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There is a phenomenon when older and older groups enter a social platform, the quality of that platform deteriorates for the younger generation, and perhaps may

There is a phenomenon when older and older groups enter a social platform, the quality of that platform deteriorates for the younger generation, and perhaps maybe even overall. We saw this with facebook, We saw this with twitter, and we're now seeing this with Reddit. (yes, there is twitter outside of tech, and it's content quality is extremely poor and juvenile) Reddit, at one point, was just science, memes, an occasional atheist post, and and A list Celebrity AMA every other day - a platform that provided niche content mostly for age 18-30 year old Americans. Now with the flood of all sorts of ideas from all fronts, It has become way too overwhelming to really digest what everyone has to offer - Diving deep into reddit will eventually and inevitably get anyone upset and bothered. As Reddit builds its foundation upon favoring ad populum, it is starting to become evident that not every voice should be heard, especially when the average american individual is as uneducated as he or she is. “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ― Isaac Asimov I'd like to one up Asimov - that it is not a false notion, but literally the core tenet of what democracy is. That all opinions are of equal value. And in all honesty... this is dangerous.

prox 6y ago
Insightful comment. This falls in line with conspiracy theories: while on the whole its good to be critical or skeptic, when you use all kinds of extraneous data points to make it fit your pre-chosen theory, it no longer is science.
mhaberl 6y ago
In democracy two stupid people have more power than one smart individual. On the other side what kind of existing system is better than democracy?
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  If you have enough money you can buy the influencing of a lot of less analytical people. In the UK we combat that by strict regulations on money spent influencing voters. Sadly, despite proving Brexit campaigns were backed by an excessive amount of money routed through a Russian oligarch the result remains (unintended ironic use of 'remain'!). Democracy can only work with probity. If the people don't know the truth they can't vote for their choice. Benevolent dictatorship seems likely the better option, just choose your dictator carefully!
  - fuzxi 6y ago
    >Benevolent dictatorship seems likely the better option, just choose your dictator carefully! "Where have all the good philosopher kings gone?" :)
cblconfederate 6y ago
Reddit skews consistently young though. Too young for many people's tastes (including mine). There is just too much meme-noise in subreddits that are not well moderated. Shallow thinking and childish antics derail any deep conversation. You are correct that reddit confuses truth with popularity though. That meme needs to die
- qwerty1234599 6y ago
  Yes, on Reddit the zoomers are a larger problem than the boomers. Default subreddits today basically feel like being in elementary school all over again, the average age is like 14.
  - poisonarena 6y ago
    "Hey I am 14 years old developer and I made XXX, for my first XXX, please check it out"
  - cvhashim 6y ago
    Funny enough that childlike behavior is probably from people in their 30s
Shivetya 6y ago
Excepting of course that just as you and many here do, you assume your opinion in the group of having higher value. Yes it is easy to pick out the obvious bad opinions but it becomes far less easy to do so when the issues are divisive because both sides can be correct but you can guarantee both sides can have proponents who think the other one is an idiot. Reddit's issue for me is that many supposedly good subs are so completely toxic to any opposing view they may as well not exist.
- fc373745 6y ago
  It is far too common that the easiest to pick out are the loudest
alangibson 6y ago
Let's not forget the Eternal September that ruined newsgroups. I don't think it's really an age issue per se. The problem that a group/demographic/tribe/whatever makes a place hot, then a bunch of people that don't fit their description show up wanting to get in on the fun. The result is the original group packing up and moving on. You see this everywhere from Facebook to gentrifying neighborhoods.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  I presume the change in tone and content on reddit is due to mobile users moving to the site. It is probably good for their click rates actually, but discussions were a lot more relaxed 5 years ago. I still use it, but only for niche subs. I always rolled my eyes at people denouncing the quality of default subs. They weren't good but also not that terrible. Now it isn't necessarily terrible, but just extremely stupid. Nearly every comment.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    Well over the last 5 years or so it's just got more commercially focussed - mainstream, populist, more tracking through app use = more advertising dollars. It's just the shift towards full commercial focus. Things get popular : someone decides to use it to increase their wealth.
  - phillip_cypher 6y ago
    I agree 100% here. Comment sections on reddit are approaching YouTube-level lows.
3np 6y ago
Part of it could also be that older people are more economically and politically interesting -> more interesting to target for ads, tracking and political persuasion. Or just the fact that older people are the decision makers deciding on these (deteriorating) things and they are more likely to target platforms they're aware of and that they recognize.
raxxorrax 6y ago
Opinions are of equal value [...] this is dangerous. I disagree that it is dangerous. Of course not every opinion is worthwhile, but since opinions got labeled as too dangerous, they got much more appeal for others. Otherwise it would just be another stupid opinion. I think this had a large negative effect on many subs since people somehow lost the ability to just ignore something or write their own opinion as a response. Everyone was screaming for mommy moderator. Today people get a heart attack if someone writes that the earth is flat.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  I think all opinions have value, but that value is not necessarily intrinsic. So 'the earth is flat' has value in indicating a person's ignorance (or trollishness), possibly associating them with a group (good for them; useful for others).
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Interesting that you feel older demographics degrade a platform. For me, it’s the opposite: I am really starting to appreciate hobby forums that are dominated by people a couple of decades older than myself. This tends to happen to independent website forums when now the younger generation eschews them for walled gardens like Reddit. The reason for that is that older people are less likely to be using mobile, and they are more likely to create long-form text content. You can actually have substantial discussions with them and share detailed tips and reports. Compare this to the relevant Reddit subreddits, where each day’s new posts have largely devolved to vacuous uploaded photos or memes, and the discussion thread is often a lot of vacuous one-sentence replies.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  > Interesting that you feel older demographics degrade a platform. For me, it’s the opposite Agree. More mature users means less bullshit. A corrected statement would probably be something like: if a platform is used mostly by younger demographics, then an influx of older people degrades that platform for the younger people. Which seems pretty obvious.
  - Macha 6y ago
    More mature users means different bullshit. The flight sim community is an example of one I'm involved in which has many forums with older users that grew out of 90s forums or even older BBSes and have a large older audience. I wouldn't call those forums as having less bullshit than say the Reddit, which has the younger parts of the community.
- fc373745 6y ago
  You are right, young people degrade a platform just as much as anyone else. The only platform in which this phenomenon can be applied to is probably Facebook.
- JohnBooty 6y ago
  Interesting that you feel older demographics degrade a platform. For me, it’s the opposite: I am really starting to appreciate hobby forums that are dominated by people a couple of decades older than myself. Yeah, it's funny. Older demographics "ruin" some platforms and really excel at others. This is all 100% subjective, but I think many people would agree that older demographics are.... not always much fun on "general purpose" social networking platforms like Facebook. Leaving Facebook's substantial ethical concerns aside for a moment, Facebook and Instagram stopped being fun real fast once everybody's parents and aunts and uncles showed up. It's simply too easy for Uncle Bob to repost anti-vax stuff or whatever he's into, and most people would prefer to keep some of the fun/exciting parts of their lives private from their families. But, like you, I've gotten into some hobbies where the older folks have just a freaking amazing online presence - just super generous and talented people; absolute superstars of the community.
dimmke 6y ago
I've been using Reddit since 2009 (after the Digg exodus for ironically - a bad redesign.), and the biggest change I've noticed (aside from the terrible single page app they switched over to) is how massively popular schadenfreude content is now. Subreddits like "Justice Served" and "Public Freakout", "Malicious Compliance" "Entitled Parents", the list goes on and on. It's all "This person/people/group did something bad and now are getting their comeuppance." and the site has become like a nerdy version of World Star Hip Hop. You really can't browse the regular Reddit front page without encountering a lot of content that is designed to upset you. I've started to actually hate using Reddit. Niche subreddits are still useful in limited ways, but it's a shame to see things go this way. Reddit had a good run.
- cvhashim 6y ago
  You’re right. I’ve been on Reddit since 2012. But over the last 2-3 years, the front page seems to feature more controversial or upsetting content. I wonder if Reddit promotes that to increase engagement metrics.
- blackearl 6y ago
  There's also tons of "memes but named differently" subs. Cursed images, blessed images, blursed images, etc. images. They're all picking from the same pool of reposted content. Some of the best stuff has actually been long form comedy writing from the sports subreddits during the lockdown. It's good banter, unlike the twitter screenshot repost subs like murderedbywords, kamikazebywords, etc.bywords.
- S_A_P 6y ago
  Agreed. It seems mostly a tool to enrage people now. I cant stomach it anymore, the tin foil hat wearing part of me would say there are larger forces at work here. The flipside of these subreddits(public freakout, etc) is that a non-trivial percentage of these things are/could be fake. To the main point of the article- Reddit must really get a lot of dough monetizing user data because its as bad or worse than ad/malware...
  - GhostVII 6y ago
WindyLakeReturn 6y ago
>Reddit, at one point, was just science, memes, an occasional atheist post, and and A list Celebrity AMA every other day - a platform that provided niche content mostly for age 18-30 year old Americans. This seems to mostly outright ignore some of the more controversial subreddits that existed/flourished in the past. There was a significant amount of content, including entire subreddits, dedicated to sexualizing minors. It feels revisionist to think reddit has only recently become flooded with controversial content.
- RandoHolmes 6y ago
  I never really got the outrage for that subreddit. Minors are sexualized in society all the time, especially by various magazines, and it's completely, 100% legal and accepted. IIRC there were accusations of CP being put up and not taken down in a timely manner. For that reason I'm ok with the subreddit not being there, but the whole "sexualization of a minor" thing is a red herring. just imagine if someone got up in arms about a magazine putting a picture of a 16 y/o with big tits on their cover. No one does unless she's explicitly in a sexual position.
romanovcode 6y ago
Top 50 sub-reddits are controlled by the same people. This should say enough about the platform.
- zo1 6y ago
  Every once in a while one of those individuals gets "pissed off" and bans individuals 1 by 1 on all the subs they mod.
logosmonkey 6y ago
I think you are incorrect in blaming older people for this issue. I would argue it's simply the increased user base regardless of age. When things are niche and communities small conversations tend to flourish and surprisingly I think echo chambers are a bit less of a problem since dissenting views can often be voiced without down vote floods etc. As the user base increases you get further from the group of people who were passionate enough about subject X to be early adopters and into a more generalized audience. That general audience is often not interested or not equipped for indepth discussion of X. That mentality also leads to down vote parties I think. I have seen it in a number of subs that I used to really enjoy. After reaching a critical mass of users they have become meme and low content post factories. I suppose part of that is an increase in users who specifically care about generating up votes so they generate as much content as possible which inevitably leads to low quality stuff.
whatisthiseven 6y ago
My reddit account is over 10 years old, and I think we have different views of why Reddit is on a slow decline. Every single sub-reddit will, at some point after its first few users, need to decide if it will be a meme/image macro sub, or not. Every sub that implicitly allows memes, will eventually become a meme sub if the mods choose to do nothing. It seems there are large numbers of users on Reddit that feel entitled to let "upvotes and downvotes" be the ultimate and only modding that should happen on a sub-reddit. These users will balk at any notion of getting rid of memes because "what else is there to discuss"? For them, the worst thing to happen to their feed is for there not to be a huge dearth of mindless content to consume which is heavily remixed and re-used all over the site every single time they login. They will also deny that any sub that allows memes will somehow then "become a meme sub". They seem willfully ignorant of what happens to meme subs, and seem to think "if people upvote it, then that means they want it", ignoring how the people who upvote most frequently and the lowest quality content are those that rapidly consume meme content. Reddit is ruined by these super passive consumers of memes. Not anti-intellectualism, but just those that want to go to reddit, see funny shit, upvote it all, and then get on with their day. And they demand to see that EVERYWHERE.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  I mean yea, but it's ruined by anti-intellectualism too.
- croissants 6y ago
  >the worst thing to happen to their feed is for there not to be a huge dearth of mindless content FYI, "dearth" means "scarcity or lack", which I think is the opposite of the intended meaning here?
  - whatisthiseven 6y ago
    My bad, thanks! I did mean the opposite
- RandoHolmes 6y ago
  I don't think it's that simple. I left /r/patientgamers after the mods came out and declared they were going to be LGTBQ friendly, which meant any discussion about those issues, even if they were related to a game (for example the remake of Baldurs Gate) would result in a ban. The argument made by a lot of people is that the community should get to decide if that's something they want to discuss, not the moderators (and I agree). I also left /r/fitness when they decided what they needed was a female moderator. They specifically decided they wanted a new moderator and that moderator had to be female. As if male moderators are unable to identify sexual harassment. I don't want to be moderated by people who have a political agenda. Fullstop. I didn't go to /r/fitness because it had a 'diverse' moderation team, I wanted to go there to discuss with fellow fitness enthusiasts. I didn't want to go to /r/patientgamers because it was a "safe space", I went there to discuss with others who also mostly refused to buy games for $60+ USD. Too often moderators forget why they're there, and think that just because they have the power to means they should. There is absolutely a time and place to let upvotes make the decision of what stays and what goes. Not always, but very often it's true.
proactivesvcs 6y ago
> especially when the average american individual is as uneducated as he or she is. I find this generalisation tired, offensive and without merit. If they're so uneducated why are they still sending craft into space, producing wonderful poetry and creating innovative ways to leverage the Internet?
- phillip_cypher 6y ago
  The people who are developing spacecraft, writing poetry, or reshaping the internet are not "average Americans." Neverthess, I agree that the statement is without merit. I think this stereotype comes from Europeans, who tend to be more worldly than Americans (for example, nearly everyone in Europe speaks both their native language and English). What Europeans tend to forget is that in Europe, you can hop on a train, airplane, hell, even a car, and within an hour be in another country, for less than the price of a fancy dinner. America, by contrast, is huge. As a result, travel is more expensive, more time-consuming, and much harder when it comes to finding diversity.
- mdoms 6y ago
  The average American is most certainly not writing poetry or building space craft.
JohnBooty 6y ago
(yes, there is twitter outside of tech, and it's content quality is extremely poor and juvenile) This is not my experience at all. It's extremely dependent on whom you follow, obviously, but there are a lot of people posting funny and smart things on Twitter. The extremely casual / shitposting crowd is more drawn to Instagram, Tiktok, etc. Like any medium, 99.9% of stuff on Twitter is garbage, but it's still primarily a text - based medium and I think that requires juuuuuuust enough effort to drive away the most casual of casual posters. The character limit of Twitter also imposes a certain clarity of thought and composition. It's like being forced to fit your thoughts into a haiku: it's restrictive and frustrating, but you can sometimes wind up with concise little gems you wouldn't have come up with otherwise.
127 6y ago
How do you determine what is "intelligent" and thus worth listening to and what is not? How can you rely on your inherently very flawed human genetic machine to not fool you into various thought patterns that have no rational basis at all, but just serve your tribe, your family, or your short term self interest?
phillip_cypher 6y ago
I find this perspective fascinating, because I totally disagree. I started using reddit in... 2007? (I remember a lot of content about the economic crisis and Occupy Wall Street.) I feel that the change in reddit has come from an influx of younger users, not older ones. When I joined reddit, I had the sense that most users were 25-45. If you revealed you were 20, you were a baby by reddit standards. There was a sort of unspoken (and sometimes, outright) filter preventing younger users from enjoying the experience. The community of users wouldn't tolerate poor grammar and misspellings. Users were torn apart if they posted a news article about a study without posting a link to the actual study. Users ignored onions from other users if they were unable to cite sources. The site was ugly. Before the redesign, it looked like it was built in '98 and never updated. I remember a friend of mine being completely turned off by the site because of the visual design, without paying any attention to the quality of the content. There was much more of a learning curve to using the site than there is now. That served as a deterrent, whether intentionally or not. People who genuinely were interested in the content and the conversation stayed, and users who were more interested in a spoon-fed lazy entertainment website stayed away. Now, it's not uncommon to see posts from 13 and 14 year-olds. I've even seen content from people as young as 7. I think this has had a significant impact on the decrease in quality of content. The redesign has certainly made the site more inviting to the average user. I think this is a chicken-or-the-egg situation, in that I can't say whether the influx of new users was a result of the redesign, or the cause, but it doesn't really matter. The point is that the content has shifted from more slow-burn, idea-challenging content, to entertainment designed for instant gratification. There's nothing wrong with that kind of entertainment in itself, I just prefer the former.
- fc373745 6y ago
  I agree. I shouldn't have led with that sentiment. The reason why I did so was because I was recently browsing an AskReddit post asking "What Movie Will you always Recommend". (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ij0ha8/what_movie_will_you_always_recommend_to_p https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ij0ha8/what_movi...) And as I viewed the top answers I remember thinking to myself that reddit is older than I perceived it to be, although it may just be appreciation for classics as I, too, have many 80-90s movies that i would highly recommend. That being said, I do believe that the older demographic ruined Facebook. Since writing the comment, I don't think it's correct to label an age demographic as the culprit but rather the rise in popularity in general, and the overwhelming effect it can have.
notmyname9173 6y ago
I suspect you may have overlooked who shows up between the kids and the older users: internet marketers. Marketers want clicks, eyeballs and engagement and they do that by sharing viral content, most often outrage porn. As long as a given platform is also a vehicle for building an off-platform audience, marketers will inevitably show up and shit all over everything.
TheKarateKid 6y ago
If this was Reddit, I would give you Gold for this post.

prox 6y ago

Insightful comment. This falls in line with conspiracy theories: while on the whole its good to be critical or skeptic, when you use all kinds of extraneous data points to make it fit your pre-chosen theory, it no longer is science.

mhaberl 6y ago

In democracy two stupid people have more power than one smart individual. On the other side what kind of existing system is better than democracy?

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
If you have enough money you can buy the influencing of a lot of less analytical people. In the UK we combat that by strict regulations on money spent influencing voters. Sadly, despite proving Brexit campaigns were backed by an excessive amount of money routed through a Russian oligarch the result remains (unintended ironic use of 'remain'!). Democracy can only work with probity. If the people don't know the truth they can't vote for their choice. Benevolent dictatorship seems likely the better option, just choose your dictator carefully!
- fuzxi 6y ago
  >Benevolent dictatorship seems likely the better option, just choose your dictator carefully! "Where have all the good philosopher kings gone?" :)

cblconfederate 6y ago

Reddit skews consistently young though. Too young for many people's tastes (including mine). There is just too much meme-noise in subreddits that are not well moderated. Shallow thinking and childish antics derail any deep conversation. You are correct that reddit confuses truth with popularity though. That meme needs to die

qwerty1234599 6y ago
Yes, on Reddit the zoomers are a larger problem than the boomers. Default subreddits today basically feel like being in elementary school all over again, the average age is like 14.
- poisonarena 6y ago
  "Hey I am 14 years old developer and I made XXX, for my first XXX, please check it out"
- cvhashim 6y ago
  Funny enough that childlike behavior is probably from people in their 30s

Shivetya 6y ago

Excepting of course that just as you and many here do, you assume your opinion in the group of having higher value. Yes it is easy to pick out the obvious bad opinions but it becomes far less easy to do so when the issues are divisive because both sides can be correct but you can guarantee both sides can have proponents who think the other one is an idiot. Reddit's issue for me is that many supposedly good subs are so completely toxic to any opposing view they may as well not exist.

fc373745 6y ago
It is far too common that the easiest to pick out are the loudest

alangibson 6y ago

Let's not forget the Eternal September that ruined newsgroups. I don't think it's really an age issue per se. The problem that a group/demographic/tribe/whatever makes a place hot, then a bunch of people that don't fit their description show up wanting to get in on the fun. The result is the original group packing up and moving on. You see this everywhere from Facebook to gentrifying neighborhoods.

raxxorrax 6y ago
I presume the change in tone and content on reddit is due to mobile users moving to the site. It is probably good for their click rates actually, but discussions were a lot more relaxed 5 years ago. I still use it, but only for niche subs. I always rolled my eyes at people denouncing the quality of default subs. They weren't good but also not that terrible. Now it isn't necessarily terrible, but just extremely stupid. Nearly every comment.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Well over the last 5 years or so it's just got more commercially focussed - mainstream, populist, more tracking through app use = more advertising dollars. It's just the shift towards full commercial focus. Things get popular : someone decides to use it to increase their wealth.
- phillip_cypher 6y ago
  I agree 100% here. Comment sections on reddit are approaching YouTube-level lows.

3np 6y ago

Part of it could also be that older people are more economically and politically interesting -> more interesting to target for ads, tracking and political persuasion. Or just the fact that older people are the decision makers deciding on these (deteriorating) things and they are more likely to target platforms they're aware of and that they recognize.

raxxorrax 6y ago

Opinions are of equal value [...] this is dangerous. I disagree that it is dangerous. Of course not every opinion is worthwhile, but since opinions got labeled as too dangerous, they got much more appeal for others. Otherwise it would just be another stupid opinion. I think this had a large negative effect on many subs since people somehow lost the ability to just ignore something or write their own opinion as a response. Everyone was screaming for mommy moderator. Today people get a heart attack if someone writes that the earth is flat.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
I think all opinions have value, but that value is not necessarily intrinsic. So 'the earth is flat' has value in indicating a person's ignorance (or trollishness), possibly associating them with a group (good for them; useful for others).

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

Interesting that you feel older demographics degrade a platform. For me, it’s the opposite: I am really starting to appreciate hobby forums that are dominated by people a couple of decades older than myself. This tends to happen to independent website forums when now the younger generation eschews them for walled gardens like Reddit. The reason for that is that older people are less likely to be using mobile, and they are more likely to create long-form text content. You can actually have substantial discussions with them and share detailed tips and reports. Compare this to the relevant Reddit subreddits, where each day’s new posts have largely devolved to vacuous uploaded photos or memes, and the discussion thread is often a lot of vacuous one-sentence replies.

read_if_gay_ 6y ago
> Interesting that you feel older demographics degrade a platform. For me, it’s the opposite Agree. More mature users means less bullshit. A corrected statement would probably be something like: if a platform is used mostly by younger demographics, then an influx of older people degrades that platform for the younger people. Which seems pretty obvious.
- Macha 6y ago
  More mature users means different bullshit. The flight sim community is an example of one I'm involved in which has many forums with older users that grew out of 90s forums or even older BBSes and have a large older audience. I wouldn't call those forums as having less bullshit than say the Reddit, which has the younger parts of the community.
fc373745 6y ago
You are right, young people degrade a platform just as much as anyone else. The only platform in which this phenomenon can be applied to is probably Facebook.
JohnBooty 6y ago
Interesting that you feel older demographics degrade a platform. For me, it’s the opposite: I am really starting to appreciate hobby forums that are dominated by people a couple of decades older than myself. Yeah, it's funny. Older demographics "ruin" some platforms and really excel at others. This is all 100% subjective, but I think many people would agree that older demographics are.... not always much fun on "general purpose" social networking platforms like Facebook. Leaving Facebook's substantial ethical concerns aside for a moment, Facebook and Instagram stopped being fun real fast once everybody's parents and aunts and uncles showed up. It's simply too easy for Uncle Bob to repost anti-vax stuff or whatever he's into, and most people would prefer to keep some of the fun/exciting parts of their lives private from their families. But, like you, I've gotten into some hobbies where the older folks have just a freaking amazing online presence - just super generous and talented people; absolute superstars of the community.

dimmke 6y ago

I've been using Reddit since 2009 (after the Digg exodus for ironically - a bad redesign.), and the biggest change I've noticed (aside from the terrible single page app they switched over to) is how massively popular schadenfreude content is now. Subreddits like "Justice Served" and "Public Freakout", "Malicious Compliance" "Entitled Parents", the list goes on and on. It's all "This person/people/group did something bad and now are getting their comeuppance." and the site has become like a nerdy version of World Star Hip Hop. You really can't browse the regular Reddit front page without encountering a lot of content that is designed to upset you. I've started to actually hate using Reddit. Niche subreddits are still useful in limited ways, but it's a shame to see things go this way. Reddit had a good run.

cvhashim 6y ago
You’re right. I’ve been on Reddit since 2012. But over the last 2-3 years, the front page seems to feature more controversial or upsetting content. I wonder if Reddit promotes that to increase engagement metrics.
blackearl 6y ago
There's also tons of "memes but named differently" subs. Cursed images, blessed images, blursed images, etc. images. They're all picking from the same pool of reposted content. Some of the best stuff has actually been long form comedy writing from the sports subreddits during the lockdown. It's good banter, unlike the twitter screenshot repost subs like murderedbywords, kamikazebywords, etc.bywords.
S_A_P 6y ago
Agreed. It seems mostly a tool to enrage people now. I cant stomach it anymore, the tin foil hat wearing part of me would say there are larger forces at work here. The flipside of these subreddits(public freakout, etc) is that a non-trivial percentage of these things are/could be fake. To the main point of the article- Reddit must really get a lot of dough monetizing user data because its as bad or worse than ad/malware...
- GhostVII 6y ago

WindyLakeReturn 6y ago

>Reddit, at one point, was just science, memes, an occasional atheist post, and and A list Celebrity AMA every other day - a platform that provided niche content mostly for age 18-30 year old Americans. This seems to mostly outright ignore some of the more controversial subreddits that existed/flourished in the past. There was a significant amount of content, including entire subreddits, dedicated to sexualizing minors. It feels revisionist to think reddit has only recently become flooded with controversial content.

RandoHolmes 6y ago
I never really got the outrage for that subreddit. Minors are sexualized in society all the time, especially by various magazines, and it's completely, 100% legal and accepted. IIRC there were accusations of CP being put up and not taken down in a timely manner. For that reason I'm ok with the subreddit not being there, but the whole "sexualization of a minor" thing is a red herring. just imagine if someone got up in arms about a magazine putting a picture of a 16 y/o with big tits on their cover. No one does unless she's explicitly in a sexual position.

romanovcode 6y ago

Top 50 sub-reddits are controlled by the same people. This should say enough about the platform.

zo1 6y ago
Every once in a while one of those individuals gets "pissed off" and bans individuals 1 by 1 on all the subs they mod.

logosmonkey 6y ago

I think you are incorrect in blaming older people for this issue. I would argue it's simply the increased user base regardless of age. When things are niche and communities small conversations tend to flourish and surprisingly I think echo chambers are a bit less of a problem since dissenting views can often be voiced without down vote floods etc. As the user base increases you get further from the group of people who were passionate enough about subject X to be early adopters and into a more generalized audience. That general audience is often not interested or not equipped for indepth discussion of X. That mentality also leads to down vote parties I think. I have seen it in a number of subs that I used to really enjoy. After reaching a critical mass of users they have become meme and low content post factories. I suppose part of that is an increase in users who specifically care about generating up votes so they generate as much content as possible which inevitably leads to low quality stuff.

whatisthiseven 6y ago

My reddit account is over 10 years old, and I think we have different views of why Reddit is on a slow decline. Every single sub-reddit will, at some point after its first few users, need to decide if it will be a meme/image macro sub, or not. Every sub that implicitly allows memes, will eventually become a meme sub if the mods choose to do nothing. It seems there are large numbers of users on Reddit that feel entitled to let "upvotes and downvotes" be the ultimate and only modding that should happen on a sub-reddit. These users will balk at any notion of getting rid of memes because "what else is there to discuss"? For them, the worst thing to happen to their feed is for there not to be a huge dearth of mindless content to consume which is heavily remixed and re-used all over the site every single time they login. They will also deny that any sub that allows memes will somehow then "become a meme sub". They seem willfully ignorant of what happens to meme subs, and seem to think "if people upvote it, then that means they want it", ignoring how the people who upvote most frequently and the lowest quality content are those that rapidly consume meme content. Reddit is ruined by these super passive consumers of memes. Not anti-intellectualism, but just those that want to go to reddit, see funny shit, upvote it all, and then get on with their day. And they demand to see that EVERYWHERE.

colinmhayes 6y ago
I mean yea, but it's ruined by anti-intellectualism too.
croissants 6y ago
>the worst thing to happen to their feed is for there not to be a huge dearth of mindless content FYI, "dearth" means "scarcity or lack", which I think is the opposite of the intended meaning here?
- whatisthiseven 6y ago
  My bad, thanks! I did mean the opposite
RandoHolmes 6y ago
I don't think it's that simple. I left /r/patientgamers after the mods came out and declared they were going to be LGTBQ friendly, which meant any discussion about those issues, even if they were related to a game (for example the remake of Baldurs Gate) would result in a ban. The argument made by a lot of people is that the community should get to decide if that's something they want to discuss, not the moderators (and I agree). I also left /r/fitness when they decided what they needed was a female moderator. They specifically decided they wanted a new moderator and that moderator had to be female. As if male moderators are unable to identify sexual harassment. I don't want to be moderated by people who have a political agenda. Fullstop. I didn't go to /r/fitness because it had a 'diverse' moderation team, I wanted to go there to discuss with fellow fitness enthusiasts. I didn't want to go to /r/patientgamers because it was a "safe space", I went there to discuss with others who also mostly refused to buy games for $60+ USD. Too often moderators forget why they're there, and think that just because they have the power to means they should. There is absolutely a time and place to let upvotes make the decision of what stays and what goes. Not always, but very often it's true.

proactivesvcs 6y ago

> especially when the average american individual is as uneducated as he or she is. I find this generalisation tired, offensive and without merit. If they're so uneducated why are they still sending craft into space, producing wonderful poetry and creating innovative ways to leverage the Internet?

phillip_cypher 6y ago
The people who are developing spacecraft, writing poetry, or reshaping the internet are not "average Americans." Neverthess, I agree that the statement is without merit. I think this stereotype comes from Europeans, who tend to be more worldly than Americans (for example, nearly everyone in Europe speaks both their native language and English). What Europeans tend to forget is that in Europe, you can hop on a train, airplane, hell, even a car, and within an hour be in another country, for less than the price of a fancy dinner. America, by contrast, is huge. As a result, travel is more expensive, more time-consuming, and much harder when it comes to finding diversity.
mdoms 6y ago
The average American is most certainly not writing poetry or building space craft.

JohnBooty 6y ago

(yes, there is twitter outside of tech, and it's content quality is extremely poor and juvenile) This is not my experience at all. It's extremely dependent on whom you follow, obviously, but there are a lot of people posting funny and smart things on Twitter. The extremely casual / shitposting crowd is more drawn to Instagram, Tiktok, etc. Like any medium, 99.9% of stuff on Twitter is garbage, but it's still primarily a text - based medium and I think that requires juuuuuuust enough effort to drive away the most casual of casual posters. The character limit of Twitter also imposes a certain clarity of thought and composition. It's like being forced to fit your thoughts into a haiku: it's restrictive and frustrating, but you can sometimes wind up with concise little gems you wouldn't have come up with otherwise.

127 6y ago

How do you determine what is "intelligent" and thus worth listening to and what is not? How can you rely on your inherently very flawed human genetic machine to not fool you into various thought patterns that have no rational basis at all, but just serve your tribe, your family, or your short term self interest?

phillip_cypher 6y ago

I find this perspective fascinating, because I totally disagree. I started using reddit in... 2007? (I remember a lot of content about the economic crisis and Occupy Wall Street.) I feel that the change in reddit has come from an influx of younger users, not older ones. When I joined reddit, I had the sense that most users were 25-45. If you revealed you were 20, you were a baby by reddit standards. There was a sort of unspoken (and sometimes, outright) filter preventing younger users from enjoying the experience. The community of users wouldn't tolerate poor grammar and misspellings. Users were torn apart if they posted a news article about a study without posting a link to the actual study. Users ignored onions from other users if they were unable to cite sources. The site was ugly. Before the redesign, it looked like it was built in '98 and never updated. I remember a friend of mine being completely turned off by the site because of the visual design, without paying any attention to the quality of the content. There was much more of a learning curve to using the site than there is now. That served as a deterrent, whether intentionally or not. People who genuinely were interested in the content and the conversation stayed, and users who were more interested in a spoon-fed lazy entertainment website stayed away. Now, it's not uncommon to see posts from 13 and 14 year-olds. I've even seen content from people as young as 7. I think this has had a significant impact on the decrease in quality of content. The redesign has certainly made the site more inviting to the average user. I think this is a chicken-or-the-egg situation, in that I can't say whether the influx of new users was a result of the redesign, or the cause, but it doesn't really matter. The point is that the content has shifted from more slow-burn, idea-challenging content, to entertainment designed for instant gratification. There's nothing wrong with that kind of entertainment in itself, I just prefer the former.

fc373745 6y ago
I agree. I shouldn't have led with that sentiment. The reason why I did so was because I was recently browsing an AskReddit post asking "What Movie Will you always Recommend". (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ij0ha8/what_movie_will_you_always_recommend_to_p https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ij0ha8/what_movi...) And as I viewed the top answers I remember thinking to myself that reddit is older than I perceived it to be, although it may just be appreciation for classics as I, too, have many 80-90s movies that i would highly recommend. That being said, I do believe that the older demographic ruined Facebook. Since writing the comment, I don't think it's correct to label an age demographic as the culprit but rather the rise in popularity in general, and the overwhelming effect it can have.

notmyname9173 6y ago

I suspect you may have overlooked who shows up between the kids and the older users: internet marketers. Marketers want clicks, eyeballs and engagement and they do that by sharing viral content, most often outrage porn. As long as a given platform is also a vehicle for building an off-platform audience, marketers will inevitably show up and shit all over everything.

TheKarateKid 6y ago

If this was Reddit, I would give you Gold for this post.