8 ms·

I've seen Reddit degrade painfully over last 8-10 years. It was full of intelligent comments, insight and unique perspective from people all over the world. Bro

I've seen Reddit degrade painfully over last 8-10 years. It was full of intelligent comments, insight and unique perspective from people all over the world. Browsing the front page and reading the comments makes me sad that instead of intellectual discourse, we have a 3 billion dollar meme making machine. I wish to keep HN away from the masses as much as I'd like a broader perspective in the light of how things go with typical social networks. There is no lack of funny things on the internet. Even witty jokes have no place here because slowly and surely it will erode away why HN is a gem of the internet.

sixQuarks 8y ago
I’m a 13-year reddit user. The quality of the site going down is simply a symptom of its popularity. Think how dumb the average joe is, then realize that 50% of the population is dumber than him. You can still find intelligent discussion on reddit, you just have to do a lot more work filtering.
- djohnston 8y ago
  not sure why you're being downvoted, you're exactly right. if hn got a user base the size of reddit's overnight, you can be sure the quality of discussions would similarly degrade. the same is true for every social network (digital or otherwise) i've ever been a part of.
  - robertAngst 8y ago
    HN has gotten worse since I started visiting ~2 years ago. That said, still some of the best comments.
    - peteretep 8y ago
      I have been here rather longer than you, and not noticed a decline in the time period you’ve identified. I do note however there seems to be a tendency in all communities for people to think it declined since they started using it.
      - nickpsecurity 8y ago
        People often react negatively to change in what they hold dear. It could just be that they all started using these communities, loved the experience at that time, the experience changed, and then they feel the "community" (not their experience) "declined over time." Might just be an instance of that more general tendency.
      - james_s_tayler 8y ago
        Probably the same phenomenon as when you first start a relationship or a job everything is wonderful because you just haven't had any negative reference experiences with the said entity yet. Then over time they accumulate and your view matures to one of "it's alright/not bad"
      - mikekchar 8y ago
        I started about 4 years ago. While I haven't really noticed much of a decline in comment quality, I think I have noticed a trend towards articles from large mainstream publications making it to the front page. Having said that, the front page as I write this is full of TechCrunch, so it is very possible this is confirmation bias ;-)
        robertAngst 8y ago
        I agree
      - ddoolin 8y ago
        Similarly long-time HN user checking in. I think there's still a great amount of quality here, particularly posted material, but I have seen an uptick in the number of junk comments. I'm including comments that say something but are really saying nothing substantive, are blatantly reflexive, or lack depth of thought. Ad hominem and such are indeed still rare here, thankfully.
      - paulcole 8y ago
        I won’t join any club that would have me as a member.
      - 8y ago
- peteretep 8y ago
  I think you’re exactly on the money. Popularity + weak moderation policies. Happens to almost all communities. Eventually enough assholes show up who are accommodated that it stops being fun.
- _asummers 8y ago
  I think a wonderful example of how Reddit can work amazingly is /r/askhistorians. They require academic sources for answers, and general expertise around all answers, at the expense of requiring heavy moderation. This does not apply for general topics (could not apply in /r/news for example), but if a community can be created around a specific topic, and that topic is amenable to this style of expertise filtering, it has been shown to work well.
- wvenable 8y ago
  I've been using reddit for 12 years and the quality of the site has gone down considerably in just the last few years. The trolling, bots, and hate speech seem to be rampant. There has been a concerted effort for certain ideological groups to take over popular subreddits like country and city specific subreddits to push a specific agenda. All this happens while plenty of other niche subreddits go on as usual. I'm subscribed to a bunch of subreddits with great communities. While popularity certainly has a huge role in the downfall, Reddit was already Internet-popular years ago. I think the problem now is that Reddit is being gamed pretty hard and they don't have the means to fix it. And it's not just a technological problem, it's a social one.
  - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    Reddit has become a platform to manipulate public opinion. I have witnessed some very strange things on Reddit where I presume a company, government agency or malicious groups take over a subject and comments to steer the opinion. It’s easy to spot. Personally I treat Reddit as a place for humor and occasional insight, but mostly humor.
    - kkarakk 8y ago
      i saw an interesting solution to chinese "shilling" on 4chan recently, just post a bunch of words that get a site filtered automatically by the great firewall of china. like "tiananmen massacre" and the like. ofc it being 4chan i don't know how reliable that information is
    - marktangotango 8y ago
      I’ve seen this as well, try posting anything negative about Monsanto or Epic Systems.
- uncletaco 8y ago
  > how dumb the median joe is FTFY, to bring a little reddit to this thread.
- sureaboutthis 8y ago
  This is what has happened to Stack Overflow. Especially once redditors started pointing to it.
- waste_monk 8y ago
  >Think how dumb the average joe is, then realize that 50% of the population is dumber than him. The median Joe.
  - crowbahr 8y ago
    You'd expect a site dedicated to software engineers to have a better grasp on how a bell curve works. Even the median Joe in this case is relatively similar to most other Joe's because 2/3 of the population is within 1 standard deviation of intelligence.
    - sixQuarks 8y ago
      I beg to differ that this site is dedicated only to software engineers. There are lots of marketers, designers, and other "business" types that visit - I'd wager that half of the visitors don't know how to code. Therefore, my use of "average" is a pragmatic usage that gets the point across better, even if it's not technically correct.
- Chris_Chambers 8y ago
  Sorry for entering pedantry mode, but I think you mean the median joe.
derefr 8y ago
Reddit, like Usenet, or IRC, is just a collection of individual communities that happen to share an identity system. Expecting the (not-logged-in) Reddit front page to be “intellectual discourse” would be like expecting a random selection of Usenet posts or IRC chat-lines to be “intellectual discourse.” Try just visiting specific Reddit communities, rather than looking askew at the entire menagerie as if there was value there. Same goes for YouTube: just subscribe to specific channels based on out-of-band recommendations. Or for Twitter, or Netflix, or anything else. These platforms have good things; even curated collections of good things. But you won’t find them by asking the platform to show you something good. In short: ignore recommendation systems. They are very good at surfacing content that the average “profitable” user that the business targets, wants to see. They are horrible at surfacing the “best” (e.g. highest positive impact on your life for having consumed it) content.
- fermienrico 8y ago
  I usually hangout on r/programming, r/hardware and a few other communities. Discussion is indeed better.
- abnry 8y ago
  This is very good advice. One of my most upvoted Hacker News comments was saying that creating an account and whitelisting the subreddits you want to read is a tremendous improvement on reddit. Funny thing to me is that it is really hard to isolate yourself in this way on Twitter. I've spent a lot of time trying to do this but politics always seems to leak through. One thing that has helped is by turning off retweets for as many people as I can.
  - theNJR 8y ago
    Ugh this is so true about Twitter. It really does seem like the feed is filled with political retweets. Good idea about turning them off.
    - dvtrn 8y ago
      Does anyone know if such functionality exists to disable seeing likes? I've turned off all retweets for exactly the reasons discussed but twitter still shows me that so and so liked some snarky thing so and si said about So and Se, Candidate from State about current affair. If I can prune that last bit, my twitter feed just might be saved.
o10449366 8y ago
10+ year user, I only consistently browse ~3 subreddits now. I realized it was time to move on when I was using Reddit Enhancement Suite more than Reddit itself. My subreddit filter list (so not including keyword filters, blocked users, domain filters, etc.) is currently 1,391, which translates to 2 or 3 unfiltered posts out of 25 if I browse r/all. "Why don't you just browse your own front page instead of r/all?" I do, but Reddit decided it would be a great idea to limit the number of subreddits they display on your frontpage unless you purchase their premium membership. As a result, even though I'm subscribed to many interesting subreddits, I only see content from the largest and most active ones on my frontpage and the rest of them are hidden from me. I started browsing r/all instead and filtering out all of the subreddits that don't interest me as a workaround to the above problem. I used to see a lot of interesting subreddits pop up on r/all, but as the site has grown real content has become drowned out by low-effort meme subreddits that multiply like rabbits, politics, and karma-farming bots that repost incessantly. Right now on the first 10 pages of r/all 15/250 posts pass my filters. I have no doubt that over the next few years this number will continue to decrease towards 0.
- movedx 8y ago
  > My subreddit filter list (so not including keyword filters, blocked users, domain filters, etc.) is currently 1,391, which translates to 2 or 3 unfiltered posts out of 25 if I browse r/all. I don't understand what you mean here. It sounds as though you have a black list versus the superior option of a white list (in this case)? Surely it's better to let in what you want and ignore everything else by default versus being surprised by something you don't like and having to ban it?
  - o10449366 8y ago
    It wasn't originally my intention for the filter list to become so comprehensive, but it's steadily grown over time as the content on Reddit has degraded. I've been building the filter list since it became a feature in RES. Also, while rare, I still do find new subreddits through r/all, so I prefer the "everything but B" to "only A" approach of filtering. I wasn't even aware it was possible to have a whitelist and I'm not quite sure what you're referring to, to be honest. I'm guessing it would be easy enough to construct now that RES supports complicated custom rules, but I think at this point I'm too lazy to. It's far more convenient to be able to just hover over a post and one-click filter a subreddit from the card RES displays.
labster 8y ago
I post jokes here occasionally, and often feel like my share of upvotes might be a little too biased toward joke posts or reflexive comments that would fit in a tweet. But one of the most important things of being a successful comedian is to play to your audience. On HN, you cannot be crass. You cannot be dumb, but you can be pun. You should not be satirical, but you can be ironic, and you should know the difference. And you absolutely cannot be cruel or stereotype others -- these jokes aren't really funny anyway, despite what people think. Those comments deserve all the downvotes, and occasionally flags. But a certain kind of joke is part of HN culture, especially those that make you think. Humor is the nexus of our expectations and reality being in conflict, and the best jokes can demolish our illusions.
- Stratoscope 8y ago
  This is wisdom. A life without humor is a sad life. And the best kind of humor can be thought-provoking. Many people think humor is unwelcome here, but that just isn't true. You identified some types of humor that are very unwelcome here, along with some that can go over quite well. A few of my highest-voted comments here have been off-the-cuff humorous remarks. But they weren't the kind you would find on some stupid Reddit pun thread. If I could share one example to illustrate... A few years ago there was a news article that said homeowners in London were digging far underground to build multi-level basements. They would bring in a digger (like what we call a backhoe in the US) to dig out those basement levels. It would dig down and down, excavating each level. And then, because it was too expensive to retrieve the digger, they would just have it dig out a little hole on the side and park itself there, never to be recovered. (There were suggestions that the story may have been apocryphal, but that isn't relevant to this discussion.) My comment was: "These diggers are the very definition of a sunk cost." If anyone doesn't see the humor there and how it might be the kind of humor that could be well received here, let me know. I try not to be my own Joke Explainer, but will be happy to clarify if needed. :-)
computerex 8y ago
Don't make the mistake of viewing the entirety of reddit under one lens. There are many serious sub-reddits that don't tolerate meme/joke posts and focus on content value.
- rchaud 8y ago
  I'm reminded of this every time I set up a Reddit app on a new phone. I have to set my filters manually each time, and it's crazy how many garbage meme/videogame/superhero subs targeted at kids I have to block before my r/all experience goes back to normal.
beginningguava 8y ago
>erode away why HN is a gem of the internet At this point HN isn't much more than a means for YC marketing their investments and job openings for their investments Any actual attempt at discussion or debate ends up with flagged posts, warnings, and bans
monochromatic 8y ago
Memes and liberal circle jerking. But there are smaller subreddits that are still pretty ok.
aerovistae 8y ago
I think this is just cynicism. there's an absolute fuckton of extremely intelligent, insightful, and interesting comments all over reddit. I think sometimes seeing what you want to see takes the form of seeing what you don't want to see.
capkutay 8y ago
> I wish to keep HN away from the masses as much as I'd like a broader perspective in the light of how things go with typical social networks Agreed. I downvote ferociously on HN when I see people attempt to be funny or meme on hacker news. It'll be a sad day once people try to use HN as some sort of hacker joke thread.
Mizza 8y ago
I feel this way about the internet as a whole. Just a complete obliteration of the culture. The things that I hate the most are screenshots of other people's tweets (who cares) and "when u" with some stupid pop culture still attached. Everywhere I turn, I see this shit-tier cyber detritus. I am unable to escape it, even with endlessly tiresome filtering, list management, content blocking extensions and the like. A long, long, long time ago, there was an absolutely delightful community called "b3ta" where people chatted and shared images (as still happens today), but there was a wonderful _culture_ to it, where it was simply socially unacceptable to post other people's content as your own, or even your own content if it wasn't really up to snuff. That seems unthinkable these days, as shameless reposting is not only the cultural norm, but the very business model for the largest web's primary attractions. And yet when I think about the delight the internet can bring, that's what I think of. I also think it's dangerous to cling to that nostalgia for the "golden era" of the internet, recognize that for the most part the great experiment has failed and to simply abandon it, or move on to the next thing with some of these bugs ironed out.
mamcx 8y ago
Is weird, because reddit for me is great, sometimes even more than HN and stack overflow. However, I suscribe to rust, mechanical keyboards, how make programming languages...
- x15 8y ago
  I can't stress enough how helpful and interesting the /r/rust sub is to me. I have always received at least a few replies to my questions, no matter how noob or hard they are. One of the most wholesome programming communities I've participated in.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tamrix 8y ago
I'm going to be that guy. The Internet was better in the late 90s early 2000s.
- rchaud 8y ago
  Back then, we just had individual communities under their own web domains. That meant that you needed to have lurked on the site for a bit, understood the culture, and then make the decision to make an account and join the discussion. Forums also had a unique look and feel, even if they were just different color themes selected from the admin panel. With Reddit, you have individual communities, but one account gets you access to them all. So you will get people who joined a 'foreveralone' group and can now frictionlessly post on relationship subs about how women don't want nice guys like him, they want bad boys who'll abuse them.
baby 8y ago
Yup. I'm a 10-year reddit user. I looked at the default FP recently and it's all about memes. Stupid animaladvice stuff. Only images. If they re-design this into 9gag I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. It used to be about r/askscience, r/atheism, a lot more textual stuff. I know the best experience is in subscribing to the right subreddits, but it's quite a shame the default front page that newbies land on has become 9gag.
- quantum_magpie 8y ago
  In my experience, the best way to do good front page is to blacklist all the crap with RES, so you might still find something new from time to time, but in general enjoy much more clean experience. This also works well in reducing time spent on the site, since the r/all pretty much stays constant during the day.
axaxs 8y ago
Precisely. I can't spend five minutes on Reddit without getting frustrated. This community feel is perfect. I don't know how it's lasted as long, but kudos to the mods here.
pwaai 8y ago
Funny you say that about HN, for a lot of us veterans on HN, we argue the exact same thing happened to HN. HN today has deteriorated, what used to be a liberal and open minded place to explore new ideas, it has become a self promoting (especially if you are YC fam) to a large degree, and heavy policing. With the rise of cryptocurrency I saw a lot more shill accounts manipulating comments and such. So many of us have left HN, maybe there's something like HN out there?

sixQuarks 8y ago

I’m a 13-year reddit user. The quality of the site going down is simply a symptom of its popularity. Think how dumb the average joe is, then realize that 50% of the population is dumber than him. You can still find intelligent discussion on reddit, you just have to do a lot more work filtering.

djohnston 8y ago
not sure why you're being downvoted, you're exactly right. if hn got a user base the size of reddit's overnight, you can be sure the quality of discussions would similarly degrade. the same is true for every social network (digital or otherwise) i've ever been a part of.
- robertAngst 8y ago
  HN has gotten worse since I started visiting ~2 years ago. That said, still some of the best comments.
  - peteretep 8y ago
    I have been here rather longer than you, and not noticed a decline in the time period you’ve identified. I do note however there seems to be a tendency in all communities for people to think it declined since they started using it.
    - nickpsecurity 8y ago
      People often react negatively to change in what they hold dear. It could just be that they all started using these communities, loved the experience at that time, the experience changed, and then they feel the "community" (not their experience) "declined over time." Might just be an instance of that more general tendency.
    - james_s_tayler 8y ago
      Probably the same phenomenon as when you first start a relationship or a job everything is wonderful because you just haven't had any negative reference experiences with the said entity yet. Then over time they accumulate and your view matures to one of "it's alright/not bad"
    - mikekchar 8y ago
      I started about 4 years ago. While I haven't really noticed much of a decline in comment quality, I think I have noticed a trend towards articles from large mainstream publications making it to the front page. Having said that, the front page as I write this is full of TechCrunch, so it is very possible this is confirmation bias ;-)
      - robertAngst 8y ago
        I agree
    - ddoolin 8y ago
      Similarly long-time HN user checking in. I think there's still a great amount of quality here, particularly posted material, but I have seen an uptick in the number of junk comments. I'm including comments that say something but are really saying nothing substantive, are blatantly reflexive, or lack depth of thought. Ad hominem and such are indeed still rare here, thankfully.
    - paulcole 8y ago
      I won’t join any club that would have me as a member.
    - 8y ago
peteretep 8y ago
I think you’re exactly on the money. Popularity + weak moderation policies. Happens to almost all communities. Eventually enough assholes show up who are accommodated that it stops being fun.
_asummers 8y ago
I think a wonderful example of how Reddit can work amazingly is /r/askhistorians. They require academic sources for answers, and general expertise around all answers, at the expense of requiring heavy moderation. This does not apply for general topics (could not apply in /r/news for example), but if a community can be created around a specific topic, and that topic is amenable to this style of expertise filtering, it has been shown to work well.
wvenable 8y ago
I've been using reddit for 12 years and the quality of the site has gone down considerably in just the last few years. The trolling, bots, and hate speech seem to be rampant. There has been a concerted effort for certain ideological groups to take over popular subreddits like country and city specific subreddits to push a specific agenda. All this happens while plenty of other niche subreddits go on as usual. I'm subscribed to a bunch of subreddits with great communities. While popularity certainly has a huge role in the downfall, Reddit was already Internet-popular years ago. I think the problem now is that Reddit is being gamed pretty hard and they don't have the means to fix it. And it's not just a technological problem, it's a social one.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  Reddit has become a platform to manipulate public opinion. I have witnessed some very strange things on Reddit where I presume a company, government agency or malicious groups take over a subject and comments to steer the opinion. It’s easy to spot. Personally I treat Reddit as a place for humor and occasional insight, but mostly humor.
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    i saw an interesting solution to chinese "shilling" on 4chan recently, just post a bunch of words that get a site filtered automatically by the great firewall of china. like "tiananmen massacre" and the like. ofc it being 4chan i don't know how reliable that information is
  - marktangotango 8y ago
    I’ve seen this as well, try posting anything negative about Monsanto or Epic Systems.
uncletaco 8y ago
> how dumb the median joe is FTFY, to bring a little reddit to this thread.
sureaboutthis 8y ago
This is what has happened to Stack Overflow. Especially once redditors started pointing to it.
waste_monk 8y ago
>Think how dumb the average joe is, then realize that 50% of the population is dumber than him. The median Joe.
- crowbahr 8y ago
  You'd expect a site dedicated to software engineers to have a better grasp on how a bell curve works. Even the median Joe in this case is relatively similar to most other Joe's because 2/3 of the population is within 1 standard deviation of intelligence.
  - sixQuarks 8y ago
    I beg to differ that this site is dedicated only to software engineers. There are lots of marketers, designers, and other "business" types that visit - I'd wager that half of the visitors don't know how to code. Therefore, my use of "average" is a pragmatic usage that gets the point across better, even if it's not technically correct.
Chris_Chambers 8y ago
Sorry for entering pedantry mode, but I think you mean the median joe.

derefr 8y ago

Reddit, like Usenet, or IRC, is just a collection of individual communities that happen to share an identity system. Expecting the (not-logged-in) Reddit front page to be “intellectual discourse” would be like expecting a random selection of Usenet posts or IRC chat-lines to be “intellectual discourse.” Try just visiting specific Reddit communities, rather than looking askew at the entire menagerie as if there was value there. Same goes for YouTube: just subscribe to specific channels based on out-of-band recommendations. Or for Twitter, or Netflix, or anything else. These platforms have good things; even curated collections of good things. But you won’t find them by asking the platform to show you something good. In short: ignore recommendation systems. They are very good at surfacing content that the average “profitable” user that the business targets, wants to see. They are horrible at surfacing the “best” (e.g. highest positive impact on your life for having consumed it) content.

fermienrico 8y ago
I usually hangout on r/programming, r/hardware and a few other communities. Discussion is indeed better.
abnry 8y ago
This is very good advice. One of my most upvoted Hacker News comments was saying that creating an account and whitelisting the subreddits you want to read is a tremendous improvement on reddit. Funny thing to me is that it is really hard to isolate yourself in this way on Twitter. I've spent a lot of time trying to do this but politics always seems to leak through. One thing that has helped is by turning off retweets for as many people as I can.
- theNJR 8y ago
  Ugh this is so true about Twitter. It really does seem like the feed is filled with political retweets. Good idea about turning them off.
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    Does anyone know if such functionality exists to disable seeing likes? I've turned off all retweets for exactly the reasons discussed but twitter still shows me that so and so liked some snarky thing so and si said about So and Se, Candidate from State about current affair. If I can prune that last bit, my twitter feed just might be saved.

o10449366 8y ago

10+ year user, I only consistently browse ~3 subreddits now. I realized it was time to move on when I was using Reddit Enhancement Suite more than Reddit itself. My subreddit filter list (so not including keyword filters, blocked users, domain filters, etc.) is currently 1,391, which translates to 2 or 3 unfiltered posts out of 25 if I browse r/all. "Why don't you just browse your own front page instead of r/all?" I do, but Reddit decided it would be a great idea to limit the number of subreddits they display on your frontpage unless you purchase their premium membership. As a result, even though I'm subscribed to many interesting subreddits, I only see content from the largest and most active ones on my frontpage and the rest of them are hidden from me. I started browsing r/all instead and filtering out all of the subreddits that don't interest me as a workaround to the above problem. I used to see a lot of interesting subreddits pop up on r/all, but as the site has grown real content has become drowned out by low-effort meme subreddits that multiply like rabbits, politics, and karma-farming bots that repost incessantly. Right now on the first 10 pages of r/all 15/250 posts pass my filters. I have no doubt that over the next few years this number will continue to decrease towards 0.

movedx 8y ago
> My subreddit filter list (so not including keyword filters, blocked users, domain filters, etc.) is currently 1,391, which translates to 2 or 3 unfiltered posts out of 25 if I browse r/all. I don't understand what you mean here. It sounds as though you have a black list versus the superior option of a white list (in this case)? Surely it's better to let in what you want and ignore everything else by default versus being surprised by something you don't like and having to ban it?
- o10449366 8y ago
  It wasn't originally my intention for the filter list to become so comprehensive, but it's steadily grown over time as the content on Reddit has degraded. I've been building the filter list since it became a feature in RES. Also, while rare, I still do find new subreddits through r/all, so I prefer the "everything but B" to "only A" approach of filtering. I wasn't even aware it was possible to have a whitelist and I'm not quite sure what you're referring to, to be honest. I'm guessing it would be easy enough to construct now that RES supports complicated custom rules, but I think at this point I'm too lazy to. It's far more convenient to be able to just hover over a post and one-click filter a subreddit from the card RES displays.

labster 8y ago

I post jokes here occasionally, and often feel like my share of upvotes might be a little too biased toward joke posts or reflexive comments that would fit in a tweet. But one of the most important things of being a successful comedian is to play to your audience. On HN, you cannot be crass. You cannot be dumb, but you can be pun. You should not be satirical, but you can be ironic, and you should know the difference. And you absolutely cannot be cruel or stereotype others -- these jokes aren't really funny anyway, despite what people think. Those comments deserve all the downvotes, and occasionally flags. But a certain kind of joke is part of HN culture, especially those that make you think. Humor is the nexus of our expectations and reality being in conflict, and the best jokes can demolish our illusions.

Stratoscope 8y ago
This is wisdom. A life without humor is a sad life. And the best kind of humor can be thought-provoking. Many people think humor is unwelcome here, but that just isn't true. You identified some types of humor that are very unwelcome here, along with some that can go over quite well. A few of my highest-voted comments here have been off-the-cuff humorous remarks. But they weren't the kind you would find on some stupid Reddit pun thread. If I could share one example to illustrate... A few years ago there was a news article that said homeowners in London were digging far underground to build multi-level basements. They would bring in a digger (like what we call a backhoe in the US) to dig out those basement levels. It would dig down and down, excavating each level. And then, because it was too expensive to retrieve the digger, they would just have it dig out a little hole on the side and park itself there, never to be recovered. (There were suggestions that the story may have been apocryphal, but that isn't relevant to this discussion.) My comment was: "These diggers are the very definition of a sunk cost." If anyone doesn't see the humor there and how it might be the kind of humor that could be well received here, let me know. I try not to be my own Joke Explainer, but will be happy to clarify if needed. :-)

computerex 8y ago

Don't make the mistake of viewing the entirety of reddit under one lens. There are many serious sub-reddits that don't tolerate meme/joke posts and focus on content value.

rchaud 8y ago
I'm reminded of this every time I set up a Reddit app on a new phone. I have to set my filters manually each time, and it's crazy how many garbage meme/videogame/superhero subs targeted at kids I have to block before my r/all experience goes back to normal.

beginningguava 8y ago

>erode away why HN is a gem of the internet At this point HN isn't much more than a means for YC marketing their investments and job openings for their investments Any actual attempt at discussion or debate ends up with flagged posts, warnings, and bans

monochromatic 8y ago

Memes and liberal circle jerking. But there are smaller subreddits that are still pretty ok.

aerovistae 8y ago

I think this is just cynicism. there's an absolute fuckton of extremely intelligent, insightful, and interesting comments all over reddit. I think sometimes seeing what you want to see takes the form of seeing what you don't want to see.

capkutay 8y ago

> I wish to keep HN away from the masses as much as I'd like a broader perspective in the light of how things go with typical social networks Agreed. I downvote ferociously on HN when I see people attempt to be funny or meme on hacker news. It'll be a sad day once people try to use HN as some sort of hacker joke thread.

Mizza 8y ago

I feel this way about the internet as a whole. Just a complete obliteration of the culture. The things that I hate the most are screenshots of other people's tweets (who cares) and "when u" with some stupid pop culture still attached. Everywhere I turn, I see this shit-tier cyber detritus. I am unable to escape it, even with endlessly tiresome filtering, list management, content blocking extensions and the like. A long, long, long time ago, there was an absolutely delightful community called "b3ta" where people chatted and shared images (as still happens today), but there was a wonderful _culture_ to it, where it was simply socially unacceptable to post other people's content as your own, or even your own content if it wasn't really up to snuff. That seems unthinkable these days, as shameless reposting is not only the cultural norm, but the very business model for the largest web's primary attractions. And yet when I think about the delight the internet can bring, that's what I think of. I also think it's dangerous to cling to that nostalgia for the "golden era" of the internet, recognize that for the most part the great experiment has failed and to simply abandon it, or move on to the next thing with some of these bugs ironed out.

mamcx 8y ago

Is weird, because reddit for me is great, sometimes even more than HN and stack overflow. However, I suscribe to rust, mechanical keyboards, how make programming languages...

x15 8y ago
I can't stress enough how helpful and interesting the /r/rust sub is to me. I have always received at least a few replies to my questions, no matter how noob or hard they are. One of the most wholesome programming communities I've participated in.

deleted 8y ago

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tamrix 8y ago

I'm going to be that guy. The Internet was better in the late 90s early 2000s.

rchaud 8y ago
Back then, we just had individual communities under their own web domains. That meant that you needed to have lurked on the site for a bit, understood the culture, and then make the decision to make an account and join the discussion. Forums also had a unique look and feel, even if they were just different color themes selected from the admin panel. With Reddit, you have individual communities, but one account gets you access to them all. So you will get people who joined a 'foreveralone' group and can now frictionlessly post on relationship subs about how women don't want nice guys like him, they want bad boys who'll abuse them.

baby 8y ago

Yup. I'm a 10-year reddit user. I looked at the default FP recently and it's all about memes. Stupid animaladvice stuff. Only images. If they re-design this into 9gag I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. It used to be about r/askscience, r/atheism, a lot more textual stuff. I know the best experience is in subscribing to the right subreddits, but it's quite a shame the default front page that newbies land on has become 9gag.

quantum_magpie 8y ago
In my experience, the best way to do good front page is to blacklist all the crap with RES, so you might still find something new from time to time, but in general enjoy much more clean experience. This also works well in reducing time spent on the site, since the r/all pretty much stays constant during the day.

axaxs 8y ago

Precisely. I can't spend five minutes on Reddit without getting frustrated. This community feel is perfect. I don't know how it's lasted as long, but kudos to the mods here.

pwaai 8y ago

Funny you say that about HN, for a lot of us veterans on HN, we argue the exact same thing happened to HN. HN today has deteriorated, what used to be a liberal and open minded place to explore new ideas, it has become a self promoting (especially if you are YC fam) to a large degree, and heavy policing. With the rise of cryptocurrency I saw a lot more shill accounts manipulating comments and such. So many of us have left HN, maybe there's something like HN out there?