4 ms·
It really fell off the rails when it became an imageboard moreso than a forum and link aggregator. It was all about the text, and so attracted those most willin
by dleslie 6y ago
It really fell off the rails when it became an imageboard moreso than a forum and link aggregator. It was all about the text, and so attracted those most willing to tolerate a wall of text.
Use Archive.org to compare 2008 to 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and onwards. The addition of thumbnails and gradual shift of the frontpage away from textual content and towards images is almost as remarkable as the increase in high-anxiety, anger and tribalism.
At some point sub-reddits were added, as well, which probably didn't help with the tribalism.
- fouc 6y agoprobably related to the integration of imgur?
- rhizome 6y agoSpeaking of sites that have become nightmares...
- sjtindell 6y agoIronically in my opinion subreddits are the only thing keeping the site useful at all. It’s all about curating a set of smaller subreddits targeted at your interests or frequented by people whose content you like. Beyond that it’s just terrible.
- Yhippa 6y agoThe line between a small subreddit struggling to get enough posts and then getting big enough to have drama is so fine these days.
- BolexNOLA 6y agoThe amount of work the ask historians mods have to put in to make reddit function like people think it does/want it to is staggering. That team is basically doing a second full time job. I don’t know how they do it.
- _pmf_ 6y ago> Ironically in my opinion subreddits are the only thing keeping the site useful at all. At what point in time could one derive value from reddit without subreddits?
- rcxdude 6y agoIt didn't have them initially. Though at that point it was basically a slightly less focused /r/programming .
- lovegoblin 6y ago> At some point sub-reddits were added, as well Hah that was in 2006. The real change for subreddits was when they became user-creatable, but even that was already in 2008. Point is it's not like they're a recent addition.
- jedberg 6y agoReddit had thumbnails in 2007.
- byte1918 6y agoI'm sure it did not or maybe it was not enabled by default. I distinctly remember having to turn 'condensed view' back on because the thumbnails were taking so much vertical space. edit: Just noticed who I replied to. I guess you would know better.
- dleslie 6y agoOf course, but the dominance of images over text was gradual. Compare archives of the front page in 2008, 2010 and so on. It is remarkable how the content focus shifts.
- jedberg 6y agoOh for sure. It's shifted way too far towards images now. I was just pointing out the shift started really early.