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The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

217 points by ko3us 4y ago

robotjosh 4y ago
Its not just awful mods, its awful paid admins. It was a step in the right direction to ban hate speech. The people they hired have decided that being mean to racists is “hate speech”, while ignoring actual hate speech and letting racist spaces thrive. This is not what people meant when they asked reddit to do something about hate speech.
- tgv 4y ago
  That's another reason, indeed. I get that moderation is hard, but the way reddit handles it is awful. There are so many, potentially conflicting interests among reddit stakeholders, but the admins seem to be single-minded and narrow-minded. Recently, they closed "tumblr in action", which now has moved to another site, a reddit clone called saidit.net. However, don't even try to visit that site: it is a truly pestilent rat nest. The net effect is that the echo chamber becomes stronger for all sides. Great outcome for no reason at all. Well, there is a reason: reddit wants free moderators. Paying would lower their dreamt IPO value.
LewisVerstappen 4y ago
It's honestly astonishing to see how poorly the leadership team at Reddit has been executing. People shit on Twitter (Zuck called Twitter "a clown car that fell into a gold mine") but Reddit is so much worse. The fact that Reddit didn't have a decent mobile app until a few years ago is unbelievable. Indie-developers were shipping a better reddit mobile apps than the company.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bojan 4y ago
  Why would they need their own app when they have good APIs and enough people to create perfectly good third-party apps for them? The only reason I can see is monetization, with your own app you can control the user engagement better. I specifically don't use their app because I explicitly don't want all the fluff features they've added over the years. That's also why I still use old.reddit.com.
  - exreddit 4y ago
  - koshergweilo 4y ago
    Also ads. Specifically more data to better target ads.
  - LewisVerstappen 4y ago
    It's incredibly important for so many reasons. Just as a reminder, users have been shifting from desktop to mobile so the world is now mobile-first. Facebook had a bet-the-company shift in the early 2010s from desktop to mobile and the Instagram app is a huge part of why Meta is valuable today. Reddit makes money through ads. Charging for API access and expecting third-party app developers to build an entire ad platform is not possible. The tech is incredibly difficult to build and then you have to actually get advertisers to use the platform (btw - this is something that Reddit is still failing at versus Facebook/Google/Twitter). Something like 50% of Reddit's traffic is from mobile users. If Reddit wants to add new features for these users, it's impossible to do so if all the users are using third-party apps. Bunch of other reasons that I can enumerate in a bit.
  - munificent 4y ago
    APIs are fundamentally at odds with an ad-based revenue model. If you let third-party apps provide a UX for your data, the app developer will naturally try to make the bext experience they can for users. The first step to doing that is to ditch all the ads. Now you're paying all the cost to host and serve the data, but the third-party app is killing your income.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  I bought Apollo (iOS, highly recommend) out of sheer spite for Reddit pushing their own shitty mobile version through dark patterns and shitty design.
- MrMan 4y ago
  Reddit is much better than Twitter in terms of social UX and worse in terms of app UX
deleted 4y ago
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orionblastar 4y ago
Insults != Harassment but they detract from the conversation. https://www.derailingfordummies.com/ https://www.derailingfordummies.com/
My104thaccount 4y ago
- LewisVerstappen 4y ago
  He's obviously not referring those subreddits. If you read the piece he's talking about subs like r/news, r/politics, r/worldnews, etc. If you don't think r/politics is an echochamber then I don't know what to tell you. r/fatFIRE was a great subreddit I used to visit frequently but it grew very quickly over the past few months and the mods haven't scaled accordingly. The moderation has gotten really, really bad over the past few months and the sub is now just filled with dumb posts like "what handbag do rich people buy"? It used to be far more technical, interesting discussions around real estate investing, taxes, etc.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    It’s not an echo chamber. It’s a meeting place for people who agree on the same things. That’s like calling a CNC machine forum an echo chamber.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ohCh6zos 4y ago
      And yet it used to be something very different.
      - bergenty 4y ago
        No it didn’t. I’ve been there since 2008/9 and the conversation has always been left leaning.
        mburns 4y ago
        There was a time when Ron Paul was Reddit’s favorite politician. https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/11/ron-paul-and-reddit/223564/ https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/11/ron-p...
snickerbockers 4y ago
I hate how many online communities have centralized themselves around reddit and discord. I'm involved a lot of communities and fandoms where everybody congregates on those two platforms, and those two platforms alone. Things were a lot better in the 00s when these sorts of communities existed primarily on webforums. That said, I'm not sure how many of the problems are problems with reddit itself vs how many of the problems would still exist on other platforms even if reddit didn't. Forum moderators have always had a reputation for being napoleonic idiots who abuse their power for extremely petty purposes. The problem of corporations and wealthy celebrities buying out moderators and admins to push their narratives and silence criticisms of their products[1] could easily have happened on webforums. There's an unfortunate drive towards centralization in online communities these days that we'd all be better without. I personally think fediverse is the best solution to this as it centralizes communities without centralizing the actual platform, but I'm not so confident it will succeed when it's up against well-funded and well-established platforms like facebook, reddit, etc. [1] i don't have any real proof there's a monetary interest involved, but I'm perma-banned from /r/startrek for saying that the creators behind "Star Trek: Picard" and "Star Trek Discovery" probably aren't even fans of Star Trek based on the shows' many discontinuities with their predecessors, and it makes me wonder if the mods are on paramount's payroll or something. This should not be a controversial statement after how terrible the most recent season of Picard was.
- mym1990 4y ago
  I think centralization is just a byproduct of the ease of setting up a community on such sites/apps. I lurk in a few subreddits these days, but I almost never feel the pull to chime in or contribute because it kind of feels like my contribution just goes out into a vast universe, and I just think 'why bother?'. I feel like the days of personalized forums truly felt like a little tight community in the very wide web.
  - bavell 4y ago
    > I lurk in a few subreddits these days, but I almost never feel the pull to chime in or contribute because it kind of feels like my contribution just goes out into a vast universe, and I just think 'why bother?' Definitely resonates with me as mostly a life-long lurker. HN is on a very, very short list of online communities I actually post on and engage with. Never got into reddit, left social media long ago.
jancsika 4y ago
> Shortly after, the FBI began monitoring Aaron Swartz and he was arrested for downloading academic journals from MIT in an attempt to make them freely available online. AFAICT Swartz never said or wrote why he attempted to download all of JSTOR. Even close friends like Lawrence Lessig only speculated as to what he may have been wanting to do with that data. But I suppose this kind of lazy writing and lack of standards is what passes for news these days at the New York Times' router that could have conceivably forwarded the packets for this medium.com article.
- chaps 4y ago
  Why do you think he attempted to download all of JSTOR?
ivraatiems 4y ago
I have a different take: The main problem with reddit is in how badly it's bungled its several different redesigns over the last few years, and how it's slowly ruined its users' experience in misguided attempts to drive mobile traffic to its app. Right now, here's the process for browsing a subreddit on mobile without the (ads and tracking loaded) reddit app: 1. Navigate to subreddit. Find out which of two (non-NSFW) or three (NSFW) "experiences" reddit decides to give me on mobile. 2. Depending on experience, jump through hoops including random "get the app!" prompts, failures to load content, failures to load nested comments, and outright refusal to display all the content in a thread unless I install the app. 3. If on an NSFW subreddit, and on about 50% of "unapproved" non-NSFW subreddits: Be blocked from viewing any additional content by an unremovable prompt. (Often, content loads in before the prompt, so you enjoy about 30 seconds of looking at your content before it's blocked.) 4. Give up, and go to old.reddit.com, which is ugly and not designed for mobile, but at least works okay. Desktop isn't much better, but I have long had browser extensions installed that redirect everything to old.reddit.com on most of my browsers, so it becomes less of an issue. If reddit took away my ability to use old.reddit.com, I'd probably stop browsing the site within weeks.
- tux2bsd 4y ago
  - noasaservice 4y ago
    So you're against treating people with respect and dignity? That's what your little "woke" slur means.
    - tux2bsd 4y ago
    - kfrzcode 4y ago
      No, xer right it's a cesspit of self-proclaimed wokensheep
labrador 4y ago
People complaining about Reddit remind me of that quote from Bjarne Stroustrup about computer languages: “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” A lot of people use Reddit. I've been on since nearly the beginning and seen it go through various phases. They started getting serious about moderation after Gamergate and they're still serious about it since they want to attract advertisers. The edgier content has gone to 4chan /pol/ but even that site has moderators called janitors. I really don't know where the extreme stuff has gone and I really don't care because I'm glad I don't see it anymore.
- ivraatiems 4y ago
  I strongly agree with your comparison, I think it's apt. There's just no way to have a tolerably pleasant public-facing community online without some kind of moderation, and people have been railing about moderators in said communities for as long as those communities have existed. That doesn't mean moderation is an easy job, or that it shouldn't be done judiciously or consistently, but it can't be abandoned.
  - labrador 4y ago
    My first reaction when I heard Elon Musk was buying Twitter was "have he and his team figured out the moderation problem?" followed by "he probably hasn't given it much thought because if he did he would realize he doesn't need that headache on his way to Mars."
    - ivraatiems 4y ago
      I suspect "he probably hasn't given it much thought" sums up most of Elon Musk's recent decision-making.
    - towaway15463 4y ago
      I imagine he’s just going to introduce a simple yet “radical” solution like allowing people to pay a small fee for verified status and adding the option to filter out all non-validated accounts. That should kill off a large number of the bots and sock puppet accounts.
sirspacey 4y ago
I cannot buy into a wholesale generalization that mods are power tripping people who deserve our contempt because they are lonely. There’s all kinds of motivations for being a mod. I rarely find a sub where mods aren’t dealing with far more BS than they are putting out. If I don’t agree with how mods handle a channel, I leave. I think it’s important that we question the usefulness of blaming society for the lack of quality in “default” content. Yes, you’re funneled into these channels. Yes, Reddit is seeking to get people to consume them. Yes, the interest of advertisers override all others. Yes, Reddit constantly inserts unwanted subs into my feed. Yet Reddit is still a place I can curate to the subs that align with my interests & values. it’s not dead yet. I don’t expect any social media platform to give me the defaults I want. I’ve accepted that I can take responsibility for the content I consume. What I’d like is to build tools that enable people to more easily filter for that content. I believe we need stronger filtering tools, not weaker. This is where I do wholeheartedly agree with author - the loss of Aaron and RSS feeds was the end of the cyberpunk movement in the browser based web. I don’t know if web3 genuinely offers a second chance, but I do know that I will continue to want the ability to learn from thoughtful people of all walks of life. That requires the ability to filter out everything else. At this point, I’d rather select keywords to filter than to surface & happily pay for the privilege. I’m so tired of being spoon fed the empty calories of outrage.
- trashcan 4y ago
  Sounds like you haven't met any reddit mods. And no, web3 offers nothing except the ability to try and control your digital currency and make money off you.
  - Jistern 4y ago
    I agree. The Reddit mods I've dealt with were nasty people.
    - richbell 4y ago
      I think the tiny amount of power goes to people's heads. Power-tripping moderators of small subreddits are a dime a dozen. The larger problem is that most subreddits are moderated by a handful of people, whose interest is expressly _moderating_. They don't care about the community. How could they, they have so many? And the power absolutely goes to their head.
deleted 4y ago
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MrThoughtful 4y ago
It might not be possible to create a public forum in a way that it stays thoughtful and interesting even when it becomes popular. The first problem is that thoughtful and interesting content rarely attracts many readers. The second is that if many readers show up, the discussion quality is going down. So there would need to be strong centralized censorship to downvote the low quality posts and prevent accounts that play the populism game to gain traction.
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  Almost half the population is below average in whatever way you wish to judge them and the bar for entry for most applications is as simple as clicking a button in an app store.
mjr00 4y ago
As someone who was involved with many internet communities long before reddit, it sounds like the author is just experiencing the eternal September[0]. Pretty much since the day I found out about reddit in... 2008-ish?, everyone in the online communities I knew thought it was filled with awful pseudointellectual teenagers and college students, that the upvote/downvote system was horrible and encouraged people to post low-effort content, the moderators were overzealous and clueless, and in general there was no sense of community due to the size of the site + lack of individual identifiers beyond usernames, like avatars and signatures from a typical internet forum of the day. Basically, reddit is just as bad today as it was a decade ago. But I'm sure for people who had their first internet-social experiences on reddit, they remember it a lot more fondly. I will concede that objectively speaking, "new Reddit" is an abject failure (and the fact that old.reddit.com continues to exist is a testament to the such) and that it's much more heavily astroturfed by major corporations now. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- Capricorn2481 4y ago
  Do you feel anyone has improved upon what Reddit is doing? Or have you only found satisfaction in specific communities on specific sites? Are there non traditional communities like Tildetown that you enjoy?
  - foolfoolz 4y ago
    tiktok provides better “communities” with more organic content. it know it sounds weird but you can get into areas of tiktok very similar to a subreddit. the lack of centralization like public karma, mods, sticky posts, etc actually helps
    - Capricorn2481 4y ago
      That's surprising to hear. I would've thought that'd be the last place I would look for community, but maybe I'll take a look
    - Dma54rhs 4y ago
ayngg 4y ago
I think there are 2 major problems at play. First, I have no idea what Reddit the company has been doing since basically every addition to the site in over a decade has been garbage and has made the site worse to use. The site is basically unusable without the old.reddit.com style, their media hosting is worse than imgur or any of the other alternatives, their app and mobile experience is worse than any number of free alternatives, and besides that I don't know what else the have done except gamify posts with their awards system. The second problem is how communities on Reddit and the internet as a whole are structured, incentivized and evolve. So many of these communities are unable to check themselves (which generally requires very good moderation), and with incentive structures like upvotes and awards, posting is gamified where people post things they think others will approve of and will reward, which causes communities to become monocultures as everyone else just leaves, is downvoted into oblivion or just banned from the subreddit. These communities basically become filled with people who have the same opinions and circlejerk about them in ways that affirm their opinions and disparage ones that oppose them, causing them to slowly become detached from reality. It creates a community of people who basically become unable to discuss things with people who don't share the same opinions, which then carries over to interactions outside of those monocultures. Lots of these people just dont have the ability to even talk to others with differing viewpoints now. The best communities and best conversations I have had online have been those that offer a lot of off topic discussions within interest based communities. Support group/ identity based communities need very strong moderation because they are much more susceptible to "radicalization" if that is the correct term.
thomassmith65 4y ago
In a decade this essay will still be available on some web archive, but the author will be fully grown, and the zeitgeist that shaped his adolescence, which is already dying, will be as transparently foolish as is, to contemporary sensibilities, a 1970's punk rocker shouting 'The Beatles suck!' It is true Reddit is a pile of garbage, but it was a worse pile of garbage when its community was posting kiddie porn and creating 'N-chain' comment threads.
- ohCh6zos 4y ago
  While those were both issues. There was a lot more quality text discussion on the site during that era.
  - yxhuvud 4y ago
    There is still a humongous amount of good discussion there. Perhaps the problem is you need to remove some bad subreddits? Some of those have definitely gotten worse, but there are plenty of good ones to find.
  - root_axis 4y ago
    The opposite is true. In absolute terms there is far more quality text discussion on reddit today than at any other time.
  - munificent 4y ago
    I've been active on Reddit for 14 years. The quality of discussion has been more or less unchanged overall, but you must choose your subreddits in order for that to be true. All of the major subreddits have gotten watered down because that's what happens when 29 million users (r/pics) are voting on comments. Communities change fundamentally when they scale up. The answer is to seek out smaller communities. The smartest thing the Reddit admins every did was to create subreddits. At the time, everyone on Reddit criticized them for it. Users wanted to be able to have a single link get posted to multiple subreddits with a single discussion, so that subreddits would behave like tags. But the admins said that, no, the whole point was to create separate distinct communities that could flourish on their own and they were absolutely right.
tux2bsd 4y ago
- junofan 4y ago
  The mental image of somebody bothering to click a downvote button is hilarious.
  - anon2020dot00 4y ago
    Do also find someone clicking an upvote hilarious? I don't get why upvote or downvote button would either be hilarious? Isn't that already normalized from Reddit, YouTube, etc.. ?
  - tux2bsd 4y ago
- qsdf38100 4y ago
  Hate speech is not free speech. There’s plenty of places to spread hate speech, you don’t have to go on Reddit. You don’t have to publicly blame it on "leftists" and compare it to NK. Your kind of speech isn’t welcome here.
  - tux2bsd 4y ago
    You see "hate" where there is none.
  - tux2bsd 4y ago
    > You don’t have to publicly blame it on "leftists" and compare it to NK. Why not, comparison is a good way to paint picture and leftists are the bad actors in what is being discussed. > Your kind of speech isn’t welcome here. How very tolerant of you.
- richbell 4y ago
  > They permanently ban accounts for minor infractions (e.g. old fashion flame war), then they ban any account that could be associated (e.g. by IP address). This isn't true. Banning is _per-subreddit_, done by the respective mod teams. Your behaviour would need to be especially egregious for it to be picked up by the admins. > Leftists naturally following a very North Korean and censorious approach. Ah, I see. Makes complete sense.
ohCh6zos 4y ago
A big issue on reddit is 'powermods' and how if your sub gets popular enough the admins will install their own mods. Everything ends up feeling incredibly similar.
dvh 4y ago
Reddit works fine for me. In R/W mode I use only /r/diypedals and /r/guitarpedals and for daily dose of doom and gloom in R/O mode I use /r/news and /r/worldnews. I access it only via RSS reader and it navigates me directly to compact version which loads instantly and works well on mobile.
- jotm 4y ago
  I'd stay away from the latter two, like not even read it. I made a terrible life changing mistake by reading too much of these subreddits. It's user generated content, mostly by people who hate their lives, hate society and hate others, aided by the traditional media they link to. By the time I saw that reality is different and so much better than the doom I got on Reddit, it was too late.
  - koshergweilo 4y ago
    > I made a terrible life changing mistake by reading too much of these subreddits. I don't understand. How could you make a life-changing mistake by reading the news?
    - 0des 4y ago
      I don't know if it is the same person, but there was a quite disheartening story posted by a person who due to internally misunderstood depression transitioned at the suggestion of people on reddit, regretted it, then later went dark and everyone assumes took their life.
      - koshergweilo 4y ago
        Yeah something like that came to my mind as well. Even if that is the case it seems a little odd to blame the news subreddit specifically and not their own poor decision-making. It's like if someone who panic sold during the covid scare blaming the news.
      - Akronymus 4y ago
        > ...a person who due to internally misunderstood depression transitioned at the suggestion of people on reddit, Sadly somewhat common. And you can talk about it almost nowhere, due to "transphobia"
exreddit 4y ago
tebbers 4y ago
I think Reddit is fantastic. So much interesting and useful content. It’s amazing to me that it isn’t full of spam if you think about how much of that there is on the internet these days so personally I think the mods are doing a really good job.
- Rochus 4y ago
  There are good subreddits indeed. I like the ability to split content thematically into subreddits. Unlike HN, this allows me to better focus on what interests me, and what I'm not interested in, I don't even get to see. On HN, instead, there's just one big pot, and what interests me often doesn't even make it to the front page, or only for a few minutes. Also on hckrnews.com I only see stuff that already has a minimum number of points. So I often go to the RSS feed; there I often find the more interesting posts than on the front page.
unconed 4y ago
I thought this was a clever joke at first that parodied how reddit forces their app on mobile users in various insidious ways... but it turns out Medium does the same. You want to know why the web is so bad? Because it's slowly become acceptable to treat your users with complete contempt by interrupting and "nudging" them into being surveillance cattle.
root_axis 4y ago
> What started as a bastion of independent thought, Reddit has slowly devolved into a den of groupthink, censorship, and corporate greed. This is revisionist romanticism. Reddit is just a collection of forums like the many hundreds of thousands that came before it, and continue to exist alongside it. Reddit is also so incredibly massive that making sweeping statements about its quality or composition is meaningless, what one consumes on reddit is really more a reflection of the individual rather than the site itself.
- tux2bsd 4y ago
- thinkingemote 4y ago
  I agree with you kind of. But it was a loose collection of forums initially and still is if you look at it that way. The Reddit admins forced the idea of communities as a reason to start banning. You can see this over time. Subreddits were not called "communities" until the admins started banning subs. It's classic group dynamics. You can't ban a group that isn't a group. So the site grouped loose collections of people into what they called communities. And it became self fulfilling as groups define themselves by what they are not as well as what they are.
  - richbell 4y ago
    > The Reddit admins forced the idea of communities as a reason to start banning. The admins also started actively policing subreddits, and shuffling uncooperative mod teams. Perhaps Reddit was never a bastion of 'independent thought', but in the beginning (after subreddits came into being) there was an understanding that communities were independent. But eventually they started getting bad press (e.g. /r/jailbait) and the 'jannies' started refusing to work for free (e.g. blackouts), so they decided to quash anyone causing them grief.
sascha_sl 4y ago
I'm sure Aaron was thinking of ridiculing fat people, fascism, revenge porn, jailbait or your right to hate the gays when he said he was concerned about corporate tyranny.
- thefz 4y ago
  On the other hand it's full of Americans touting their free speech is true like no other country on earth and blah blah, so I guess, free speech except for those you disagree with
  - Philadelphia 4y ago
    “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” There’s nothing in there about Reddit making moderation policies
    - aqouta 4y ago
      You're conflating 1A with free speech. Free speech is the principle that inspires 1A but it's a larger concept and the same reasoning applies to things like reddit. This whole "don't let you political opponents speak or coordinate because you happen to have the power to stop them" is the weapon of a tyrant, one of these days a real tyrant will seize the reins of these platforms and show us all how they're really used.
      - Philadelphia 4y ago
        Parent comment is about “Americans touting their free speech.” First Amendment is obviously what that refers to. The Internet doesn’t have a limit on the number of web sites. You want to say something, get a $2/month shared hosting plan and post HTML, or lease fiber and run your own server farm, or do any number of things in between.
kazinator 4y ago
Long before Reddit, there were dial-up BBSes in the 1980's. You don't know what petty online brownshirting is if you had not not experienced that --- and every little of it was corporate in any shape or form.
czhu12 4y ago
I'm curious what reddit even aspires to be at its greatest. Most of the popular subreddit's comment sections have top rated comments being something totally predictable and sarcastic. Right now the top post on r/news is [1] Contrasted to the equivalent story on hackernews: [2] There isn't anything remotely thought provoking in the top rated comments on reddit as there is on hackernews. It seems to me this isn't due to censorship or corporate influence, but purely due to the fact that the reddit post has 100x more upvotes (and therefore more viewership) than the hackernews equivalent. In the pockets of reddit that have a small but active community, I think it's easier to argue that the original essence and charm of reddit is still very much alive. I'm skeptical that even without all the corrupting factors mentioned in this article, that reddit would ever be a place for the masses to engage healthy discourse and speech [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/vjpfbh/supreme_court_overturns_roe_v_wade_states_can_ban/ https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/vjpfbh/supreme_court_... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31862258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31862258
- Zeratoss 4y ago
  Funny that you say that. I found the comments on that hacker news thread predictably awful, like all even slightly political discussion on hnews. People trying to one up each other with edgy comments on why the ruling is actually a good thing and how smart they are. A display of privilege and of a real lack of empathy
  - MrMan 4y ago
    Hacker news is one of the worst communities on the internet but the headlines are better than most aggregating sites. Though I see more and more postings that also came across my Google news feed so HN is losing a lot of its utility for me. But it's a good place to see where the wind is blowing in terms of the ongoing radicalization of white men.
    - effingwewt 4y ago
      You are all over this thread being racist and sexist. Not everyone here is white, or men, nor are all the people in the US. You keep crying about white men and fascists while being a complete dick. You even called someone with a good point an FSB employee. Half your comments are flamebait. If you hate it so very much why are you here, much less participating?
bryans 4y ago
The issues are so much worse than what is being described in this post. Reddit-appointed moderators are used as a protective layer for all of the company's shady, anti-social and sometimes straight up illegal behaviors. The perfect example of this is RPAN, their recently defunct streaming function, where a dozen subreddits were created by the company and populated with moderators, who then spent two years brazenly lying on behalf of the admins at every opportunity and constantly gaslighting the entire community. They lied to advertisers by inflating viewership numbers 35x higher than reality. They sold their top broadcast mechanism to these advertisers, but repeatedly told the viewers that what they were witnessing was community-created content. The "algorithm" had a built-in caste system which was manually manipulated and curated by admins, while they directed mods to convince the community they don't even have the ability to manipulate the rankings. They even allowed the sexual proposition of minors to take place on a daily basis, while both mods and admins were fully aware of it -- never mind the reports, they were sometimes in the chat while it was happening. They permanently banned anyone who discussed any of these issues, without hesitation. And this list is just the tip of the iceberg of Reddit's Black Mirror-esque methodologies. The moderators are extremely loyal to the admins, because there are significant perks involved, not least of which being that moderators have notably become a hiring pool. It's no coincidence that the mods who are the most willing to lie are the same people finding employment within the company.
NalNezumi 4y ago
I used reddit for the first time in 2020 and only because a researcher friend told me to ask a question about implementation details of a paper I read. It gave me a good answer and to my surprise had some relatively famous names in the research field in the subreddit. That said, it also seemed to me like it's (maybe intentionally?) designed to promote bad faith communication[0]. Combine that with the Eternal September phenomenon it seems like an place of inevitable decay; whatever subreddit there is struggling against entropy. I think I saw an add about "Reddit: the Frontpage of Internet" but I think a more apt catch phrase would be "doormat"; all the rude, dirty people stomp all over it to get to the internet house. The mattress is mud ridden and smells. And the design of it is like a room without any windows with a broken AC making it humid, mold ridden and hot. And it was made right next to a Highschool and gives free entrance vouchers to the students. Some subreddits might try to carve out a space in the room, keeping it clean and everything but when most people coming in is bad faith and the room is so hopelessly inhospitable, it's just a matter of time. [0] https://consilienceproject.org/endgames-of-bad-communication/ https://consilienceproject.org/endgames-of-bad-communication...
webscout 4y ago
For business/finance related social news there's a UGC section on https://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com — Small but less toxic.
kthejoker2 4y ago
The universal problem with all large anthrocentric networks - real life, digital, political, socioeconomic, the planet's climate - is it's exponentially easier to break things than build them. Bullshit travels twice around the world before the truth gets its boots on. It does not have a side, or an agenda, or rarely even a purpose beyond the exercise of control over others. It's trolling, period. So as soon as you decide you wamt to optimize for growth over exclusivity, you are DOA because shortly (in startup time) your platform will become 99.99999% bullshit. You don't need a deeper look into why Reddit or any large site that optimizes for growth descends into chaos.
marban 4y ago
My 15y old Gold account just got banned after posting a crypto-critical Wall Street Journal link. Go figure.
- over_bridge 4y ago
  Reddit is mostly crypto-critical so unless you posted something paywalled or in the wrong sub, this is unlikely to be the root cause. WSJ is paywalled isn't it? Like as in no one can read the article.
tomlockwood 4y ago
> Reddit is tailored for a better corporate experience, not a better user experience. Yeah, advertisers want "brand safety" and having the most neutral and inoffensive topics possible (and nothing controversial) is what enables that. Censorship arises organically on the advertiser-based web, which many users of this site have had a hand in creating.
anotherrandom 4y ago
Reddit is largely garbage. Some bits of it are alright, but it has definitely gone downhill since Swartz passed. At this point the only good forums I am aware of are this one and Bogleheads, apart from a few still-decent parts of reddit that aren't completely astroturfed by corporations or packed full of lower-level midwits (i.e. any subreddit with a subscriber count close to or over 500k). Anyone else know of good places to read online?
- vin047 4y ago
  I’ve been trying [Lemmy](https://join-lemmy.org https://join-lemmy.org) for a while - it’s an open source, federated alternative to Reddit (and uses an interface similar to old.reddit.com). The main instance has a pretty heavy left bias, and like all less well known social media platforms, it suffers from a lack of content and engagement. But these are issues that can be tackled over time with more users joining the platform.
haunter 4y ago
idk I follow only gaming subs and they all seem all right to me. The players just share guides, fan arts, news etc. Sure every sub has some asshole mods but generally it's still not as bad as front page subs (/r/news, /r/politics/ etc.) where basically there is only one message accepted
nathias 4y ago
I don't get the popularity of the "mobile first" paradigm. I get it as a cost saving measure, but when you try and make UX fit mobile and desktop both will be worse off. > bastion of independent thought was never a thing, nor is it possible for reddit-type platforms. The mechanics of voting and karma organize content as groupthink, and the divisions of subreddits structure grouphink by type of content with mods that enforce their vision of the type. There is very little you can do for independent thought in this content if mods aren't actively trying for that (and they never did). What you get is content decided by the average person interested in some field, with added selections of moderation. This can be good for a few things but thought or indepth conversations aren't one of those.
etchalon 4y ago
As far as I know, outside of egregious violations, most subreddits have their own internal rules. Different communities seem to go through various periods of success, and my experience has been that it's just as often the fault of a lack of moderation as it is from moderation itself, but MOST often, it's the scale of the community. Once a community reaches a certain size, moderation is just impossible for the handful of volunteers who do it. Either way, the article strikes me less as "reddit is declining!" as it is "oh man, things changed and I don't like it."
zigman1 4y ago
Does anyone have a good Reddit alternative, that's kindof a niche like HN?
- doublepg23 4y ago
  lobste.rs ?
- munificent 4y ago
  The good alternative to Reddit is still Reddit. Reddit isn't "a community" any more than the web or a state is. It's a huge collection of distinct ones. If you don't like the subreddits you're on, find others.
- exabyte 4y ago
  Check out Lemmy https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/
bumblebritches5 4y ago
qsdf38100 4y ago
Reddit is still one of the best place to find relevant and accurate information, compared to say Facebook, Twitter or some random website. Depends on the subreddit of course, but at least healthy communities can be created and moderated. Of course you’ll also find terrible and toxic communities and users, like The_Donald, which has fortunately been banned. Why is the author only focusing on bad aspects? What’s the purpose of this article? It doesn’t bring anything constructive, it’s just trying to make it look bad, and discourage people from going there. It doesn’t say what should be done to improve, what healthier site we should visit instead. It’s only negative. "No matter what you believe in, wisdom isn’t achieved living inside a bubble of utopian ideals." Oh yeah ideals are bad, surely, wisdom is better. I wonder what kind of "wisdom" he has in mind… He won’t tell us either. Sounds like this article has an agenda, which involves convincing people that Reddit and ideals are bad. Reddit is doomed, and will go down into chaos because of ideals, values, mods and corporations. Hmmm that sounds familiar. Replace "Reddit" with anything and that’s your usual anti-system "wisdom". It didn’t bring me any new information. It looks like Reddit is generally too pro-western values for the tastes of the author… And he had to tell the world about it.
- 12amxn12 4y ago
  Sounds like you clearly have an agenda, which comes down to "it's okay to ban anything I don't agree with". And that's exactly what the article is talking about.
  - Philadelphia 4y ago
    If someone doesn’t like a forum’s moderation policies, they’re free to find a different forum. This has been true since BBSes. It’s been true since the days of newspapers. It’s been true since the days of people speechifying in taverns.
    - 12amxn12 4y ago
      - 4y ago
0dayz 4y ago
Im going to play devils advocate, when you look at the subreddits banned there are those that are banned for unknown and petty reasons (Tumblrinaction), however at the same time extremely radical or racist subreddits are also included (alt right ones, some extreme left and coontown fat people hate). And if we judge reddit with 4chan the "free" speech platform, you will notice that 4chan is plagued with extremism and anti-social views, which in some ways is because they don't censor and is 100% anonymous to each user. Personally some censorship is good to not allow the patients running the asylum, but also make sure you don't overreach.
smrtinsert 4y ago
Reddit critiques in this thread sound more like anger directed at their moderation because the commenters here have apparently been banned, shadow-banned, removed for transgender "jokes" etc.
- philjohn 4y ago
  Looking at the comments that got them banned would be illuminating. I've seen my fair share of people just being straight up assholes. Sorry buddy, be civil, or go somewhere else.
aliswe 4y ago
I personally hate Reddit, but I think it's misleading to talk about their "fall". Arent they thriving or even excelling by the metrics they (and most other non-users) care about?
- over_bridge 4y ago
  Pretty sure they are just pumping their metrics ahead of a future IPO. The current shareholders will all disappear and the new ones can slowly pick up the pieces in a few years. Forget running a sustainable business with your customers at the heart of it, the new way is going just fine.
jimjimjim 4y ago
places need limits. they really really do. They do in real life, they do in online. Should someone be able to go to a bar and shout insults at the owner. depending on where the bar is this will end with you in an alley. Why should a private company allow things that affects their bottom line?
- winternett 4y ago
  Why should anyone contribute their time, content, thoughts, and often money into a company's platform when the company doesn't care about anything but protecting it's bottom line, and then severing you from and taking control of your already spent time, content, thoughts, and often money? The other big problem is that Reddit hides the fact that it takes every step possible to limit users in order to protect it's bottom line... That's textbook bad business.
paganel 4y ago
There are still pockets of sanity here and there, if you know where to look, but otherwise it has become a huge propaganda machine. /r/worldnews is now basically a continuation of whatever Washington DC holds as true when it comes to US foreign policy, the same goes for /politics (when it comes to US domestic politics) and most of the subs related to the current war in Ukraine.
- MrMan 4y ago
  Ukraine is a puppet of the US! Russia is only defending itself right?
  - paganel 4y ago
    If you think close to 7 million refugees and 20 to 25% of the territory lost for good is a good outcome for Ukraine then, yeah, you're right. Ukraine wouldn't have had those 7 million refugees and 20 to 25% of its territory lost if it had not been led to believe accession into the Western sphere of influence was possible. It is not. That policy was carried out, in part, by Western media entities.
    - mythrwy 4y ago
      Don't forget the death toll. Gonna be hard to rebuild the country when tens or hundreds of thousands of your working age men are no more.
- SSLy 4y ago
  Care to point out the subs in the last category? Between NCD / UWVR / UkrainianConflict the message I've got was vastly pro-UA.
lionkor 4y ago
I disagree with what the article says. If you follow no news or politics related subreddits, its a wholesome and friendly place (mostly) like it always was. The mistake is thinking news and politics make good talking topics on the internet, on massive platforms like that. Headlines are the only thing people read, theres no genuine discussion, just people screaming as loud as they can, hoping their opinion ends up being the loudest.
- richbell 4y ago
  > If you follow no news or politics related subreddits, its a wholesome and friendly place (mostly) like it always was. It's a shame that you have to go out of your way to make it a decent experience. It's been a while since I've created a new account. Do you still need to manually unsubscribe from 50+ subreddits?
  - lionkor 4y ago
    I believe in the beginning it persuades you to subscribe to "recommended" ones, but I remember theres a way to make an account that follows nothing, its not difficult but not the default either
Jemm 4y ago
Anyone who remembers BBSs would not be surprised by a site that turns in to small fiefdoms but would rather be surprised by a site that is not.
wpdev_63 4y ago
The instant downvoting is a dead giveaway to what they're about. It's going to be interesting to see what rises from the "web 3.0".
- richbell 4y ago
  > It's going to be interesting to see what rises from the "web 3.0". The semantic web? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
HumanReadable 4y ago
My issue with reddit is the polar opposite. It's not moderated remotely aggressively enough! Any interesting subreddit immediately falls to the lowest common denominator without aggressive moderation. /r/askhistorians is a good example of the level of moderation a subreddit needs to remain sane as it grows. People like to complain about gatekeeping, but societies build gates for a reason. I would like a forum that actively encourages gatekeeping and bans users who consistently post low quality comments.
RappingBoomer 4y ago
chaos? Or authoritarianism? Two opposites on the spectrum? Some might argue that the elites are becoming more authoritarian as time goes on, and as they seek to quash all criticism of their regime...an old story...
netfortius 4y ago
For those of us, needing a VPN from time to time, this platform is unusable. From a decision they took to suspend my oldest over 11.5k karma acct, when I started travel, thus use of diff VPN exit points in Europe, through to almost 20 other accounts I attempted to create, since, whenever I used one with and without VPN within the span of a few hours, I get the dreaded suspension reaction.
softwarebeware 4y ago
I didn’t even know about some of the things that the author went over in this article, but it’s undeniable that power-mad mods have ruined anything I ever enjoyed about Reddit over the past ten years. And that there seem to no longer be many interesting voices or fair debate on the site. I found myself logging in less and less over the past four years and when I do, I recognize it less and less also. It just isn’t Reddit at all these days, no matter what logo is on it
Tolexx 4y ago
if going by what the writer wrote about the length of Aron Swartz incarceration is true, then that's way too much (35-year sentence). I mean he didn't kill someone even though what he did might be illegal. I just feel they just wanted to eliminate him. it's also totally unfair that he was erased from the history of reddit without good recognition for his work and contribution.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
I think reddit died for me when they more than doubled the price of premium membership (previously called 'gold'). It's just not worth it anymore. I always used to love how open it was. Don't communities were toxic sure but there were lots of fringey subreddits with people really enjoying themselves. For example exhibitionism. Conde Nast are trying to clamp down on this a lot to make it more mainstream palatable. IMO this is when such platforms start to decline though I have to admit reddit has so far lasted longer than I expected (especially when considering predecessors like Digg)
nunez 4y ago
Outside of a few subreddits and many smaller ones, quality discussion on reddit at large scale never really existed (or at least not since i joined in 2012) because the type of content that was/is upvoted most heavily is quick, low-thought, quippy and usually low-quality.
RickJWagner 4y ago
I don't frequently visit Reddit, but I think in the last year or two it has become more prone to mono-think and feels a bit like high school. I hope it changes direction and becomes a better public forum. We need more of those kinds of environments.
jaggs 4y ago
Reddit is not so simple to pin down. On the one hand all the 'bad stuff'. On the other, a huge selection of really interesting niche subs where you can find intelligent, valuable and even expert information and guidance. The big subs are not everything that is Reddit. The real treasure is found in the specialist places which very few people know about, staffed by enthusiast hobbyist mods and devoured by equally passionate readers.
- cowtools 4y ago
  Before reddit, these sorts of forums were hosted on their own websites. I think having a forum on reddit these days is a major liability. I wonder if these forums would benefit from being hosted in a more de-centralized and durable manner.
  - richbell 4y ago
    Unfortunately, forums seem to be a dying medium. The few communities that still exist tend to use things like Discourse (which I dispise); funny to think that people used to pay hundreds of dollars for VBulletin and XenForo licenses. A worrying trend is new communities using, or existing communities migrating to, Discord.
nickysielicki 4y ago
I’ve had an idea for a while on how I would fix or reimplement Reddit. Someone please feel free to steal and implement these ideas, I’ll join! The basic problem with Reddit (and all eternal Septembers) is that new users change the culture that made the site interesting in the first place. The reddiquette and the HN rules might have been followed strictly at first, but they fall to the wayside due to a lack of enforcement. Moderation does not scale. My proposed solution is to assign weights to users such that bad actors cannot come in and exert influence on the site, through a modified ELO-like ranking system. You as the founder set a base set of rules that you know you can follow, like never downvoting substantive comments that you disagree with, and then you just use the site with care to not get sloppy with the rules. Your ELO (and those in your special known-good-actor clique) is held high, at least until you reach a critical mass of users where it becomes unnecessary. The kicker is this: every vote by another user on the site is now a “match” against all users on the site that have a higher ELO that have voted on it, and you treat their vote as a draw if they vote the same, or a loss if they downvote. Powerusers aren’t actually the problem, so long as you have the right powerusers. The problem is that powerusers are able to sell their account and exert influence for profit (ie: astroturfing). But with you as the baseline ideal user, and with your interests always being the longevity of the site, the possibility of corruption goes down. The other change I would make to Reddit is to have a predefined Usenet-like hierarchy with community-provided tags for niche topics that would otherwise fall through the cracks. Opinion-oriented communities (/r/bluepolitics, /r/redpolitics) facilitate one-sided boring conversations.
FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
Way to bury the lead: > I only recently found out that Ghislaine Maxwell, wife to Jeffery Epstein, ran one of the most powerful Reddit accounts on the website. In fact, it was the eighth-most popular account by karma on Reddit. Spooky X-Files music.
Havoc 4y ago
Reddit isn’t dead until there is a viable alternative. You can’t have an exodus without a destination
- usrn 4y ago
  There are plenty of other forums. The other day William Osman just told all his followers to come here because it's "like Reddit used to be" for example.
  - Havoc 4y ago
    Any other forums you’d recommend?
    - usrn 4y ago
      Topical forums run by enthusiasts are always good. 4chan is underrated in some ways even; there's a lot of garbage but the best is better than anywhere. I think in general you should avoid sites that have any kind of voting. "Bump order" brings controversial ideas to the top which means they're probably original. IRC channels are still great too, I learned a lot lurking in places like #linux on freenode.
paulmendoza 4y ago
The subreddits are horrible. There is one called “RealTesla” that only allows stories negative towards Tesla. Nothing good, only negative. I was banned for posting an article that wasn’t negative enough.
- tux2bsd 4y ago
  That's actually hilarious. That sort of flippant moderation is rife throughout Reddit the wrong username or wrong wording - anything and they'll ban just for fun.
12amxn12 4y ago
I'm now getting flagged for anything I comment that goes against the groupthink. HN is worse than reddit at this point.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
Reddit remains completely a in-the-right-place-right-time thing when Digg fumbled and there was a mass exodus saving the almost-closed Reddit. That's it. It is/was nothing special. It has been riding the wave ever since (and also why I see no reason to give people like Alexis Ohanian any praise or credibility when he's out there talking about all kinds of nonsense, but I digress). Ultimately these days it suffers from massive mainstream adoption and use, and all of the moderation and scale problems that come with that(including the much griped about design problems and struggles to both monetize and maintain usability). But under it all it's still just a large collection of forums of all sizes, with some intermixing, but also a lot of non-mixing. If you participate in a handful of niche interest subreddits, and this is all logged into the site (where you can permanently set the old look as your UI complainers!), you will never see all the crap that's happening on the oversized main subs and it's great. Just a place for basic forum-like functionality and interest sharing.
eternityforest 4y ago
It's just another boring scroll hole for 1 minute content bites, like the rest of the internet is becoming. It's more of a place to share useless time filler to be scrolled on a phone, and a place to have mostly useless fights(As a time filler). Nobody really likes it enough to call it entertainment, it's just a pacifier.

217 points by ko3us 4y ago

Its not just awful mods, its awful paid admins. It was a step in the right direction to ban hate speech. The people they hired have decided that being mean to racists is “hate speech”, while ignoring actual hate speech and letting racist spaces thrive. This is not what people meant when they asked reddit to do something about hate speech.

tgv 4y ago
That's another reason, indeed. I get that moderation is hard, but the way reddit handles it is awful. There are so many, potentially conflicting interests among reddit stakeholders, but the admins seem to be single-minded and narrow-minded. Recently, they closed "tumblr in action", which now has moved to another site, a reddit clone called saidit.net. However, don't even try to visit that site: it is a truly pestilent rat nest. The net effect is that the echo chamber becomes stronger for all sides. Great outcome for no reason at all. Well, there is a reason: reddit wants free moderators. Paying would lower their dreamt IPO value.

LewisVerstappen 4y ago

It's honestly astonishing to see how poorly the leadership team at Reddit has been executing. People shit on Twitter (Zuck called Twitter "a clown car that fell into a gold mine") but Reddit is so much worse. The fact that Reddit didn't have a decent mobile app until a few years ago is unbelievable. Indie-developers were shipping a better reddit mobile apps than the company.

deleted 4y ago
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bojan 4y ago
Why would they need their own app when they have good APIs and enough people to create perfectly good third-party apps for them? The only reason I can see is monetization, with your own app you can control the user engagement better. I specifically don't use their app because I explicitly don't want all the fluff features they've added over the years. That's also why I still use old.reddit.com.
- exreddit 4y ago
- koshergweilo 4y ago
  Also ads. Specifically more data to better target ads.
- LewisVerstappen 4y ago
  It's incredibly important for so many reasons. Just as a reminder, users have been shifting from desktop to mobile so the world is now mobile-first. Facebook had a bet-the-company shift in the early 2010s from desktop to mobile and the Instagram app is a huge part of why Meta is valuable today. Reddit makes money through ads. Charging for API access and expecting third-party app developers to build an entire ad platform is not possible. The tech is incredibly difficult to build and then you have to actually get advertisers to use the platform (btw - this is something that Reddit is still failing at versus Facebook/Google/Twitter). Something like 50% of Reddit's traffic is from mobile users. If Reddit wants to add new features for these users, it's impossible to do so if all the users are using third-party apps. Bunch of other reasons that I can enumerate in a bit.
- munificent 4y ago
  APIs are fundamentally at odds with an ad-based revenue model. If you let third-party apps provide a UX for your data, the app developer will naturally try to make the bext experience they can for users. The first step to doing that is to ditch all the ads. Now you're paying all the cost to host and serve the data, but the third-party app is killing your income.
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
I bought Apollo (iOS, highly recommend) out of sheer spite for Reddit pushing their own shitty mobile version through dark patterns and shitty design.
MrMan 4y ago
Reddit is much better than Twitter in terms of social UX and worse in terms of app UX

deleted 4y ago

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orionblastar 4y ago

Insults != Harassment but they detract from the conversation. https://www.derailingfordummies.com/ https://www.derailingfordummies.com/

My104thaccount 4y ago

LewisVerstappen 4y ago
He's obviously not referring those subreddits. If you read the piece he's talking about subs like r/news, r/politics, r/worldnews, etc. If you don't think r/politics is an echochamber then I don't know what to tell you. r/fatFIRE was a great subreddit I used to visit frequently but it grew very quickly over the past few months and the mods haven't scaled accordingly. The moderation has gotten really, really bad over the past few months and the sub is now just filled with dumb posts like "what handbag do rich people buy"? It used to be far more technical, interesting discussions around real estate investing, taxes, etc.
- bergenty 4y ago
  It’s not an echo chamber. It’s a meeting place for people who agree on the same things. That’s like calling a CNC machine forum an echo chamber.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ohCh6zos 4y ago
    And yet it used to be something very different.
    - bergenty 4y ago
      No it didn’t. I’ve been there since 2008/9 and the conversation has always been left leaning.
      - mburns 4y ago
        There was a time when Ron Paul was Reddit’s favorite politician. https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/11/ron-paul-and-reddit/223564/ https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/11/ron-p...

snickerbockers 4y ago

I hate how many online communities have centralized themselves around reddit and discord. I'm involved a lot of communities and fandoms where everybody congregates on those two platforms, and those two platforms alone. Things were a lot better in the 00s when these sorts of communities existed primarily on webforums. That said, I'm not sure how many of the problems are problems with reddit itself vs how many of the problems would still exist on other platforms even if reddit didn't. Forum moderators have always had a reputation for being napoleonic idiots who abuse their power for extremely petty purposes. The problem of corporations and wealthy celebrities buying out moderators and admins to push their narratives and silence criticisms of their products[1] could easily have happened on webforums. There's an unfortunate drive towards centralization in online communities these days that we'd all be better without. I personally think fediverse is the best solution to this as it centralizes communities without centralizing the actual platform, but I'm not so confident it will succeed when it's up against well-funded and well-established platforms like facebook, reddit, etc. [1] i don't have any real proof there's a monetary interest involved, but I'm perma-banned from /r/startrek for saying that the creators behind "Star Trek: Picard" and "Star Trek Discovery" probably aren't even fans of Star Trek based on the shows' many discontinuities with their predecessors, and it makes me wonder if the mods are on paramount's payroll or something. This should not be a controversial statement after how terrible the most recent season of Picard was.

mym1990 4y ago
I think centralization is just a byproduct of the ease of setting up a community on such sites/apps. I lurk in a few subreddits these days, but I almost never feel the pull to chime in or contribute because it kind of feels like my contribution just goes out into a vast universe, and I just think 'why bother?'. I feel like the days of personalized forums truly felt like a little tight community in the very wide web.
- bavell 4y ago
  > I lurk in a few subreddits these days, but I almost never feel the pull to chime in or contribute because it kind of feels like my contribution just goes out into a vast universe, and I just think 'why bother?' Definitely resonates with me as mostly a life-long lurker. HN is on a very, very short list of online communities I actually post on and engage with. Never got into reddit, left social media long ago.

jancsika 4y ago

> Shortly after, the FBI began monitoring Aaron Swartz and he was arrested for downloading academic journals from MIT in an attempt to make them freely available online. AFAICT Swartz never said or wrote why he attempted to download all of JSTOR. Even close friends like Lawrence Lessig only speculated as to what he may have been wanting to do with that data. But I suppose this kind of lazy writing and lack of standards is what passes for news these days at the New York Times' router that could have conceivably forwarded the packets for this medium.com article.

chaps 4y ago
Why do you think he attempted to download all of JSTOR?

ivraatiems 4y ago

I have a different take: The main problem with reddit is in how badly it's bungled its several different redesigns over the last few years, and how it's slowly ruined its users' experience in misguided attempts to drive mobile traffic to its app. Right now, here's the process for browsing a subreddit on mobile without the (ads and tracking loaded) reddit app: 1. Navigate to subreddit. Find out which of two (non-NSFW) or three (NSFW) "experiences" reddit decides to give me on mobile. 2. Depending on experience, jump through hoops including random "get the app!" prompts, failures to load content, failures to load nested comments, and outright refusal to display all the content in a thread unless I install the app. 3. If on an NSFW subreddit, and on about 50% of "unapproved" non-NSFW subreddits: Be blocked from viewing any additional content by an unremovable prompt. (Often, content loads in before the prompt, so you enjoy about 30 seconds of looking at your content before it's blocked.) 4. Give up, and go to old.reddit.com, which is ugly and not designed for mobile, but at least works okay. Desktop isn't much better, but I have long had browser extensions installed that redirect everything to old.reddit.com on most of my browsers, so it becomes less of an issue. If reddit took away my ability to use old.reddit.com, I'd probably stop browsing the site within weeks.

tux2bsd 4y ago
- noasaservice 4y ago
  So you're against treating people with respect and dignity? That's what your little "woke" slur means.
  - tux2bsd 4y ago
  - kfrzcode 4y ago
    No, xer right it's a cesspit of self-proclaimed wokensheep

labrador 4y ago

People complaining about Reddit remind me of that quote from Bjarne Stroustrup about computer languages: “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” A lot of people use Reddit. I've been on since nearly the beginning and seen it go through various phases. They started getting serious about moderation after Gamergate and they're still serious about it since they want to attract advertisers. The edgier content has gone to 4chan /pol/ but even that site has moderators called janitors. I really don't know where the extreme stuff has gone and I really don't care because I'm glad I don't see it anymore.

ivraatiems 4y ago
I strongly agree with your comparison, I think it's apt. There's just no way to have a tolerably pleasant public-facing community online without some kind of moderation, and people have been railing about moderators in said communities for as long as those communities have existed. That doesn't mean moderation is an easy job, or that it shouldn't be done judiciously or consistently, but it can't be abandoned.
- labrador 4y ago
  My first reaction when I heard Elon Musk was buying Twitter was "have he and his team figured out the moderation problem?" followed by "he probably hasn't given it much thought because if he did he would realize he doesn't need that headache on his way to Mars."
  - ivraatiems 4y ago
    I suspect "he probably hasn't given it much thought" sums up most of Elon Musk's recent decision-making.
  - towaway15463 4y ago
    I imagine he’s just going to introduce a simple yet “radical” solution like allowing people to pay a small fee for verified status and adding the option to filter out all non-validated accounts. That should kill off a large number of the bots and sock puppet accounts.

sirspacey 4y ago

I cannot buy into a wholesale generalization that mods are power tripping people who deserve our contempt because they are lonely. There’s all kinds of motivations for being a mod. I rarely find a sub where mods aren’t dealing with far more BS than they are putting out. If I don’t agree with how mods handle a channel, I leave. I think it’s important that we question the usefulness of blaming society for the lack of quality in “default” content. Yes, you’re funneled into these channels. Yes, Reddit is seeking to get people to consume them. Yes, the interest of advertisers override all others. Yes, Reddit constantly inserts unwanted subs into my feed. Yet Reddit is still a place I can curate to the subs that align with my interests & values. it’s not dead yet. I don’t expect any social media platform to give me the defaults I want. I’ve accepted that I can take responsibility for the content I consume. What I’d like is to build tools that enable people to more easily filter for that content. I believe we need stronger filtering tools, not weaker. This is where I do wholeheartedly agree with author - the loss of Aaron and RSS feeds was the end of the cyberpunk movement in the browser based web. I don’t know if web3 genuinely offers a second chance, but I do know that I will continue to want the ability to learn from thoughtful people of all walks of life. That requires the ability to filter out everything else. At this point, I’d rather select keywords to filter than to surface & happily pay for the privilege. I’m so tired of being spoon fed the empty calories of outrage.

trashcan 4y ago
Sounds like you haven't met any reddit mods. And no, web3 offers nothing except the ability to try and control your digital currency and make money off you.
- Jistern 4y ago
  I agree. The Reddit mods I've dealt with were nasty people.
  - richbell 4y ago
    I think the tiny amount of power goes to people's heads. Power-tripping moderators of small subreddits are a dime a dozen. The larger problem is that most subreddits are moderated by a handful of people, whose interest is expressly _moderating_. They don't care about the community. How could they, they have so many? And the power absolutely goes to their head.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

MrThoughtful 4y ago

It might not be possible to create a public forum in a way that it stays thoughtful and interesting even when it becomes popular. The first problem is that thoughtful and interesting content rarely attracts many readers. The second is that if many readers show up, the discussion quality is going down. So there would need to be strong centralized censorship to downvote the low quality posts and prevent accounts that play the populism game to gain traction.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago
Almost half the population is below average in whatever way you wish to judge them and the bar for entry for most applications is as simple as clicking a button in an app store.

mjr00 4y ago

As someone who was involved with many internet communities long before reddit, it sounds like the author is just experiencing the eternal September[0]. Pretty much since the day I found out about reddit in... 2008-ish?, everyone in the online communities I knew thought it was filled with awful pseudointellectual teenagers and college students, that the upvote/downvote system was horrible and encouraged people to post low-effort content, the moderators were overzealous and clueless, and in general there was no sense of community due to the size of the site + lack of individual identifiers beyond usernames, like avatars and signatures from a typical internet forum of the day. Basically, reddit is just as bad today as it was a decade ago. But I'm sure for people who had their first internet-social experiences on reddit, they remember it a lot more fondly. I will concede that objectively speaking, "new Reddit" is an abject failure (and the fact that old.reddit.com continues to exist is a testament to the such) and that it's much more heavily astroturfed by major corporations now. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Capricorn2481 4y ago
Do you feel anyone has improved upon what Reddit is doing? Or have you only found satisfaction in specific communities on specific sites? Are there non traditional communities like Tildetown that you enjoy?
- foolfoolz 4y ago
  tiktok provides better “communities” with more organic content. it know it sounds weird but you can get into areas of tiktok very similar to a subreddit. the lack of centralization like public karma, mods, sticky posts, etc actually helps
  - Capricorn2481 4y ago
    That's surprising to hear. I would've thought that'd be the last place I would look for community, but maybe I'll take a look
  - Dma54rhs 4y ago

ayngg 4y ago

I think there are 2 major problems at play. First, I have no idea what Reddit the company has been doing since basically every addition to the site in over a decade has been garbage and has made the site worse to use. The site is basically unusable without the old.reddit.com style, their media hosting is worse than imgur or any of the other alternatives, their app and mobile experience is worse than any number of free alternatives, and besides that I don't know what else the have done except gamify posts with their awards system. The second problem is how communities on Reddit and the internet as a whole are structured, incentivized and evolve. So many of these communities are unable to check themselves (which generally requires very good moderation), and with incentive structures like upvotes and awards, posting is gamified where people post things they think others will approve of and will reward, which causes communities to become monocultures as everyone else just leaves, is downvoted into oblivion or just banned from the subreddit. These communities basically become filled with people who have the same opinions and circlejerk about them in ways that affirm their opinions and disparage ones that oppose them, causing them to slowly become detached from reality. It creates a community of people who basically become unable to discuss things with people who don't share the same opinions, which then carries over to interactions outside of those monocultures. Lots of these people just dont have the ability to even talk to others with differing viewpoints now. The best communities and best conversations I have had online have been those that offer a lot of off topic discussions within interest based communities. Support group/ identity based communities need very strong moderation because they are much more susceptible to "radicalization" if that is the correct term.

thomassmith65 4y ago

In a decade this essay will still be available on some web archive, but the author will be fully grown, and the zeitgeist that shaped his adolescence, which is already dying, will be as transparently foolish as is, to contemporary sensibilities, a 1970's punk rocker shouting 'The Beatles suck!' It is true Reddit is a pile of garbage, but it was a worse pile of garbage when its community was posting kiddie porn and creating 'N-chain' comment threads.

ohCh6zos 4y ago
While those were both issues. There was a lot more quality text discussion on the site during that era.
- yxhuvud 4y ago
  There is still a humongous amount of good discussion there. Perhaps the problem is you need to remove some bad subreddits? Some of those have definitely gotten worse, but there are plenty of good ones to find.
- root_axis 4y ago
  The opposite is true. In absolute terms there is far more quality text discussion on reddit today than at any other time.
- munificent 4y ago
  I've been active on Reddit for 14 years. The quality of discussion has been more or less unchanged overall, but you must choose your subreddits in order for that to be true. All of the major subreddits have gotten watered down because that's what happens when 29 million users (r/pics) are voting on comments. Communities change fundamentally when they scale up. The answer is to seek out smaller communities. The smartest thing the Reddit admins every did was to create subreddits. At the time, everyone on Reddit criticized them for it. Users wanted to be able to have a single link get posted to multiple subreddits with a single discussion, so that subreddits would behave like tags. But the admins said that, no, the whole point was to create separate distinct communities that could flourish on their own and they were absolutely right.

tux2bsd 4y ago

junofan 4y ago
The mental image of somebody bothering to click a downvote button is hilarious.
- anon2020dot00 4y ago
  Do also find someone clicking an upvote hilarious? I don't get why upvote or downvote button would either be hilarious? Isn't that already normalized from Reddit, YouTube, etc.. ?
- tux2bsd 4y ago
qsdf38100 4y ago
Hate speech is not free speech. There’s plenty of places to spread hate speech, you don’t have to go on Reddit. You don’t have to publicly blame it on "leftists" and compare it to NK. Your kind of speech isn’t welcome here.
- tux2bsd 4y ago
  You see "hate" where there is none.
- tux2bsd 4y ago
  > You don’t have to publicly blame it on "leftists" and compare it to NK. Why not, comparison is a good way to paint picture and leftists are the bad actors in what is being discussed. > Your kind of speech isn’t welcome here. How very tolerant of you.
richbell 4y ago
> They permanently ban accounts for minor infractions (e.g. old fashion flame war), then they ban any account that could be associated (e.g. by IP address). This isn't true. Banning is _per-subreddit_, done by the respective mod teams. Your behaviour would need to be especially egregious for it to be picked up by the admins. > Leftists naturally following a very North Korean and censorious approach. Ah, I see. Makes complete sense.

ohCh6zos 4y ago

A big issue on reddit is 'powermods' and how if your sub gets popular enough the admins will install their own mods. Everything ends up feeling incredibly similar.

dvh 4y ago

Reddit works fine for me. In R/W mode I use only /r/diypedals and /r/guitarpedals and for daily dose of doom and gloom in R/O mode I use /r/news and /r/worldnews. I access it only via RSS reader and it navigates me directly to compact version which loads instantly and works well on mobile.

jotm 4y ago
I'd stay away from the latter two, like not even read it. I made a terrible life changing mistake by reading too much of these subreddits. It's user generated content, mostly by people who hate their lives, hate society and hate others, aided by the traditional media they link to. By the time I saw that reality is different and so much better than the doom I got on Reddit, it was too late.
- koshergweilo 4y ago
  > I made a terrible life changing mistake by reading too much of these subreddits. I don't understand. How could you make a life-changing mistake by reading the news?
  - 0des 4y ago
    I don't know if it is the same person, but there was a quite disheartening story posted by a person who due to internally misunderstood depression transitioned at the suggestion of people on reddit, regretted it, then later went dark and everyone assumes took their life.
    - koshergweilo 4y ago
      Yeah something like that came to my mind as well. Even if that is the case it seems a little odd to blame the news subreddit specifically and not their own poor decision-making. It's like if someone who panic sold during the covid scare blaming the news.
    - Akronymus 4y ago
      > ...a person who due to internally misunderstood depression transitioned at the suggestion of people on reddit, Sadly somewhat common. And you can talk about it almost nowhere, due to "transphobia"

exreddit 4y ago

tebbers 4y ago

I think Reddit is fantastic. So much interesting and useful content. It’s amazing to me that it isn’t full of spam if you think about how much of that there is on the internet these days so personally I think the mods are doing a really good job.

Rochus 4y ago
There are good subreddits indeed. I like the ability to split content thematically into subreddits. Unlike HN, this allows me to better focus on what interests me, and what I'm not interested in, I don't even get to see. On HN, instead, there's just one big pot, and what interests me often doesn't even make it to the front page, or only for a few minutes. Also on hckrnews.com I only see stuff that already has a minimum number of points. So I often go to the RSS feed; there I often find the more interesting posts than on the front page.

unconed 4y ago

I thought this was a clever joke at first that parodied how reddit forces their app on mobile users in various insidious ways... but it turns out Medium does the same. You want to know why the web is so bad? Because it's slowly become acceptable to treat your users with complete contempt by interrupting and "nudging" them into being surveillance cattle.

root_axis 4y ago

> What started as a bastion of independent thought, Reddit has slowly devolved into a den of groupthink, censorship, and corporate greed. This is revisionist romanticism. Reddit is just a collection of forums like the many hundreds of thousands that came before it, and continue to exist alongside it. Reddit is also so incredibly massive that making sweeping statements about its quality or composition is meaningless, what one consumes on reddit is really more a reflection of the individual rather than the site itself.

tux2bsd 4y ago
thinkingemote 4y ago
I agree with you kind of. But it was a loose collection of forums initially and still is if you look at it that way. The Reddit admins forced the idea of communities as a reason to start banning. You can see this over time. Subreddits were not called "communities" until the admins started banning subs. It's classic group dynamics. You can't ban a group that isn't a group. So the site grouped loose collections of people into what they called communities. And it became self fulfilling as groups define themselves by what they are not as well as what they are.
- richbell 4y ago
  > The Reddit admins forced the idea of communities as a reason to start banning. The admins also started actively policing subreddits, and shuffling uncooperative mod teams. Perhaps Reddit was never a bastion of 'independent thought', but in the beginning (after subreddits came into being) there was an understanding that communities were independent. But eventually they started getting bad press (e.g. /r/jailbait) and the 'jannies' started refusing to work for free (e.g. blackouts), so they decided to quash anyone causing them grief.

sascha_sl 4y ago

I'm sure Aaron was thinking of ridiculing fat people, fascism, revenge porn, jailbait or your right to hate the gays when he said he was concerned about corporate tyranny.

thefz 4y ago
On the other hand it's full of Americans touting their free speech is true like no other country on earth and blah blah, so I guess, free speech except for those you disagree with
- Philadelphia 4y ago
  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” There’s nothing in there about Reddit making moderation policies
  - aqouta 4y ago
    You're conflating 1A with free speech. Free speech is the principle that inspires 1A but it's a larger concept and the same reasoning applies to things like reddit. This whole "don't let you political opponents speak or coordinate because you happen to have the power to stop them" is the weapon of a tyrant, one of these days a real tyrant will seize the reins of these platforms and show us all how they're really used.
    - Philadelphia 4y ago
      Parent comment is about “Americans touting their free speech.” First Amendment is obviously what that refers to. The Internet doesn’t have a limit on the number of web sites. You want to say something, get a $2/month shared hosting plan and post HTML, or lease fiber and run your own server farm, or do any number of things in between.

kazinator 4y ago

Long before Reddit, there were dial-up BBSes in the 1980's. You don't know what petty online brownshirting is if you had not not experienced that --- and every little of it was corporate in any shape or form.

czhu12 4y ago

I'm curious what reddit even aspires to be at its greatest. Most of the popular subreddit's comment sections have top rated comments being something totally predictable and sarcastic. Right now the top post on r/news is [1] Contrasted to the equivalent story on hackernews: [2] There isn't anything remotely thought provoking in the top rated comments on reddit as there is on hackernews. It seems to me this isn't due to censorship or corporate influence, but purely due to the fact that the reddit post has 100x more upvotes (and therefore more viewership) than the hackernews equivalent. In the pockets of reddit that have a small but active community, I think it's easier to argue that the original essence and charm of reddit is still very much alive. I'm skeptical that even without all the corrupting factors mentioned in this article, that reddit would ever be a place for the masses to engage healthy discourse and speech [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/vjpfbh/supreme_court_overturns_roe_v_wade_states_can_ban/ https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/vjpfbh/supreme_court_... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31862258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31862258

Zeratoss 4y ago
Funny that you say that. I found the comments on that hacker news thread predictably awful, like all even slightly political discussion on hnews. People trying to one up each other with edgy comments on why the ruling is actually a good thing and how smart they are. A display of privilege and of a real lack of empathy
- MrMan 4y ago
  Hacker news is one of the worst communities on the internet but the headlines are better than most aggregating sites. Though I see more and more postings that also came across my Google news feed so HN is losing a lot of its utility for me. But it's a good place to see where the wind is blowing in terms of the ongoing radicalization of white men.
  - effingwewt 4y ago
    You are all over this thread being racist and sexist. Not everyone here is white, or men, nor are all the people in the US. You keep crying about white men and fascists while being a complete dick. You even called someone with a good point an FSB employee. Half your comments are flamebait. If you hate it so very much why are you here, much less participating?

bryans 4y ago

The issues are so much worse than what is being described in this post. Reddit-appointed moderators are used as a protective layer for all of the company's shady, anti-social and sometimes straight up illegal behaviors. The perfect example of this is RPAN, their recently defunct streaming function, where a dozen subreddits were created by the company and populated with moderators, who then spent two years brazenly lying on behalf of the admins at every opportunity and constantly gaslighting the entire community. They lied to advertisers by inflating viewership numbers 35x higher than reality. They sold their top broadcast mechanism to these advertisers, but repeatedly told the viewers that what they were witnessing was community-created content. The "algorithm" had a built-in caste system which was manually manipulated and curated by admins, while they directed mods to convince the community they don't even have the ability to manipulate the rankings. They even allowed the sexual proposition of minors to take place on a daily basis, while both mods and admins were fully aware of it -- never mind the reports, they were sometimes in the chat while it was happening. They permanently banned anyone who discussed any of these issues, without hesitation. And this list is just the tip of the iceberg of Reddit's Black Mirror-esque methodologies. The moderators are extremely loyal to the admins, because there are significant perks involved, not least of which being that moderators have notably become a hiring pool. It's no coincidence that the mods who are the most willing to lie are the same people finding employment within the company.

NalNezumi 4y ago

I used reddit for the first time in 2020 and only because a researcher friend told me to ask a question about implementation details of a paper I read. It gave me a good answer and to my surprise had some relatively famous names in the research field in the subreddit. That said, it also seemed to me like it's (maybe intentionally?) designed to promote bad faith communication[0]. Combine that with the Eternal September phenomenon it seems like an place of inevitable decay; whatever subreddit there is struggling against entropy. I think I saw an add about "Reddit: the Frontpage of Internet" but I think a more apt catch phrase would be "doormat"; all the rude, dirty people stomp all over it to get to the internet house. The mattress is mud ridden and smells. And the design of it is like a room without any windows with a broken AC making it humid, mold ridden and hot. And it was made right next to a Highschool and gives free entrance vouchers to the students. Some subreddits might try to carve out a space in the room, keeping it clean and everything but when most people coming in is bad faith and the room is so hopelessly inhospitable, it's just a matter of time. [0] https://consilienceproject.org/endgames-of-bad-communication/ https://consilienceproject.org/endgames-of-bad-communication...

webscout 4y ago

For business/finance related social news there's a UGC section on https://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com — Small but less toxic.

kthejoker2 4y ago

The universal problem with all large anthrocentric networks - real life, digital, political, socioeconomic, the planet's climate - is it's exponentially easier to break things than build them. Bullshit travels twice around the world before the truth gets its boots on. It does not have a side, or an agenda, or rarely even a purpose beyond the exercise of control over others. It's trolling, period. So as soon as you decide you wamt to optimize for growth over exclusivity, you are DOA because shortly (in startup time) your platform will become 99.99999% bullshit. You don't need a deeper look into why Reddit or any large site that optimizes for growth descends into chaos.

marban 4y ago

My 15y old Gold account just got banned after posting a crypto-critical Wall Street Journal link. Go figure.

over_bridge 4y ago
Reddit is mostly crypto-critical so unless you posted something paywalled or in the wrong sub, this is unlikely to be the root cause. WSJ is paywalled isn't it? Like as in no one can read the article.

tomlockwood 4y ago

> Reddit is tailored for a better corporate experience, not a better user experience. Yeah, advertisers want "brand safety" and having the most neutral and inoffensive topics possible (and nothing controversial) is what enables that. Censorship arises organically on the advertiser-based web, which many users of this site have had a hand in creating.

anotherrandom 4y ago

Reddit is largely garbage. Some bits of it are alright, but it has definitely gone downhill since Swartz passed. At this point the only good forums I am aware of are this one and Bogleheads, apart from a few still-decent parts of reddit that aren't completely astroturfed by corporations or packed full of lower-level midwits (i.e. any subreddit with a subscriber count close to or over 500k). Anyone else know of good places to read online?

vin047 4y ago
I’ve been trying [Lemmy](https://join-lemmy.org https://join-lemmy.org) for a while - it’s an open source, federated alternative to Reddit (and uses an interface similar to old.reddit.com). The main instance has a pretty heavy left bias, and like all less well known social media platforms, it suffers from a lack of content and engagement. But these are issues that can be tackled over time with more users joining the platform.

haunter 4y ago

idk I follow only gaming subs and they all seem all right to me. The players just share guides, fan arts, news etc. Sure every sub has some asshole mods but generally it's still not as bad as front page subs (/r/news, /r/politics/ etc.) where basically there is only one message accepted

nathias 4y ago

I don't get the popularity of the "mobile first" paradigm. I get it as a cost saving measure, but when you try and make UX fit mobile and desktop both will be worse off. > bastion of independent thought was never a thing, nor is it possible for reddit-type platforms. The mechanics of voting and karma organize content as groupthink, and the divisions of subreddits structure grouphink by type of content with mods that enforce their vision of the type. There is very little you can do for independent thought in this content if mods aren't actively trying for that (and they never did). What you get is content decided by the average person interested in some field, with added selections of moderation. This can be good for a few things but thought or indepth conversations aren't one of those.

etchalon 4y ago

As far as I know, outside of egregious violations, most subreddits have their own internal rules. Different communities seem to go through various periods of success, and my experience has been that it's just as often the fault of a lack of moderation as it is from moderation itself, but MOST often, it's the scale of the community. Once a community reaches a certain size, moderation is just impossible for the handful of volunteers who do it. Either way, the article strikes me less as "reddit is declining!" as it is "oh man, things changed and I don't like it."

zigman1 4y ago

Does anyone have a good Reddit alternative, that's kindof a niche like HN?

doublepg23 4y ago
lobste.rs ?
munificent 4y ago
The good alternative to Reddit is still Reddit. Reddit isn't "a community" any more than the web or a state is. It's a huge collection of distinct ones. If you don't like the subreddits you're on, find others.
exabyte 4y ago
Check out Lemmy https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/

bumblebritches5 4y ago

qsdf38100 4y ago

Reddit is still one of the best place to find relevant and accurate information, compared to say Facebook, Twitter or some random website. Depends on the subreddit of course, but at least healthy communities can be created and moderated. Of course you’ll also find terrible and toxic communities and users, like The_Donald, which has fortunately been banned. Why is the author only focusing on bad aspects? What’s the purpose of this article? It doesn’t bring anything constructive, it’s just trying to make it look bad, and discourage people from going there. It doesn’t say what should be done to improve, what healthier site we should visit instead. It’s only negative. "No matter what you believe in, wisdom isn’t achieved living inside a bubble of utopian ideals." Oh yeah ideals are bad, surely, wisdom is better. I wonder what kind of "wisdom" he has in mind… He won’t tell us either. Sounds like this article has an agenda, which involves convincing people that Reddit and ideals are bad. Reddit is doomed, and will go down into chaos because of ideals, values, mods and corporations. Hmmm that sounds familiar. Replace "Reddit" with anything and that’s your usual anti-system "wisdom". It didn’t bring me any new information. It looks like Reddit is generally too pro-western values for the tastes of the author… And he had to tell the world about it.

12amxn12 4y ago
Sounds like you clearly have an agenda, which comes down to "it's okay to ban anything I don't agree with". And that's exactly what the article is talking about.
- Philadelphia 4y ago
  If someone doesn’t like a forum’s moderation policies, they’re free to find a different forum. This has been true since BBSes. It’s been true since the days of newspapers. It’s been true since the days of people speechifying in taverns.
  - 12amxn12 4y ago
    - 4y ago

0dayz 4y ago

Im going to play devils advocate, when you look at the subreddits banned there are those that are banned for unknown and petty reasons (Tumblrinaction), however at the same time extremely radical or racist subreddits are also included (alt right ones, some extreme left and coontown fat people hate). And if we judge reddit with 4chan the "free" speech platform, you will notice that 4chan is plagued with extremism and anti-social views, which in some ways is because they don't censor and is 100% anonymous to each user. Personally some censorship is good to not allow the patients running the asylum, but also make sure you don't overreach.

smrtinsert 4y ago

Reddit critiques in this thread sound more like anger directed at their moderation because the commenters here have apparently been banned, shadow-banned, removed for transgender "jokes" etc.

philjohn 4y ago
Looking at the comments that got them banned would be illuminating. I've seen my fair share of people just being straight up assholes. Sorry buddy, be civil, or go somewhere else.

aliswe 4y ago

I personally hate Reddit, but I think it's misleading to talk about their "fall". Arent they thriving or even excelling by the metrics they (and most other non-users) care about?

over_bridge 4y ago
Pretty sure they are just pumping their metrics ahead of a future IPO. The current shareholders will all disappear and the new ones can slowly pick up the pieces in a few years. Forget running a sustainable business with your customers at the heart of it, the new way is going just fine.

jimjimjim 4y ago

places need limits. they really really do. They do in real life, they do in online. Should someone be able to go to a bar and shout insults at the owner. depending on where the bar is this will end with you in an alley. Why should a private company allow things that affects their bottom line?

winternett 4y ago
Why should anyone contribute their time, content, thoughts, and often money into a company's platform when the company doesn't care about anything but protecting it's bottom line, and then severing you from and taking control of your already spent time, content, thoughts, and often money? The other big problem is that Reddit hides the fact that it takes every step possible to limit users in order to protect it's bottom line... That's textbook bad business.

paganel 4y ago

There are still pockets of sanity here and there, if you know where to look, but otherwise it has become a huge propaganda machine. /r/worldnews is now basically a continuation of whatever Washington DC holds as true when it comes to US foreign policy, the same goes for /politics (when it comes to US domestic politics) and most of the subs related to the current war in Ukraine.

MrMan 4y ago
Ukraine is a puppet of the US! Russia is only defending itself right?
- paganel 4y ago
  If you think close to 7 million refugees and 20 to 25% of the territory lost for good is a good outcome for Ukraine then, yeah, you're right. Ukraine wouldn't have had those 7 million refugees and 20 to 25% of its territory lost if it had not been led to believe accession into the Western sphere of influence was possible. It is not. That policy was carried out, in part, by Western media entities.
  - mythrwy 4y ago
    Don't forget the death toll. Gonna be hard to rebuild the country when tens or hundreds of thousands of your working age men are no more.
SSLy 4y ago
Care to point out the subs in the last category? Between NCD / UWVR / UkrainianConflict the message I've got was vastly pro-UA.

lionkor 4y ago

I disagree with what the article says. If you follow no news or politics related subreddits, its a wholesome and friendly place (mostly) like it always was. The mistake is thinking news and politics make good talking topics on the internet, on massive platforms like that. Headlines are the only thing people read, theres no genuine discussion, just people screaming as loud as they can, hoping their opinion ends up being the loudest.

richbell 4y ago
> If you follow no news or politics related subreddits, its a wholesome and friendly place (mostly) like it always was. It's a shame that you have to go out of your way to make it a decent experience. It's been a while since I've created a new account. Do you still need to manually unsubscribe from 50+ subreddits?
- lionkor 4y ago
  I believe in the beginning it persuades you to subscribe to "recommended" ones, but I remember theres a way to make an account that follows nothing, its not difficult but not the default either

Jemm 4y ago

Anyone who remembers BBSs would not be surprised by a site that turns in to small fiefdoms but would rather be surprised by a site that is not.

wpdev_63 4y ago

The instant downvoting is a dead giveaway to what they're about. It's going to be interesting to see what rises from the "web 3.0".

richbell 4y ago
> It's going to be interesting to see what rises from the "web 3.0". The semantic web? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

HumanReadable 4y ago

My issue with reddit is the polar opposite. It's not moderated remotely aggressively enough! Any interesting subreddit immediately falls to the lowest common denominator without aggressive moderation. /r/askhistorians is a good example of the level of moderation a subreddit needs to remain sane as it grows. People like to complain about gatekeeping, but societies build gates for a reason. I would like a forum that actively encourages gatekeeping and bans users who consistently post low quality comments.

RappingBoomer 4y ago

chaos? Or authoritarianism? Two opposites on the spectrum? Some might argue that the elites are becoming more authoritarian as time goes on, and as they seek to quash all criticism of their regime...an old story...

netfortius 4y ago

For those of us, needing a VPN from time to time, this platform is unusable. From a decision they took to suspend my oldest over 11.5k karma acct, when I started travel, thus use of diff VPN exit points in Europe, through to almost 20 other accounts I attempted to create, since, whenever I used one with and without VPN within the span of a few hours, I get the dreaded suspension reaction.

softwarebeware 4y ago

I didn’t even know about some of the things that the author went over in this article, but it’s undeniable that power-mad mods have ruined anything I ever enjoyed about Reddit over the past ten years. And that there seem to no longer be many interesting voices or fair debate on the site. I found myself logging in less and less over the past four years and when I do, I recognize it less and less also. It just isn’t Reddit at all these days, no matter what logo is on it

Tolexx 4y ago

if going by what the writer wrote about the length of Aron Swartz incarceration is true, then that's way too much (35-year sentence). I mean he didn't kill someone even though what he did might be illegal. I just feel they just wanted to eliminate him. it's also totally unfair that he was erased from the history of reddit without good recognition for his work and contribution.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

I think reddit died for me when they more than doubled the price of premium membership (previously called 'gold'). It's just not worth it anymore. I always used to love how open it was. Don't communities were toxic sure but there were lots of fringey subreddits with people really enjoying themselves. For example exhibitionism. Conde Nast are trying to clamp down on this a lot to make it more mainstream palatable. IMO this is when such platforms start to decline though I have to admit reddit has so far lasted longer than I expected (especially when considering predecessors like Digg)

nunez 4y ago

Outside of a few subreddits and many smaller ones, quality discussion on reddit at large scale never really existed (or at least not since i joined in 2012) because the type of content that was/is upvoted most heavily is quick, low-thought, quippy and usually low-quality.

RickJWagner 4y ago

I don't frequently visit Reddit, but I think in the last year or two it has become more prone to mono-think and feels a bit like high school. I hope it changes direction and becomes a better public forum. We need more of those kinds of environments.

jaggs 4y ago

Reddit is not so simple to pin down. On the one hand all the 'bad stuff'. On the other, a huge selection of really interesting niche subs where you can find intelligent, valuable and even expert information and guidance. The big subs are not everything that is Reddit. The real treasure is found in the specialist places which very few people know about, staffed by enthusiast hobbyist mods and devoured by equally passionate readers.

cowtools 4y ago
Before reddit, these sorts of forums were hosted on their own websites. I think having a forum on reddit these days is a major liability. I wonder if these forums would benefit from being hosted in a more de-centralized and durable manner.
- richbell 4y ago
  Unfortunately, forums seem to be a dying medium. The few communities that still exist tend to use things like Discourse (which I dispise); funny to think that people used to pay hundreds of dollars for VBulletin and XenForo licenses. A worrying trend is new communities using, or existing communities migrating to, Discord.

nickysielicki 4y ago

I’ve had an idea for a while on how I would fix or reimplement Reddit. Someone please feel free to steal and implement these ideas, I’ll join! The basic problem with Reddit (and all eternal Septembers) is that new users change the culture that made the site interesting in the first place. The reddiquette and the HN rules might have been followed strictly at first, but they fall to the wayside due to a lack of enforcement. Moderation does not scale. My proposed solution is to assign weights to users such that bad actors cannot come in and exert influence on the site, through a modified ELO-like ranking system. You as the founder set a base set of rules that you know you can follow, like never downvoting substantive comments that you disagree with, and then you just use the site with care to not get sloppy with the rules. Your ELO (and those in your special known-good-actor clique) is held high, at least until you reach a critical mass of users where it becomes unnecessary. The kicker is this: every vote by another user on the site is now a “match” against all users on the site that have a higher ELO that have voted on it, and you treat their vote as a draw if they vote the same, or a loss if they downvote. Powerusers aren’t actually the problem, so long as you have the right powerusers. The problem is that powerusers are able to sell their account and exert influence for profit (ie: astroturfing). But with you as the baseline ideal user, and with your interests always being the longevity of the site, the possibility of corruption goes down. The other change I would make to Reddit is to have a predefined Usenet-like hierarchy with community-provided tags for niche topics that would otherwise fall through the cracks. Opinion-oriented communities (/r/bluepolitics, /r/redpolitics) facilitate one-sided boring conversations.

FooBarBizBazz 4y ago

Way to bury the lead: > I only recently found out that Ghislaine Maxwell, wife to Jeffery Epstein, ran one of the most powerful Reddit accounts on the website. In fact, it was the eighth-most popular account by karma on Reddit. Spooky X-Files music.

Havoc 4y ago

Reddit isn’t dead until there is a viable alternative. You can’t have an exodus without a destination

usrn 4y ago
There are plenty of other forums. The other day William Osman just told all his followers to come here because it's "like Reddit used to be" for example.
- Havoc 4y ago
  Any other forums you’d recommend?
  - usrn 4y ago
    Topical forums run by enthusiasts are always good. 4chan is underrated in some ways even; there's a lot of garbage but the best is better than anywhere. I think in general you should avoid sites that have any kind of voting. "Bump order" brings controversial ideas to the top which means they're probably original. IRC channels are still great too, I learned a lot lurking in places like #linux on freenode.

paulmendoza 4y ago

The subreddits are horrible. There is one called “RealTesla” that only allows stories negative towards Tesla. Nothing good, only negative. I was banned for posting an article that wasn’t negative enough.

tux2bsd 4y ago
That's actually hilarious. That sort of flippant moderation is rife throughout Reddit the wrong username or wrong wording - anything and they'll ban just for fun.

12amxn12 4y ago

I'm now getting flagged for anything I comment that goes against the groupthink. HN is worse than reddit at this point.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

Reddit remains completely a in-the-right-place-right-time thing when Digg fumbled and there was a mass exodus saving the almost-closed Reddit. That's it. It is/was nothing special. It has been riding the wave ever since (and also why I see no reason to give people like Alexis Ohanian any praise or credibility when he's out there talking about all kinds of nonsense, but I digress). Ultimately these days it suffers from massive mainstream adoption and use, and all of the moderation and scale problems that come with that(including the much griped about design problems and struggles to both monetize and maintain usability). But under it all it's still just a large collection of forums of all sizes, with some intermixing, but also a lot of non-mixing. If you participate in a handful of niche interest subreddits, and this is all logged into the site (where you can permanently set the old look as your UI complainers!), you will never see all the crap that's happening on the oversized main subs and it's great. Just a place for basic forum-like functionality and interest sharing.

eternityforest 4y ago

It's just another boring scroll hole for 1 minute content bites, like the rest of the internet is becoming. It's more of a place to share useless time filler to be scrolled on a phone, and a place to have mostly useless fights(As a time filler). Nobody really likes it enough to call it entertainment, it's just a pacifier.