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Except that Reddit is gradually turning into 4chan. Every time I see /r/all, it's a little more mean-spirited, a little younger, a little more toxic. Outsourc

• nobody_nowhere 11y ago
  Regression to the mean...
• lintiness 11y ago
  unsub to all the political nonsense, and reddit's still a valuable resource.
  • pjc50 11y ago
    The politics leaks everywhere, except in the most heavily moderated subreddits like AskHistorians. Not to mention that reddit doesn't police offensive usernames.
    • TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Fortunately usernames are short, limited, and easy to filter out visually; there's no space to put something actually offensive in them. It takes one going out of their way to get offended for one to have a problem with Reddit usernames.
  • karmajunkie 11y ago
    I use it almost exclusively for Elixir stories. I think for very narrow topics it still has some value. Then again, I've never been a serious redditor, so take that with a grain of salt. I miss the old days of slashdot...
  • ihsw 11y ago
    He said /r/all and not the default subs. /r/all is generally a cesspool nowadays, especially with all the #TREMENDOUS /r/the_donald shitposts. I have seen Trump-tier shitposting leak into /r/China and other completely unrelated subs as well. It's getting out of hand.
    • lintiness 11y ago
      you must have missed all the bernie sanders stuff.
      • xienze 11y ago
        Well it was OK then because it agreed with his worldview, you see.
        • ihsw 11y ago
          Oh come on now, despite being a Trump supporter I find it 9/10 crude and tasteless.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• vanderZwan 11y ago
  First "the fappening" attracting juvenile sexist dudebros and alienating the rest, now /r/the_donald (and I'm skipping a lot of drama). It's not a coincidence that the best subs are the ones where the goals of the sub are clearly defined and the mods enforce the rules with an iron fist (/r/AskHistorians is the best example of this).
  • soapdog 11y ago
    /r/AskHistorians is the reason I started using Reddit. Found some threads by accident, was then amazed with the quality answers and good community. I am but a lurker there but I extract an immense value from it in terms of "having fun online", it is one of my favorite places on the internet.
  • joezydeco 11y ago
    It boggles me that there's no way to filter out specific subreddits on /r/all without using some custom viewer or plugin. Or am I missing something?
    • stronglikedan 11y ago
      Perhaps the FilteReddit[0] feature (under Filters) of RES is what you're looking for? [0]http://redditenhancementsuite.com/features.html http://redditenhancementsuite.com/features.html
      • joezydeco 11y ago
        Like I said, is it possible without a browser extension?
        • c0nducktr 11y ago
          It is a paid feature that is part of reddit gold.
        • stronglikedan 11y ago
          Oops, missed the "without". Innocent mistake. That, I don't know.
• MustardTiger 11y ago
  Reddit is overwhelmingly "normal people". Mean spirited and "toxic" is normal people. Go look at twitter, and tumblr and facebook. They all have the same thing. These sites didn't chase normal people away, they attracted them.
  • vanderZwan 11y ago
    > Go look at twitter, and tumblr and facebook. As much as I despise how close-minded and backwards society is on average, this particular argument doesn't hold. What you see on a social networks is not a likely to be valid data-point for what the average person is like; at the very least it will be heavily biased. SMBC has a very concise explanation: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939 Of course that's just nice a hypothesis/observational humour mix, but it fits with the well-known effect of people thinking the world is a lot worse because the news reports only the negative, or that everyone else in their (virtual) social circle is more happy and successful than them because Facebook shows the most liked posts first.
    • MustardTiger 11y ago
      No, that is purely humor, and isn't related to what I am talking about. There are no sides here. This isn't "people on side X of issue are bad, not like us wonderful side Y people". It is the simple fact that those sites demonstrate that reddit is not driving away normal people. Facebook is the definition of normal people, and they act the same way. And note, I am not saying ALL normal people are mean and "toxic". I am saying having a small vocal subset of the population be mean and "toxic" is normal. What was abnormal was having a higher standard than that, caused by having a small, fairly homogeneous community. Reddit went from abnormal to normal, not the other way around.
    • goldbrick 11y ago
      More rather, people arguing on the internet are moreso what the average person is "like". Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. - Oscar Wilde
    • 11y ago
• overcast 11y ago
  I can't even go on Reddit anymore, in fact I just avoid it all together at this point. I'm sick of the memes, I'm sick of the left wing, hive mind, down vote brigades, and I'm especially sick of everyone just being an asshole to everyone else.
  • emodendroket 11y ago
    You can just go to some other subreddit with a right-wing hive mind instead. Problem solved.
    • overcast 11y ago
      No, I can't, because if I want information on a particular game/field/whatever, it's been overrun with trash by now. Sure, you can find your little niche subreddits that are civil, but how is that helping me? I don't want to use it, just to use it.
      • emodendroket 11y ago
        I didn't mean that comment to be entirely serious; sorry.
    • 55acdda48ab5 11y ago
      You actually can't. Lefty types show up in pretty much all the otherwise good topical sub-reddits and signal and get their upvotes. There will be some utterly irrelevant aside with Trump bashing, or whatever, on thread about single cylinder engines. There are some guys upthread here arguably doing it, for example. Ask the lefty signaler to shut up and stay on topic and you get downvoted or even deleted. Reddit is dominated by entry-ist lefties to the point it's too annoying to read.
      • 59nadir 11y ago
        > You actually can't. I had to download Reddit Enhancement Suite today (where I previously didn't bother at work) only to be able to hide r/The_Donald from r/all. It's just fucking everywhere, I can't take it. 50% of the posts are doomsday prophecies and just pure and utter shit. During every US election this happens, and your/their election process is so long you're basically wading in bullshit for 2 years.
• cwmma 11y ago
  Or is it the same age and your a little older?
• forgueam 11y ago
  IMHO, niche sub-reddits are really where Reddit shines. I can't even remember the last time I intentionally visited /r/all. Topic-specific sub-reddits are my go-to source for unbiased information, advice, and birds of a feather.
  • vanderZwan 11y ago
    > unbiased information I agree with you, but just to be pedantic: kinda by definition they are biased; in a way that's what makes them great!
• surge 11y ago
  The default sub-reddit's turn into what happens when you have a site populated mostly by the lowest common denominator and posts that appeal to the same. Once it became mainstream the defaults just fell into an Eternal September cycle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September) that most sites never recover from. However, reddit had a defense mechanism against this in that there are many, many subsections and almost hidden communities or "True*" sub-reddit's for the core/original users who prefer some semblance of thought provoking content or discussion, or at least pretend to. I generally unsubscribe from all of those defaults (except maybe /r/WorldNews) and almost never look at them, have some lists of subject related sub-reddits I like (ex: tech). There are sub-reddits that have communities in them I haven't found a replacement for elsewhere aside from maybe some private FB groups. There is something to be said for exclusivity or staying obscure. For every /r/The_Donald there is a /r/Sweden, or for /r/SRS and /r/RedPill there is /r/TwoXChromosomes and /r/AskMen. You aren't going to read about the good communities in the news, as polite people having interesting level headed discussions rarely makes headlines. To me Hacker News is just another sub-reddit like site. I usually see the same links posted in my sub-reddit's as I do HN, and I'd wager the discussion is sometimes better in the sub-reddit's than it is here, it's at least on par.
  • Pxtl 11y ago
    Yes, but we can't pretend that the low quality of the defaults doesn't affect the quality of the good sub-reddits.
    • pavel_lishin 11y ago
      Does it? A subreddit is as good as its moderators; a good team can keep a sub from being flooded with trolls, or even regulars who are unfamiliar with a sub's rules or culture.
      • fragmede 11y ago
        It does. When a really nice niche subreddit is thrust into the lime-light by becoming a default, it usually dies from an influx of low-quality default users. If it doesn't die from that, the moderation team has to really step up their job - a job they're not getting paid to do which means moderation teams get overworked and burned out, and the quit and the sub dies from lack of moderation. If the subreddit is survives that, the more successful approach seems to be for moderation to become very heavy-handed, which does quite well in a number of places, but also forces a change to the subreddit's culture that was doing well before it became a default. If the answer is to not become a default sub, well, then the low-quality of the default has affected a good quality sub from becoming a default and prevented quality content from reaching more users. Unfortunately, a good moderation team doesn't just appear, and one way of acquiring talent is to gasp pay for it. Reddit's avoidance of paying moderators results in relying on unpaid volunteers to do the bulk of the work, so good teams are few and far between, and horrible racist troll-y shit is de jure. Reddit wants to be "the front page of the internet", but when the default not-logged-in front page features shit like "What's the difference between a feminist and a gun? (self.Jokes)" (pulled just now), it's never going to rise above being dismissed as the front page for horrible trolls, racists, and misogynists. If I'm supposed to make an account then wade through a pile of shit subreddits just to find an AskHistorians diamond or two, how about I just don't wade through the pile of shit at all?
• ilitirit 11y ago
  r/all looks nothing like my front page. While it's arguably true that the level of discourse is not what it was 5 years ago (or maybe my interests/world view has changed - probably a combination of both), a (personally) curated list of sub-reddits is still 100x better than the default reddit.
• gherkin0 11y ago
  It's really unfortunate that this post about the (final?) end of Kuro5hin.org ended up getting completely derailed and dominated by an unoriginal discussion about reddit.
  • jxramos 11y ago
    ha! I didn't even realize I got dragged into the reddit tangent. Thanks for setting us straight
• homulilly 11y ago
  More than moderation, I think it's just an artifact of their ranking system. It basically guarantees that the only stuff on the front page or top of large reddits is going to be stuff that's shallow and easy (not to mention quick) to consume.
• ak_wa 11y ago
  It feels so incredibly good to watch them slowly getting corrupted. After the cancer they introduced to 4chan, they deserve it.
• benatkin 11y ago
  This. I just deleted my 10 year old reddit account. I might miss a big AMA from a famous person I'm interested in, but I'd rather that they choose another platform besides reddit for taking questions, so I'm voting with my clicks.
• tater_sent_me 11y ago
  just trying to please the kek god.
• orionblastar 11y ago
  Reddit when they started to ban subreddits for hate speech and other things, that is when 4Channers came over to cause some trouble. I never had any problems on Reddit until after they changed their policies, I don't go for hate speech and other things, but /r/Ferguson was about the Ferguson riots and Black Lives Matter and other stuff related to Ferguson, but the racists came in and took it over and then it became one of those subreddits that was in lock down and it warned you about it when you tried to access it. I got downvoted by racists and had to leave that subreddit. I live near Ferguson and shop there, the people of Ferguson are good people no matter what race they are. The rioters and looters came from outside Ferguson. Maybe people don't always wave back or smile, but they got their own problems they are dealing with.
• oliyoung 11y ago
  depends on the subreddits - r/nba, r/hiphopheads, r/comicbooks are all great quality communities