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I realized recently Ive spent a ton of years being a reddit user. Somehow that's where I settled. Politics, covid19, and memes have really been making me rethin

by tayo42 7y ago

I realized recently Ive spent a ton of years being a reddit user. Somehow that's where I settled. Politics, covid19, and memes have really been making me rethink where I spend my time on the internet, its stopped being fun. I think the person that posts on reddit has changed. I thought it might be an interesting thing to reflect in a longer format blog post thing, but not sure. there really is a toxic undertone to a lot of subreddits. Even the niche one's have some crazy people wandering in. My problem is i don't know what to really replace it with. I don't think the alternatives are great. Forums seem deadish, the format isn't great to use on mobile. Reddit is nice to use in an app, makes it easy to post and read. It almost feels like the social web has run its course.

boopk 7y ago
Yeah sadly I started browsing reddit in 2011 when the f7u12 memes and subreddit were popular and it really has gone down in quality and the people posting like you mentioned has changed drastically. I can't wait for the day when a new forum experience replaces it.
notamy 7y ago
I was having a lot of the same thoughts lately! Back in 2012-2015 I was SUPER active on some forums, but I visit them nowadays and they're just... dead. It makes me really sad because I don't know of any other alternatives; Reddit is awful for a lot of my interests, but there's no real communities I've found that can compare... I miss the forums I used to browse.
Trasmatta 7y ago
It's weird how the sense is community that existed on forums just doesn't exist on Reddit. You just don't have the same connection to the other posters that you would on tight knit forums. You might as well not even have usernames. It's a bit different on smaller, more focused subreddits, but not by much. I used to think that Reddit was a better place to be than Twitter or Facebook, but now I'm not so sure. I've definitely had a harder time cutting it out of my life than those other two, even though I think it's had a pretty bad effect on my mental health.
- hunter2_ 7y ago
  I think a part of this is how forum members tend to populate avatar/signature/location/etc and the interface shows it prominently. On reddit you just see a username and occasionally some flair, so you rarely even realize that what you're reading was written by someone you've read from before.
  - Trasmatta 7y ago
    Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. I think the other part is that discussions don't live for longer than a day or two. Things fall off the page and everyone moves on to the next posts. (Same deal here on HN of course.) With forums, you have long living threads where you engage in discussions with the same people for months or even years.
    - hunter2_ 7y ago
      True. Reddit has several sort options, and none of them remotely facilitate the "necro bump" that a single forum post can achieve. But when you're searching for a quick answer (rather than browsing/debating) there's nothing better than upvote sort (see also: stack exchange) which far exceeds any chronological sort forums have.
      - Trasmatta 7y ago
        Yeah, I frequently find myself doing "site:reddit.com" when searching for answers to random things.
        tayo42 7y ago
        I do this too, it's like wikipedia for general sentiment on a topic, good to get a starting of idea. There are some gem posts out there. I think its also a symptom of google searches just not being that great and dominated by people that play the seo game well instead of actual good sources. But thats a rant for another time...
        7y ago
btrettel 7y ago
What don't you like about forums on mobile? The default phpBB skin is fairly good on mobile in my experience. I don't regularly participate on other forum softwares.
- tayo42 7y ago
  Some are okish. My biggest problems are ads pushing content off the limited screen space, "please download our app", some just don't render well and skip around. Funny enough, i went back to find some examples of ones that really drove me crazy and they have gotten better(snowboardforum, nasioc and wetcanvas). One's even got a big announcement about their ui update on the front page. I do think the threaded style of comments is much better then the forums though. Ignoring the problems of upvotes.
  - bzb3 7y ago
    >My biggest problems are ads pushing content off the limited screen space, "please download our app", some just don't render well and skip around. So, like Reddit?
    - tayo42 7y ago
      I started using reddit is fun years ago, so i guess i do use an app for that. My account defaults to old.reddit.com I have no idea what the new ui looks like, except for the login screen.
__s 7y ago
Forums seeming deadish is a feature, at least if they aren't actually dead
- tayo42 7y ago
  I guess not individual forums, some are active. I meant more like how many there are. Before reddit there it always seemed like to me there was a large number of them for different interests, you could kind of pick which forum fit for you.
mister_hn 7y ago
I think, only few subreddits are worth spending time for and most of them are NSFW
nelaboras 7y ago
you might want to look into the "eternal September" concept, for me that really is what happened to Reddit. to;dr eternal september = constant influx of many new users didn't allow the 'culture' from before to survive.
HeadsUpHigh 7y ago
There are maybe 10, 20 reddit accounts that I recognize. Most of them come from fitness subs. Everyone else might as well not have usernames. The problem with forums isn't that they are dead. It's that you are trying to have them do what reddit does right now, which is endless content and interaction 24/7. But that just doesn't work with a smaller number of people. Forums make sense as the thing that you visit once or twice a day and browse for a bit in a relaxed environment. I guarantee you that doing so from your phone during your commute or your 10 minute break isn't the same. It won't create comments of the same quality.
- tayo42 7y ago
  > The problem with forums isn't that they are dead. It's that you are trying to have them do what reddit does right now, which is endless content and interaction 24/7. This is interesting, something I think i had a feeling about, but seeing it put in words, you're probably right. Ive probably changed a bit in my browsing habits and been conditioned to expect constant content.
dt3ft 7y ago
One of the reasons I'm building 20-things.com. Imagine a much smaller community with 100 (this is a goal, currently very few people know about it) daily active users or so. It doesn't have to be huge, quality over quantity.
kilroy123 7y ago
I stopped using Reddit as I've come to the same conclusions. I feel like I'm missing very little now What I did was slowly unsubscribe to all subreddits over the course of 6-8 months; slowly 1-3 subs at a time. In the end when there was only one sub left, I lost the habit of going to the site.
- mrweasel 7y ago
  After a few years I decided that I should only see the sub-reddits I actively used/followed. As each became increasingly painful to visit I unsubscribed. Like you I ended up with just one, a local sub-reddit (/r/denmark), but that too was just an echo chamber of one particular world view. During the last Danish election I promised my self that I would close my reddit account after the election. I wanted to follow and debate the election on Reddit, but I pretty much gave up as it because clear that I'm apparently wrong about anything, according to the users on Reddit. Reddit and Facebook groups pretty much killed the forums, but the communities are somehow much worse. I suspect it's somehow related to how users would previous cluster in smaller forums, but now everyone descents on one Facebook group or one sub-reddit. Having both Facebook and Reddit is interesting though. It more or less proves, at least to me, that anonymity is not what makes people behaving badly towards others. The Facebook users are just as bad as those on Reddit. I believe that it's the social distance to others that makes some users behave like jerks.
lodovic 7y ago
I unsubscribed from every generic subreddit and only view the subreddits for my hobbies. I avoid any subreddit where news, current events or politics may be referred to. Those are extremely toxic.
beirut_bootleg 7y ago
My strategy for the past couple of years has been using RES [1] to browse /r/all, filter out everything I consider a waste of time (irrelevant, toxic, or just dumb) and subscribe to the few subreddits that caught my eye. This has had limited success - it's a lot of work, but it did surface some gems. I'm sorry to say it's literally like panning for gold. * [1] https://redditenhancementsuite.com/ https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

by tayo42 7y ago

boopk 7y ago

Yeah sadly I started browsing reddit in 2011 when the f7u12 memes and subreddit were popular and it really has gone down in quality and the people posting like you mentioned has changed drastically. I can't wait for the day when a new forum experience replaces it.

notamy 7y ago

I was having a lot of the same thoughts lately! Back in 2012-2015 I was SUPER active on some forums, but I visit them nowadays and they're just... dead. It makes me really sad because I don't know of any other alternatives; Reddit is awful for a lot of my interests, but there's no real communities I've found that can compare... I miss the forums I used to browse.

Trasmatta 7y ago

It's weird how the sense is community that existed on forums just doesn't exist on Reddit. You just don't have the same connection to the other posters that you would on tight knit forums. You might as well not even have usernames. It's a bit different on smaller, more focused subreddits, but not by much. I used to think that Reddit was a better place to be than Twitter or Facebook, but now I'm not so sure. I've definitely had a harder time cutting it out of my life than those other two, even though I think it's had a pretty bad effect on my mental health.

hunter2_ 7y ago
I think a part of this is how forum members tend to populate avatar/signature/location/etc and the interface shows it prominently. On reddit you just see a username and occasionally some flair, so you rarely even realize that what you're reading was written by someone you've read from before.
- Trasmatta 7y ago
  Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. I think the other part is that discussions don't live for longer than a day or two. Things fall off the page and everyone moves on to the next posts. (Same deal here on HN of course.) With forums, you have long living threads where you engage in discussions with the same people for months or even years.
  - hunter2_ 7y ago
    True. Reddit has several sort options, and none of them remotely facilitate the "necro bump" that a single forum post can achieve. But when you're searching for a quick answer (rather than browsing/debating) there's nothing better than upvote sort (see also: stack exchange) which far exceeds any chronological sort forums have.
    - Trasmatta 7y ago
      Yeah, I frequently find myself doing "site:reddit.com" when searching for answers to random things.
      - tayo42 7y ago
        I do this too, it's like wikipedia for general sentiment on a topic, good to get a starting of idea. There are some gem posts out there. I think its also a symptom of google searches just not being that great and dominated by people that play the seo game well instead of actual good sources. But thats a rant for another time...
      - 7y ago

btrettel 7y ago

What don't you like about forums on mobile? The default phpBB skin is fairly good on mobile in my experience. I don't regularly participate on other forum softwares.

tayo42 7y ago
Some are okish. My biggest problems are ads pushing content off the limited screen space, "please download our app", some just don't render well and skip around. Funny enough, i went back to find some examples of ones that really drove me crazy and they have gotten better(snowboardforum, nasioc and wetcanvas). One's even got a big announcement about their ui update on the front page. I do think the threaded style of comments is much better then the forums though. Ignoring the problems of upvotes.
- bzb3 7y ago
  >My biggest problems are ads pushing content off the limited screen space, "please download our app", some just don't render well and skip around. So, like Reddit?
  - tayo42 7y ago
    I started using reddit is fun years ago, so i guess i do use an app for that. My account defaults to old.reddit.com I have no idea what the new ui looks like, except for the login screen.

__s 7y ago

Forums seeming deadish is a feature, at least if they aren't actually dead

tayo42 7y ago
I guess not individual forums, some are active. I meant more like how many there are. Before reddit there it always seemed like to me there was a large number of them for different interests, you could kind of pick which forum fit for you.

mister_hn 7y ago

I think, only few subreddits are worth spending time for and most of them are NSFW

nelaboras 7y ago

you might want to look into the "eternal September" concept, for me that really is what happened to Reddit. to;dr eternal september = constant influx of many new users didn't allow the 'culture' from before to survive.

HeadsUpHigh 7y ago

There are maybe 10, 20 reddit accounts that I recognize. Most of them come from fitness subs. Everyone else might as well not have usernames. The problem with forums isn't that they are dead. It's that you are trying to have them do what reddit does right now, which is endless content and interaction 24/7. But that just doesn't work with a smaller number of people. Forums make sense as the thing that you visit once or twice a day and browse for a bit in a relaxed environment. I guarantee you that doing so from your phone during your commute or your 10 minute break isn't the same. It won't create comments of the same quality.

tayo42 7y ago
> The problem with forums isn't that they are dead. It's that you are trying to have them do what reddit does right now, which is endless content and interaction 24/7. This is interesting, something I think i had a feeling about, but seeing it put in words, you're probably right. Ive probably changed a bit in my browsing habits and been conditioned to expect constant content.

dt3ft 7y ago

One of the reasons I'm building 20-things.com. Imagine a much smaller community with 100 (this is a goal, currently very few people know about it) daily active users or so. It doesn't have to be huge, quality over quantity.

kilroy123 7y ago

I stopped using Reddit as I've come to the same conclusions. I feel like I'm missing very little now What I did was slowly unsubscribe to all subreddits over the course of 6-8 months; slowly 1-3 subs at a time. In the end when there was only one sub left, I lost the habit of going to the site.

mrweasel 7y ago
After a few years I decided that I should only see the sub-reddits I actively used/followed. As each became increasingly painful to visit I unsubscribed. Like you I ended up with just one, a local sub-reddit (/r/denmark), but that too was just an echo chamber of one particular world view. During the last Danish election I promised my self that I would close my reddit account after the election. I wanted to follow and debate the election on Reddit, but I pretty much gave up as it because clear that I'm apparently wrong about anything, according to the users on Reddit. Reddit and Facebook groups pretty much killed the forums, but the communities are somehow much worse. I suspect it's somehow related to how users would previous cluster in smaller forums, but now everyone descents on one Facebook group or one sub-reddit. Having both Facebook and Reddit is interesting though. It more or less proves, at least to me, that anonymity is not what makes people behaving badly towards others. The Facebook users are just as bad as those on Reddit. I believe that it's the social distance to others that makes some users behave like jerks.

lodovic 7y ago

I unsubscribed from every generic subreddit and only view the subreddits for my hobbies. I avoid any subreddit where news, current events or politics may be referred to. Those are extremely toxic.

beirut_bootleg 7y ago

My strategy for the past couple of years has been using RES [1] to browse /r/all, filter out everything I consider a waste of time (irrelevant, toxic, or just dumb) and subscribe to the few subreddits that caught my eye. This has had limited success - it's a lot of work, but it did surface some gems. I'm sorry to say it's literally like panning for gold. * [1] https://redditenhancementsuite.com/ https://redditenhancementsuite.com/