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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.
- mariusor 4y ago
  > they were absolutely right They were right only because their goal was to increase the number of users to the largest extent possible. > everyone on Reddit criticized them for it ... and they were also right, because at the time reddit was a community for mostly tech news, similarly to what HN represents now. Creating the subreddits led to the tech part of the community to be splintered and then get more and more watered down as time went by. It's sad.
  - munificent 4y ago
    Most of my favorite subreddits these days are not tech related, so I stand by my claim that Reddit is better for having distinct communities.
    - mariusor 4y ago
      I agree, but sadly besides all the cool communities out there there's an order of magnitude more of them that are a stain and a strain on reasonable discussion. As a user of reddit I would like to isolate myself from these people as much as possible, which is now somewhat possible by blacklisting subbredits. But sadly the people themselves are vastly over represented in the wider community and having to suffer through chains of memes and hot takes, vitriol and all around non good faith discourse is making me go less and less into the comments of interesting posts because I don't really want to subject myself to all that negativity. In my opinion, the overall effect is negative, despite the existence of diamonds in the rough communities here and there. PS. I am saying these things as a long time reddit user and as a dev that tries to build an alternative link aggregator and discussion platform for communities to move to. :D
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

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.

mariusor 4y ago
> they were absolutely right They were right only because their goal was to increase the number of users to the largest extent possible. > everyone on Reddit criticized them for it ... and they were also right, because at the time reddit was a community for mostly tech news, similarly to what HN represents now. Creating the subreddits led to the tech part of the community to be splintered and then get more and more watered down as time went by. It's sad.
- munificent 4y ago
  Most of my favorite subreddits these days are not tech related, so I stand by my claim that Reddit is better for having distinct communities.
  - mariusor 4y ago
    I agree, but sadly besides all the cool communities out there there's an order of magnitude more of them that are a stain and a strain on reasonable discussion. As a user of reddit I would like to isolate myself from these people as much as possible, which is now somewhat possible by blacklisting subbredits. But sadly the people themselves are vastly over represented in the wider community and having to suffer through chains of memes and hot takes, vitriol and all around non good faith discourse is making me go less and less into the comments of interesting posts because I don't really want to subject myself to all that negativity. In my opinion, the overall effect is negative, despite the existence of diamonds in the rough communities here and there. PS. I am saying these things as a long time reddit user and as a dev that tries to build an alternative link aggregator and discussion platform for communities to move to. :D
deleted 4y ago
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