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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

by 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
    TikTok recommendation algo is creepy but strange enough it's community is much more kinder and less angry than Reddit. If you give it a day or two train and get past the dancing videos its excellent (unless dancing videos are your thing of course).
    - winternett 4y ago
      It's quite possibly not the algo anymore running TikTok ... It's likely now all just a random assortment of content from whoever pays the most for ad promotions on their posts, without violating community standards and policy, and occasional celeb posts here and there... of course. The algo likely only does light duty when something bad on the platform makes the news... They have to make sure paid ads run as promised, and a lot of people buy ads, there is likely no more space for unpaid algo picks, as the Internet now runs 24/7 worldwide with over 8 billion potential customers.
      - jpindar 4y ago
        Its not random. I always see content related to my specific interests (as indicated by the videos I've liked, and I never see celebrity posts. In fact TikTok is widely said to have the best algorithm for determining someone's interests.
        winternett 4y ago
        It always depends on what type of user you are... The most disgruntled people usually are people who are business owners... If you're not marketing a business or your art work for example, you have no problems and the algorithm entertains you seamlessly. If you're someone like a musician, makeup artist, or web developer (for example) TikTok floods you with success tips, tutorials about how people went viral, with tips on pay for promotional ads on the platform, and a constant stream of thought leadership programming to keep you struggling and spending time and money on growth. It's quite hostile to anyone who just wants to develop listeners and viewers, or anyone who wants to market a product independently. Big businesses can just have a meeting with TikTok reps, pay a fee, and get prime promo placement. When you run a small business, without lots of employees, managing social media presence becomes a huge mountain to climb, and TikTok won't meat with you unless you're very popular or wealthy (and willing to spend) already. Everyone on the platform has a different perspective, TikTok's algo is good at determining that and maximizing what can be earned from each user, but it's not fair nor transparent at all, and it creates a situation where no one can question things because there are others that will always say their TikTok experience is "going just fine". User experience all depends on the user's personas.
  - qsdf38100 4y ago
    Hmmm, tell me more about these better communities without centralization, moderation, or even votes. Sounds like the ideal opaque platform to brainwash people with "organic", shallow and easy to watch content. The perfect backdoor for an open society.
- winternett 4y ago
  The real tragedy is the shear volume of effort that made reddit the valuable resource it once was... Anyone starting a better version of that would need to wait ages before it gets populated with data, and they'd be extremely lucky if the same quality of minds contributed serious posts to it without totally and quickly devolving it into a bed of memes and clickbait now that everyone has been trained that these types of efforts really don't serve nor reward them. Truly a missed field goal... Someone responsible should be spoken to rather harshly about this dereliction of duty, and the db should be at least reverted back to it's 2010 state. heh. :/
- sph 4y ago
  I have in fact. I have discovered a forum that used to be quite popular back in the day and very chaotic. It literally spawned 4chan at the time, but in the meantime it kept going, many left and grew out of it and the remaining posters are now in their 30s and I've had some of the best and some of the most inane discussions of the past few years in there, with topics for most of my interest, gaming, mental health, programming, stairs. Surprisingly there's a lot of people with newer accounts. Parts of it are still a bit of a cesspool, but it's what the Internet we love to reminisce was also about, instead of the sanitised corporate web we're dealing with today. It's been an arduous process but I've managed to replace Reddit with a few forums, HN included, that are still alive to this day. And I've completely banned myself from Reddit. It's hard given how much information is stored on that site.
t-away-gilead 4y ago
Ha - was literally typing "The eternal September turned into the eternal 2016." and read your post as I did so...
winternett 4y ago
Reddit is hijacking content by requiring it to be hosted on it's own CDN... It's one of the main reasons why they put up walls. Many reddit users are actively involved in content and credit theft as well, but no one knows about how deep it runs. In a world where creators are going unviewed from IG to TikTok, there is literally an underground repost network that literally steals and reposts content to claim credit and monetize the lifted content on reddit and other sources through various means. This is also why Reddit rarely lets posters link to original content sources like YouTube, IG, and TikTok on major subs any more. Millions of creators on sites like YouTube and others never get credited or viewed even though their stolen content goes viral on bootleg accounts. It's a huge problem. Even replies and posts from other sites are hijacked for the same purposes now. It laid the ground work for content theft going on everywhere now... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a4geZL2xmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a4geZL2xmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaEJWlAbXLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaEJWlAbXLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcE8ZVG_tmo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcE8ZVG_tmo
- lupire 4y ago
  Reddit only bans links when the Reddit post is mockery/harassment of the original content/creator, as an anti-doxxing measure. Otherwise linking to source is common and encouraged.
  - winternett 4y ago
    There is no way to verify content that is hosted on reddit's CDN, anyone could make any claim about OC at any time. The only way IDs happen is in comments, and that comes long after the damage is already done. Reddit used to allow external links, but now only a few subs do it (None of the default subs allow external links) because it's common practice on the site. Regardless of linking to the OC, it's still hijacking views from the original creators and undermining content creators. Reddit does not pay original content creators for their views... If Reddit had to pay OC creators for views fairly, they'd likely not be as popular nor profitable as they are now.
    - 4y ago
bshepard 4y ago
Thank you for introducing this concept of the "Eternal September" - it has a real archetypal power to it, reminds me of Northrop Frye's genre-seasons: comedy with spring, romance with summer, tragedy with autumn, satire with winter.
- towaway15463 4y ago
  It’s important to realize that it’s not a stage of development, it’sa failure state. Specifically it occurs when the number of new members joining exceeds the capacity of the current members to educate them in the norms of the site’s culture. This results in the total destruction of the previous culture.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
uhhhhhhhhhhhh 4y ago
You're looking at it all wrong. Kind of through the lens of an narcissist. Not nearly as many people have had the opportunity to even become "full" intellectuals. The irony here is that while the world burns, the easiest solution is raising that bar for them by challenging them and leading them into better paradigms, through interaction and debate or even arguments. Without your presence amongst the people on that platform, and with the condemnation and final-judgement people like yourself dole out... how could you expect them to ever be any better or things to improve over the course of a decade? Team values have all but disappeared. That is the real issue at hand. We need to be finding leverage and educating them on how to think critically, while providing them with support and encouragement of lifestyles which improve their intellectual abilities. Not put them down and shut them out. You may disagree - you may believe that there needs to be a culling like a lot of the entitled wealthy class, but that's just naive weak thinking from a group of individuals who couldn't build or run something themselves if their life depended on it. They're essentially nothing more than spoiled children living in a bubble. They have no foresight.
- agentgumshoe 4y ago
  I agree with this in principle, but in reality the flood of new people, influence/manipulation by organisations (political and market) and encouragement of features that reward low quality content (emotes, monetisation, etc) mean the site doesn't actually promote the environment you suggest should exist. Old fashioned forums are still far and away the best 'system' for this, they're just not 'popular' enough any more, particularly with Facebook providing groups within their massive walls.
  - FastMonkey 4y ago
    The solution seems to be a Goldilocks zone between popularity and death, too popular and it devolves, too unpopular and it dies. HN manages to keep itself tucked neatly into that zone I think.
    - agentgumshoe 4y ago
      And keeping a purpose. Going for 'broadest possible audience' is always a spiral to trash. HN still keeps to its 'niche' well enough, much as forums have their usual genres that allow for clear moderation and purpose/values.
huimang 4y ago
It's true that people have been complaining about "eternal september" since at least 2010 when I joined. However IMO reddit really has declined in discussion quality for the most part since then, asides from banning some of the worst subreddits. To say that 2022 reddit is the same as 2010 reddit is preposterous. The main thing right now is bots. Endless copying & reposting of submissions, and even wholesale copy/pasting comment replies. The reddit staff have to know about this as it's been going on for a while, but seemingly don't care.
- dromtrund 4y ago
  I also joined in 2010-ish, and although the big subreddits have been declining forever, some of the niche ones have improved massively because of the increased number of users. To me, reddit is two parallel user experiences - interesting discussion in niche subreddits matching my interests, and mindless doom scrolling through the big, astro turfed generic subreddits. There used to be more overlap between the two, but the days of interesting comment threads in the default subreddits are definitely gone now.
  - 8bitsrule 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
AlecSchueler 4y ago
I've been on Reddit since 2008 myself and was an avid user of forums etc for years before that. When I started on Reddit there was already an element of things having changed, a move away from niche technology discussion towards lowest common denominator stuff and discussion by meme. In general this was fine as you could just move to smaller subreddits, and the bigger pages had fun cultures that permeated the others and gave it all a sense of unity and shared interest even when you were in your bubble. The difficult change I've seen in the past few years is the rising number of hate and harassment subs, and Reddit tolerating them. If you scroll through the top of /r/BanFemaleHateSubs or /r/AgainstDegenerateSubs you'll see how bad things have become and how unsafe the general environment is. It's not that discussion has become worse in an Eternal September way, it's that discussion has become openly threatening, with innocent women having their pictures and social media links shared for strangers to discuss rape and murder fantasy, and this gets 10s of 1000s of subscribers and Reddit routinely ignores reports about it.
- 0x138d5 4y ago
  Reddit always had an element of \dchan in it ever since user subs were created. Coontown (and the preceding slur subreddit), FPH etc. In my view this is just a symptom of the wider populace gaining access to internet forums and the cultural shift mass internet usage brought. As in, there have always been darker corners of the internet, just that the people who frequented them had to have some level of nerdiness/geekiness and {nerds}∩{violent racists} is smaller than {whole population}∩{violent racists}.
  - AlecSchueler 4y ago
    There always having been elements of racism and violent misogyny doesn't preclude there being either a quantitative or qualitative shift in how much Reddit as a whole is steered by such ideas. Back in 2010 there would be discussions about places like /r/jailbait, about the tradeoffs between free speech and public safety etc. Now there are subreddits openly sharing child pornography with links to the social media accounts of the children and their families, and Reddit auto responds that these things don't violate their usage policies when reported.
anotheryou 4y ago
It's a fundamental problem with democracy + taste: we can only agree on cute cats, even if every individual has diverse actually cool interests. An Subreddits can only help you towards alternative mainstream until they grow too big.
MaxBarraclough 4y ago
It depends on the specific subreddit. It makes some sense that the largest subs would succumb to eternal September, but there are plenty of small niche subs that haven't. I agree though that just about all changes made to the reddit website itself have been for the worse. Perhaps the story of digg.com will play out again?
marginalia_nu 4y ago
I think part of the problem is that reddit seems to really aggressively push for subreddit growth. This artificially creates an "eternal september" almost everywhere. I'm not really sure why they are pushing this so hard, if it's to show investors how fast reddit is growing or something? But bottom line is that perhaps the single most disruptive event an online community can experience is a large sustained influx of new members. It just will not be the same before and after.
- richbell 4y ago
  > This artificially creates an "eternal september" almost everywhere. This is also why the 'powermods' are so damaging: without proper, attentive moderation an influx of new users invariably leads to a decline in quality. Half the subreddits in /r/all are so homogeneous that it's impossible to tell if a post was in /r/muderedbywords, /r/nextfuckinglevel, /r/damnthatsinteresting, /r/unexpected, etc. And that's not to mention all the bots...
xg15 4y ago
> lack of individual identifiers beyond usernames, like avatars and signatures from a typical internet forum of the day. I wonder if this is done on purpose, to nudge people into thinking of individual users not as people but as voices of a "hivemind". Even today, usernames are de-emphasized in the UI in contrast to names of threads or subreddits. That's most prominent on the front-page ("r/all") where posts don't show the usernames at all, only the names of subreddits - producing the odd impression that the subreddits are authoring the posts and not individual users within the subreddit. HN's UI is sort of similar on the first half: Users are de-emphasized here as well, but there are no subreddits to emphasize instead. Though I think it would be interesting if someone made an alternative frontend for HN that presented threads in the style of an old web forum, with user identities shown prominently I think it works frightenly well sometimes. Ask yourself: - How many engaging conversations have you had on HN in the last year? - How many people do you know on HN?
- throwawaybutwhy 4y ago
  Some redditors use Reddit Enhancement Suite. > - How many engaging conversations have you had on HN in the last year? - None that I remember, thank goodness. One man's conversations are another man's flame wars. > - How many people do you know on HN? - At the very least, knowing HN users' affiliations and posting tendencies is key to quickly blocking unwanted ideological noise, whether it concerns international politics or programming languages.
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    > - At the very least, knowing HN users' affiliations and posting tendencies is key to quickly blocking unwanted ideological noise, whether it concerns international politics or programming languages This is IMO the approach that makes the most sense. Let users ignore other users, rather than enforcing bans/shadowbans on the whole userbase. While I personally would rather not block anyone, I think everyone should have the ability to police the content they see, but in most cases not what other people see.
- ItsMonkk 4y ago
  Yep, I actively have to fight both services to get the most value from the service, much more similar to how Twitter does it. I find having both views is a good idea, I'm not sure why these services tend to focus on only one view. On HN when I like a users comment I will go through their post history, and if enough of their comments are of good quality, I add their comments to my RSS reader through hnrss. Reddit does this slightly better, where you can add users to your 'friend's list' and then they give you an option to see the latest comments from all of your friends. Both ways do context of the comment poorly. The other thing I do on Reddit is have thousands of sub-reddits filtered out through RES. Basically anything bigger than a million subscribers is useless, and often even 100k is to much.
ziml77 4y ago
I started using reddit in 2009 and can agree that the quality was always lacking. The posts that made it to the top were the ones that were the lowest effort to consume which quickly get repetitive and boring. The comments were often equally low effort with memes and weak jokes rising to the top. This was especially infuriating in places like /r/askreddit where the only chance of seeing replies that weren't clear fabrications or jokes was to specifically ask for serious replies. There were really only 2 ways for a subreddit to be good. It either had to be small and relatively close-knit or it had to have rules against low effort content and solid moderation enforcing those rules. But since communities will naturally grow as people find them and because people hate when moderators remove their posts, Reddit ended up exactly where it was destined to.
- cowtools 4y ago
  I agree. I think it's fundamentally a flaw of the voting system: the idea that previous users should be able to anonymously and indirectly influence the visibility of a message or post to future users.
permo-w 4y ago
the author is experiencing the corporate hijacking and poor moderation of a website. this is not Eternal September. the success of this comment is a far better illustration of Eternal September
lamontcg 4y ago
The author is actually complaining about a lot of half conspiracy theories around reddit. They don't even touch on the Eternal September of reddit. Every thread is full of the most mundane observations possible, lazy puns, entirely expected The Office references and sayings which have been said literally thousands of times before -- followed up by someone going "this is the most perfect comment" all of which is wildly upvoted. It feels like it is being botted by a simplistic lazy circle jerking ML text generation algorithm. Maybe it is. But it is definitely drowning in https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by mjr00 4y ago

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
  TikTok recommendation algo is creepy but strange enough it's community is much more kinder and less angry than Reddit. If you give it a day or two train and get past the dancing videos its excellent (unless dancing videos are your thing of course).
  - winternett 4y ago
    It's quite possibly not the algo anymore running TikTok ... It's likely now all just a random assortment of content from whoever pays the most for ad promotions on their posts, without violating community standards and policy, and occasional celeb posts here and there... of course. The algo likely only does light duty when something bad on the platform makes the news... They have to make sure paid ads run as promised, and a lot of people buy ads, there is likely no more space for unpaid algo picks, as the Internet now runs 24/7 worldwide with over 8 billion potential customers.
    - jpindar 4y ago
      Its not random. I always see content related to my specific interests (as indicated by the videos I've liked, and I never see celebrity posts. In fact TikTok is widely said to have the best algorithm for determining someone's interests.
      - winternett 4y ago
        It always depends on what type of user you are... The most disgruntled people usually are people who are business owners... If you're not marketing a business or your art work for example, you have no problems and the algorithm entertains you seamlessly. If you're someone like a musician, makeup artist, or web developer (for example) TikTok floods you with success tips, tutorials about how people went viral, with tips on pay for promotional ads on the platform, and a constant stream of thought leadership programming to keep you struggling and spending time and money on growth. It's quite hostile to anyone who just wants to develop listeners and viewers, or anyone who wants to market a product independently. Big businesses can just have a meeting with TikTok reps, pay a fee, and get prime promo placement. When you run a small business, without lots of employees, managing social media presence becomes a huge mountain to climb, and TikTok won't meat with you unless you're very popular or wealthy (and willing to spend) already. Everyone on the platform has a different perspective, TikTok's algo is good at determining that and maximizing what can be earned from each user, but it's not fair nor transparent at all, and it creates a situation where no one can question things because there are others that will always say their TikTok experience is "going just fine". User experience all depends on the user's personas.
- qsdf38100 4y ago
  Hmmm, tell me more about these better communities without centralization, moderation, or even votes. Sounds like the ideal opaque platform to brainwash people with "organic", shallow and easy to watch content. The perfect backdoor for an open society.
winternett 4y ago
The real tragedy is the shear volume of effort that made reddit the valuable resource it once was... Anyone starting a better version of that would need to wait ages before it gets populated with data, and they'd be extremely lucky if the same quality of minds contributed serious posts to it without totally and quickly devolving it into a bed of memes and clickbait now that everyone has been trained that these types of efforts really don't serve nor reward them. Truly a missed field goal... Someone responsible should be spoken to rather harshly about this dereliction of duty, and the db should be at least reverted back to it's 2010 state. heh. :/
sph 4y ago
I have in fact. I have discovered a forum that used to be quite popular back in the day and very chaotic. It literally spawned 4chan at the time, but in the meantime it kept going, many left and grew out of it and the remaining posters are now in their 30s and I've had some of the best and some of the most inane discussions of the past few years in there, with topics for most of my interest, gaming, mental health, programming, stairs. Surprisingly there's a lot of people with newer accounts. Parts of it are still a bit of a cesspool, but it's what the Internet we love to reminisce was also about, instead of the sanitised corporate web we're dealing with today. It's been an arduous process but I've managed to replace Reddit with a few forums, HN included, that are still alive to this day. And I've completely banned myself from Reddit. It's hard given how much information is stored on that site.

t-away-gilead 4y ago

Ha - was literally typing "The eternal September turned into the eternal 2016." and read your post as I did so...

winternett 4y ago

Reddit is hijacking content by requiring it to be hosted on it's own CDN... It's one of the main reasons why they put up walls. Many reddit users are actively involved in content and credit theft as well, but no one knows about how deep it runs. In a world where creators are going unviewed from IG to TikTok, there is literally an underground repost network that literally steals and reposts content to claim credit and monetize the lifted content on reddit and other sources through various means. This is also why Reddit rarely lets posters link to original content sources like YouTube, IG, and TikTok on major subs any more. Millions of creators on sites like YouTube and others never get credited or viewed even though their stolen content goes viral on bootleg accounts. It's a huge problem. Even replies and posts from other sites are hijacked for the same purposes now. It laid the ground work for content theft going on everywhere now... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a4geZL2xmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a4geZL2xmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaEJWlAbXLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaEJWlAbXLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcE8ZVG_tmo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcE8ZVG_tmo

lupire 4y ago
Reddit only bans links when the Reddit post is mockery/harassment of the original content/creator, as an anti-doxxing measure. Otherwise linking to source is common and encouraged.
- winternett 4y ago
  There is no way to verify content that is hosted on reddit's CDN, anyone could make any claim about OC at any time. The only way IDs happen is in comments, and that comes long after the damage is already done. Reddit used to allow external links, but now only a few subs do it (None of the default subs allow external links) because it's common practice on the site. Regardless of linking to the OC, it's still hijacking views from the original creators and undermining content creators. Reddit does not pay original content creators for their views... If Reddit had to pay OC creators for views fairly, they'd likely not be as popular nor profitable as they are now.
  - 4y ago

bshepard 4y ago

Thank you for introducing this concept of the "Eternal September" - it has a real archetypal power to it, reminds me of Northrop Frye's genre-seasons: comedy with spring, romance with summer, tragedy with autumn, satire with winter.

towaway15463 4y ago
It’s important to realize that it’s not a stage of development, it’sa failure state. Specifically it occurs when the number of new members joining exceeds the capacity of the current members to educate them in the norms of the site’s culture. This results in the total destruction of the previous culture.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

uhhhhhhhhhhhh 4y ago

You're looking at it all wrong. Kind of through the lens of an narcissist. Not nearly as many people have had the opportunity to even become "full" intellectuals. The irony here is that while the world burns, the easiest solution is raising that bar for them by challenging them and leading them into better paradigms, through interaction and debate or even arguments. Without your presence amongst the people on that platform, and with the condemnation and final-judgement people like yourself dole out... how could you expect them to ever be any better or things to improve over the course of a decade? Team values have all but disappeared. That is the real issue at hand. We need to be finding leverage and educating them on how to think critically, while providing them with support and encouragement of lifestyles which improve their intellectual abilities. Not put them down and shut them out. You may disagree - you may believe that there needs to be a culling like a lot of the entitled wealthy class, but that's just naive weak thinking from a group of individuals who couldn't build or run something themselves if their life depended on it. They're essentially nothing more than spoiled children living in a bubble. They have no foresight.

agentgumshoe 4y ago
I agree with this in principle, but in reality the flood of new people, influence/manipulation by organisations (political and market) and encouragement of features that reward low quality content (emotes, monetisation, etc) mean the site doesn't actually promote the environment you suggest should exist. Old fashioned forums are still far and away the best 'system' for this, they're just not 'popular' enough any more, particularly with Facebook providing groups within their massive walls.
- FastMonkey 4y ago
  The solution seems to be a Goldilocks zone between popularity and death, too popular and it devolves, too unpopular and it dies. HN manages to keep itself tucked neatly into that zone I think.
  - agentgumshoe 4y ago
    And keeping a purpose. Going for 'broadest possible audience' is always a spiral to trash. HN still keeps to its 'niche' well enough, much as forums have their usual genres that allow for clear moderation and purpose/values.

huimang 4y ago

It's true that people have been complaining about "eternal september" since at least 2010 when I joined. However IMO reddit really has declined in discussion quality for the most part since then, asides from banning some of the worst subreddits. To say that 2022 reddit is the same as 2010 reddit is preposterous. The main thing right now is bots. Endless copying & reposting of submissions, and even wholesale copy/pasting comment replies. The reddit staff have to know about this as it's been going on for a while, but seemingly don't care.

dromtrund 4y ago
I also joined in 2010-ish, and although the big subreddits have been declining forever, some of the niche ones have improved massively because of the increased number of users. To me, reddit is two parallel user experiences - interesting discussion in niche subreddits matching my interests, and mindless doom scrolling through the big, astro turfed generic subreddits. There used to be more overlap between the two, but the days of interesting comment threads in the default subreddits are definitely gone now.
- 8bitsrule 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

AlecSchueler 4y ago

I've been on Reddit since 2008 myself and was an avid user of forums etc for years before that. When I started on Reddit there was already an element of things having changed, a move away from niche technology discussion towards lowest common denominator stuff and discussion by meme. In general this was fine as you could just move to smaller subreddits, and the bigger pages had fun cultures that permeated the others and gave it all a sense of unity and shared interest even when you were in your bubble. The difficult change I've seen in the past few years is the rising number of hate and harassment subs, and Reddit tolerating them. If you scroll through the top of /r/BanFemaleHateSubs or /r/AgainstDegenerateSubs you'll see how bad things have become and how unsafe the general environment is. It's not that discussion has become worse in an Eternal September way, it's that discussion has become openly threatening, with innocent women having their pictures and social media links shared for strangers to discuss rape and murder fantasy, and this gets 10s of 1000s of subscribers and Reddit routinely ignores reports about it.

0x138d5 4y ago
Reddit always had an element of \dchan in it ever since user subs were created. Coontown (and the preceding slur subreddit), FPH etc. In my view this is just a symptom of the wider populace gaining access to internet forums and the cultural shift mass internet usage brought. As in, there have always been darker corners of the internet, just that the people who frequented them had to have some level of nerdiness/geekiness and {nerds}∩{violent racists} is smaller than {whole population}∩{violent racists}.
- AlecSchueler 4y ago
  There always having been elements of racism and violent misogyny doesn't preclude there being either a quantitative or qualitative shift in how much Reddit as a whole is steered by such ideas. Back in 2010 there would be discussions about places like /r/jailbait, about the tradeoffs between free speech and public safety etc. Now there are subreddits openly sharing child pornography with links to the social media accounts of the children and their families, and Reddit auto responds that these things don't violate their usage policies when reported.

anotheryou 4y ago

It's a fundamental problem with democracy + taste: we can only agree on cute cats, even if every individual has diverse actually cool interests. An Subreddits can only help you towards alternative mainstream until they grow too big.

MaxBarraclough 4y ago

It depends on the specific subreddit. It makes some sense that the largest subs would succumb to eternal September, but there are plenty of small niche subs that haven't. I agree though that just about all changes made to the reddit website itself have been for the worse. Perhaps the story of digg.com will play out again?

marginalia_nu 4y ago

I think part of the problem is that reddit seems to really aggressively push for subreddit growth. This artificially creates an "eternal september" almost everywhere. I'm not really sure why they are pushing this so hard, if it's to show investors how fast reddit is growing or something? But bottom line is that perhaps the single most disruptive event an online community can experience is a large sustained influx of new members. It just will not be the same before and after.

richbell 4y ago
> This artificially creates an "eternal september" almost everywhere. This is also why the 'powermods' are so damaging: without proper, attentive moderation an influx of new users invariably leads to a decline in quality. Half the subreddits in /r/all are so homogeneous that it's impossible to tell if a post was in /r/muderedbywords, /r/nextfuckinglevel, /r/damnthatsinteresting, /r/unexpected, etc. And that's not to mention all the bots...

xg15 4y ago

> lack of individual identifiers beyond usernames, like avatars and signatures from a typical internet forum of the day. I wonder if this is done on purpose, to nudge people into thinking of individual users not as people but as voices of a "hivemind". Even today, usernames are de-emphasized in the UI in contrast to names of threads or subreddits. That's most prominent on the front-page ("r/all") where posts don't show the usernames at all, only the names of subreddits - producing the odd impression that the subreddits are authoring the posts and not individual users within the subreddit. HN's UI is sort of similar on the first half: Users are de-emphasized here as well, but there are no subreddits to emphasize instead. Though I think it would be interesting if someone made an alternative frontend for HN that presented threads in the style of an old web forum, with user identities shown prominently I think it works frightenly well sometimes. Ask yourself: - How many engaging conversations have you had on HN in the last year? - How many people do you know on HN?

throwawaybutwhy 4y ago
Some redditors use Reddit Enhancement Suite. > - How many engaging conversations have you had on HN in the last year? - None that I remember, thank goodness. One man's conversations are another man's flame wars. > - How many people do you know on HN? - At the very least, knowing HN users' affiliations and posting tendencies is key to quickly blocking unwanted ideological noise, whether it concerns international politics or programming languages.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  > - At the very least, knowing HN users' affiliations and posting tendencies is key to quickly blocking unwanted ideological noise, whether it concerns international politics or programming languages This is IMO the approach that makes the most sense. Let users ignore other users, rather than enforcing bans/shadowbans on the whole userbase. While I personally would rather not block anyone, I think everyone should have the ability to police the content they see, but in most cases not what other people see.
ItsMonkk 4y ago
Yep, I actively have to fight both services to get the most value from the service, much more similar to how Twitter does it. I find having both views is a good idea, I'm not sure why these services tend to focus on only one view. On HN when I like a users comment I will go through their post history, and if enough of their comments are of good quality, I add their comments to my RSS reader through hnrss. Reddit does this slightly better, where you can add users to your 'friend's list' and then they give you an option to see the latest comments from all of your friends. Both ways do context of the comment poorly. The other thing I do on Reddit is have thousands of sub-reddits filtered out through RES. Basically anything bigger than a million subscribers is useless, and often even 100k is to much.

ziml77 4y ago

I started using reddit in 2009 and can agree that the quality was always lacking. The posts that made it to the top were the ones that were the lowest effort to consume which quickly get repetitive and boring. The comments were often equally low effort with memes and weak jokes rising to the top. This was especially infuriating in places like /r/askreddit where the only chance of seeing replies that weren't clear fabrications or jokes was to specifically ask for serious replies. There were really only 2 ways for a subreddit to be good. It either had to be small and relatively close-knit or it had to have rules against low effort content and solid moderation enforcing those rules. But since communities will naturally grow as people find them and because people hate when moderators remove their posts, Reddit ended up exactly where it was destined to.

cowtools 4y ago
I agree. I think it's fundamentally a flaw of the voting system: the idea that previous users should be able to anonymously and indirectly influence the visibility of a message or post to future users.

permo-w 4y ago

the author is experiencing the corporate hijacking and poor moderation of a website. this is not Eternal September. the success of this comment is a far better illustration of Eternal September

lamontcg 4y ago

The author is actually complaining about a lot of half conspiracy theories around reddit. They don't even touch on the Eternal September of reddit. Every thread is full of the most mundane observations possible, lazy puns, entirely expected The Office references and sayings which have been said literally thousands of times before -- followed up by someone going "this is the most perfect comment" all of which is wildly upvoted. It feels like it is being botted by a simplistic lazy circle jerking ML text generation algorithm. Maybe it is. But it is definitely drowning in https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/.

deleted 4y ago

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