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Comment by fletchowns | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing they are making money (ads & reddit gold) since they have been able to make a few hires recently.

Unfortunately the overall quality of content on reddit has really gone downhill. Even after unsubscribing to the subreddits that were the worst offenders, it's really hard to find interesting stuff with meaningful discussions. These days I'm almost embarrassed to tell people I use reddit.

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Reddit is the new Digg. Groupthink on an epic scale, linkbait headlines, and hordes of people that want to feel angry about things so they can at least feel something. (Just like old media!) Now, there is some good content on there, but there's way too much crap to wade through in order to find it.

Former and active NASA engineers hang out in r/space sometimes. r/askscience is full of incredible questions and smart answers. r/science recently started enforcing stricter standards and now has plenty of amazing discussion and knowledge moving around. r/physics is the same.

It all depends on where you go, and I strongly disagree that finding those places is difficult.

This is a good point, you just have to leave the mainpageish universe completely. /r/linguistics has interesting stuff. Similarly the subreddit for creating your own language is also neat, but these are niche, small reddits. The big reddits have been taken over by group think and are difficult to read and often boring.

everybody who's been on usenet for a nontrivial amount of time has experienced exactly what you describe, several times. expecting reddit to be different is like hoping for world peace. you should instead assume that degradation of quality will naturally happen as a community forum becomes more popular and either introduce moderation or fork off a smaller forum... and both of those happen, as you noticed.

this comment may be misplaced, but i've finally entered rant mode after reading the 5th or so comment saying "reddit is popular hence degrades" and misses (or stops short of) the point that all communities degrade with increase of their popularity - every now and then somebody writes that hacker news is not what it used to be.

A lot of the quality degradation stems from the mistaken idea that everyone has something of value to contribute. They don't. Discussion often involves a handful of quality posts, and then a bunch of "I agree"'s clogging it up. Posts that don't add to the discussion should be moderated, or, at the very least, targeted for downvotes.

Of course, it'd be tough to gain traction with users who believe their karma score matters. Better to hide it from them completely and indicate scores in another way.

Metafilter is an interesting counter-example to the rule that communities degrade over time: it was a total shitshow for a while in the early 2000s, and then repaired itself.

r/pics did a pretty good job of fixing itself up, as well. It used to be total crap, but now is actually mostly cool pictures.

Is there a way to create a customised frontdoor without having an account? I remember reading something about chaining subreddits in a URL, but never gave it a shot.

I'm also in the "embarrassed mentioning Reddit" camp, but I do like AskScience and anything like that.

You can do exactly what you described by chaining subreddits in the url. Just go to reddit.com/r/sub1+sub2+sub3...

That being said, making an account is suprisingly easy and has its benefits.

The best you can do is bookmark the link with all of them chained. To construct a custom frontpage, just take the subreddit names and join them together with a '+'

Example: http://reddit.com/r/fitness+programming+iama

  Groupthink on an epic scale, linkbait headlines, and hordes 
  of people that want to feel angry about things so they can 
  at least feel something. (Just like old media!) Now, there 
  is some good content on there, but there's way too much 
  crap to wade through in order to find it.

So... it's exactly like the internet?

Unfortunately the degradation of community and content is one of the issues that is associated with scale. I personally think reddit has done a much better job at staying off the decline than digg did. I'll be interested to see how things progress as their traffic numbers continue (presumably) to rise.

Is there a consensus about what caused the decline of Digg? I thought it had a lot to do with the redesign that couldn't be reverted, but I don't like to peddle hearsay and assumptions like it's the truth, especially since I never used Digg.

IIRC the redesign was the final straw for many users and caused the mass-exodus. I think the functionality of subreddits and the ability to completely ignore the "mainstream content" if you so wish has been the main feature that has helped reddit stop the decline.

Subreddits are what will keep Reddit strong. Even though Reddit has tons of members, subreddits make it feel much smaller and personal.

I know they suffered a big drop when it came out that they were manually curating the links on their front page. I don't remember the details, but that's what did it for me.

There is few good reddits with good/decent moderation (deleting silly memes and off topic comments, /r/AskScience , /r/fitness and /r/DepthHub/ comes to mind).

Was money the problem before for hiring or the lack of support from the parent company (Conde Nast)? I don't know if they suddenly made more money and as a result were able to hire.

Edit: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/11/thank-you-mr-nast-may-we-have...

Unless they are lying, the impression I got was that the issue was money, and that things like Gold Members directly impacted their ability to hire.

In July 2010, some yutz who used to work there said that Conde Nast likes to "allocate resources proportionate to revenue."

http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html

Exactly my point. The issue was revenue (and, of course, the parent company). But, with more revenue, came more support.

The reddit admins have made a policy out of basically never intervening on the site - how ever egregious the transgressions are - so the inmates have slowly taken over the asylum.

There's also something to be learnt about this on HN. :)

I think reddit as more of a platform than a community at this point aside from the hivemind and reddit memes going on there. I'm sure it's still an interesting place to create your own subreddit, if you have the time to moderate it (although you can't IP nor e-mail ban people from it).

Well, they did shutdown r/jailbait for "threatening the structural integrity of the greater reddit community."

They shut it down because it had child porn. Not "very young girls", but literally de jure child porn.

It always did, and it always got deleted and the people were banned. The problem wasn't just the content, but the fact that some people took over the mods in a "coup" and were trying to fuck it up. Of course the CP wasn't deleted and they had to act.

They still could've deleted just the CP and restored the mods, but considering they had already moved to r/teen_girls, that probably wouldn't make much sense.

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