The Fall of Reddit: Why It’s Quickly Declining into Chaos | Hacker News Reader

The Fall of Reddit: Why It’s Quickly Declining into Chaos

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21 pointsmemorable36 comments

I think a dupe of this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31881238

The original techy userbase left when reddit accepted massive amounts of venture capital and had to make a profit in early to mid 2010s. It's been inertia ever since. They've been trying very hard to gentrify and make reddit as appealing as possible to all the people that wanted to leave Facebook but still wanted a facebook-alike. And reddit provided that with a heavy shift to user-profile based posting and integration of commercial ad accounts as users.

So now they're left with effectively Facebook users but without all the real names and private information to sell so of course that doesn't work. There's no way 1.3 billion USD in venture capital is getting a return without it continuing to be run into the ground.

Yep. Most Reddit users are now mainstream average people which unfortunately leads to average signal interactions. This happens to almost every platform when those late to the party tend to push away the cool kids.

The only high signal communities are perpetually the next ones that haven't become too popular yet.

I posit that invite-only via vouching, subscription fees, not run by a corporation, real names+faces profiles, and policed just enough to defend decorum is one of the only ways to build a useful, enduring community that's not a fad.

What a weird perspective. Anyone who's ran a social media site seems to understand that unmoderated sites devolve into hatepits that drive out the normies until they capture the orbit of 1-10k full-timers. That's no way to run a business - money speaks.

Likewise weird perspective.

The early reddit was a place for reading interesting stories and having intelligent conversations. Now it's among the most hateful places on the internet, despite all the "moderation".

It seems censorship doesn't actually solve the issue of hatred, it's a question of culture. In the early days it was a community of geeks and people looking to discuss niche interests. Now the mainstream is there with all its toxic political bickering and personal attacks. The more the thought police tries to turn social media into autocracy, the worse it gets. Early internet forums and remailers had trolls, but it was never this bad.

Hackernews btw also has much less moderation and is less horrible. Again, it's simply down to the users that you cultivate. Also unlike reddit, HN has never hired pedophilia supporters as admins and then tried covering it up by censoring mentions of it.

I think claiming HN has less overt moderation and still manages to be civilized is a little like pointing to a low-crime part of town without much of a police presence, and highlighting it as evidence that cops are unnecessary. In both cases, it's not that policing isn't necessary; it's that—thanks to a less crime-prone community and/or earlier, heavier policing—it's become unnecessary. You don't see a lot of overt moderation on places like HN or Ars Technica, but that's because you learn pretty quickly that ugliness isn't tolerated. (And for what it's worth, a lot of the trolls getting downvoted/told off by dang here do claim that they're being silenced by ideological thought police.)

"Censorship", as you chose to put it, might not "solve" hate, but it absolutely establishes a culture where hate is less welcome, and I think most of us here would much prefer that culture to some anarchic cesspool like 4chan. I've been on the internet for over half my life, and I have never once in that timeframe seen an unmoderated online community that didn't revolve into the internet version of a failed state. You said, accurately, that a crucial factor in any online community is the users you cultivate; I'm not sure how such a cultivation process could work without some level of moderation.

If you can show me an example of a completely unmoderated community that matches HN in terms of civility and intelligent discourse, I would be very curious to see it. As far as I can tell, such a thing has never existed and never will.

HN is the most moderated site I visit and that includes Reddit. I'm not sure which version of HN you're using. Try browsing with showdead on and vast swaths of moderated content shows itself. Either way, I don't think we're going to agree on a quantitative metric of moderation, so it's unproductive to continue this line of discourse.

I always have showdead enabled. Really not sure what you mean, there is very little moderation here, most of the flagging is simply due to downvoting by users and like you say yourself you can see this by ticking "showdead".

Is it possible you're not aware of all the censorship on reddit? Most of the posts and comments are removed without users even knowing if they weren't looking with special tools. Many times even those making the submissions themself aren't aware, since perfidiously it still shows up to the user who made the comment or post. Try browsing with 'reveddit', which is good for making both moderator as well as some admin deletions visible. But even that doesn't catch everything.

The cool people get to platforms early. It's all great and fun times when it's small and the less cool people aren't there to ruin it. Later, the moderators and the users change to be not so intimate or as great on average, leading to disengagement and burnout of those early cool people.

As someone who is shadow banned, the moderation is no less strict here than on Reddit. Your experience will ultimately depend on a mods particular mood or sensitive topics.

You're banned, but not shadow banned. We told you we were banning you and why:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31332637

First time I’m seeing that link (56 days later).

So the distinction between ban and shadow ban seems pretty minor. Anyway zero warnings and I’ve posted no “ideological” material other than fully in context responses to posts.

Again, same here as Reddit. Mods didn’t like a particular political association with a post so made the choice to label it ideological and ban me.

It always feels like the mods are against you, but plenty of HN users with roughly the same political or ideological associations stay within the site guidelines and don't get banned. The converse is also true: users with opposite views to yours, who break the site guidelines in the way that you did, also get banned.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Musk seems to think free speech Twitter can escape that fate.

Anarchy leads to 4chan. An undefended community ceases to be.

OTOH, not all moderation is equal. Slanted, arbitrary, mercurial, and/or unfair moderation doesn't serve the greater good either. Moderators need to be neutral, mature, and not use moderation to endorse political activist chilling effects by silencing debate.

> Anarchy leads to 4chan

4chan has quite a bit of moderation.

Bring back the old bulletin boards, or forums. Specialized communities driven by a common interest. Not everything needs to be centralised.

Reddit is a dumpster fire today and finding any relevant information is a chore,it's just meme after pun after stupid comment

> Bring back the old bulletin boards, or forums. Specialized communities driven by a common interest

That's what Reddit is, just at a central platform, which is easier for most involved with regards to UX (i don't want to have a separate account and notification system for each of my interests), discoverability, etc.

>it's just meme after pun after stupid comment

this really is the case. it's actually quite an interesting social phenomenon. facebook and twitter aren't like that[1], and they have a roughly similar userbase at this point. where did it originate? what UI/UX features promote it? was digg like that too?

[1] yes people make jokes, but there isn't the same scramble to make the best pun/chain of puns every time someone makes a post.

1. It’s not quickly declining into chaos.

2. Despite the title, the author offers no evidence of it doing so.

Maybe some of the big subs are crap, but the big subs have always been crap. And the vast ocean of smaller subs have plenty of good communities.

The popular subreddits are a write-off but there’s still good discussion if you dig a little. I like to think the mainstream subs are acting as the fall-guy for lesser known subs, leaching the awful populace away.

I used to think this way but the redditor mentality is creeping up on smaller subs too.

IRL that's somehow like Tenerife, Canary Islands, works as a popular European tourist destination: They built (in the 60s and 70s) two major centers in the dry south, not far from the airport: Los Christianos and Los Americanos. When exiting the airport, the crowds divide: all those (mostly anglophone I think) tourists who are there with their buddies for the booze and the all-you-can-eat turn left and are shuttled to those two centers, everybody else—the retired couples, the quiet types, people into hiking and stuff—heads down the highway to the right and distributes over the much larger rest of the island, including the green and more hospitable north. For all the crowds and the frenzy at the airport, Tenerife has many quiet and even lonely and downright deserted spots.

My censorship story about reddit begins when I somehow or other saw the front page instead of just my usual set of selected subreddits.

On that front page was a thumbnail photo of an old piece of medical equipment. It was an Iron Lung. I hadn't seen one of those since the 1960s.

So I commented on that front page article stating just that, that I hadn't seen one of those since the 1960s. What's the big deal about that, you might ask. As did I.

Except that the following day, I received a notification that I had been permanently banned from some subreddit that I had never heard of ever before. Huh? The reason given was that the article I had commented on was in one of the Trump subreddits. Who Knew?

When I commented on this strange state of events, that new comment of mine was 'disappeared' within minutes.

I knew then that Reddit had 'jumped the shark' and could only terminally decline after that.

Many subreddits use Mass Tagger[0] or other bots to automatically ban people who post in 'right-wing' or 'reactionary' subreddits. The criteria for being tagged is shakey at best.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/masstagger/

> Many subreddits use Mass Tagger[0] or other bots to automatically ban people who post in 'right-wing' or 'reactionary' subreddits. The criteria for being tagged is shakey at best.

Last time I used reddit (years ago), it was easy and ubiquitous to use many alt accounts and to switch between them using RES. Seems like it would just encourage people to use more alts.

It is — Reddit still doesn't require email verification — but I don't think the average user does.

To the average user it's inconvenient and either:

- has a chilling effect on what subreddits they participate in

- annoys users and dissuades them from participating in the banning subreddits

I suspect both are desired outcomes for Mass Tagger, regardless of 'collateral damage'.

Aside from this place, are there any good alternatives to that website?

Everything else I see is either dead, or incredibly political to a degree that I do not want to be involved with it.

Agreed, I've loved newsgroups back in the day, Slashdot, HN and a few other online forums. There isn't anything else better than Reddit right now. (HN aside of course :)

Reddit seems to be doing fine though?

Certainly better than it was in like 2013

why is anyone surprised? if you're using a free product, most likely they are collecting your data and selling it to the highest bidder.

Does it feel like reddit used to encourage outbound linking and now does everything to make users stay on the site?

Reddit has always been a place where you deviated from the prevailing groupthink at your own peril, and if people on HN are honest with themselves they might come to realize that HN is only marginally better than Reddit in that regard. Also, in fairness to HN, they didn't erase one of their founders from the site's history after he was driven to suicide by the US government.

There's something about the direct democracy upvote/downvote system that hyper-polarizes the whole forum. Marginal (read: interesting and crucially under-appreciated) voices are silenced & made to disappear, only reinforcing the absence of marginalized voices.

On Reddit, it's done for overtly political reasons. And on HN it's done under the pretense of expertise (a loose proxy for majority "respectable" political opinion of the relatively wealthy tech industry social class).

I disagree that HN is only marginally better. on reddit, it doesn't matter how polite or substantive you are, if you step out of the groupthink you get downvoted to fuck. on HN, in my experience, as long as you're substantive and polite, even if you're genuinely egregiously wrong, you very rarely get downvoted. obviously there are other factors, like the lack of downvote for newer or low-karma users, but this is my experience

Trump broke Reddit. I remember around 2017 where r/popular was nothing but negative stories about Trump and republicans and has only gotten worse. The echo chamber there is insane. RIP NoNewNormal.

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