5 ms·
Searching Reddit helps but the quality of comments has gotten lower since 2015 or so. It seems to coincide with the wave of subreddit bans and the nakedly polit
by legalcorrection 5y ago
Searching Reddit helps but the quality of comments has gotten lower since 2015 or so. It seems to coincide with the wave of subreddit bans and the nakedly politically-driven moderation on subreddits. And with the reflexive attitude—against anything countering the Reddit consensus—that developed during the Trump years. High quality posters seem to have withdrawn from the site (at least in how much they comment) and what's left is mostly ignorant teenagers and bitter millennials with shitty jobs. In turn, that crowd is much less likely to upvote high-quality thoughtful content, so the cycle continues. The decline in quality has trickled even into the less popular subs. Don't get me wrong, the site has always had problems, but the more recent decline in thoughtfulness is dramatic.
The worst part is that despite Reddit getting so much worse, there is no other place that's grown to fill the void. This place is great, and I do search HN when it makes sense, but it's small and narrow in scope. Reddit basically crowds out any competing websites by sucking up all the low-level chatter required to sustain a community, but has also pushed away high-quality posters, who now have no place to go. Very tragic but maybe a good case study in shitty network effects.
- fallingknife 5y agoWith quality comes success. With success comes popularity. With popularity comes idiots.
- D13Fd 5y agoI find the idea that banning Trump supporters killed reddit to be pretty far-fetched. To the extent there is a change in quality, it probably comes from other factors, including having a bigger, broader, and different user base now than in the past (and only a small portion of that change likely came from Trump-related bans).
- jasonladuke0311 5y agoParent didn't say Trump supporters. And I completely agree with their observation. Quality went completely off a cliff around that time. I think it just officially entrenched the Reddit orthodoxy and that there is a "right way" to think, and that infected even non-political subreddits. Not all though, I know some subs are much better and open to discussion than in the past.
- legalcorrection 5y agoYep. These days you’ll even get banned from fandom subreddits if you criticize the tv show/movie/book too heavily.
- twoodfin 5y agoI dunno, looking at the growth curve in Paul Graham’s tweet I expect most of the drop in average comment quality can be attributed to the size of the user base. It’s hard to keep high-quality content the norm even in much smaller communities. /r/nfl had a reputation for high-quality content and wasn’t a particular battleground in the Trump Wars. It’s still a good breaking news feed, and the live game threads are fun, but every post is dominated by joke comments and memes.
- WastingMyTime89 5y agoQuality on any non niche popular subreddits were already abysmal long before 2015. Reddit is useless for anything which is not highly specific but there are some diamonds in the rough: great subreddits exists about fashion, knives, gardening, coffee, shaving and plenty of other weird interests.
- legalcorrection 5y agoThis is true but I find that about 2015 is the inflection point. Even posts about highly technical subjects are not as good if they’re from after that.
- code_duck 5y agoSubs about specific medical conditions have been really helpful for me.