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I definitely see Reddit going the way of Yahoo! A slow spiral into irrelevance because of lots of small bad decisions. At one point, Reddit felt like a lone ch

I definitely see Reddit going the way of Yahoo! A slow spiral into irrelevance because of lots of small bad decisions. At one point, Reddit felt like a lone champion of free speech and conversation in a sea of buzzfeeds. I think they've moderated the website into ruin. They've put a lot of energy into silencing certain kinds of voices/opinions while promoting others. What's left is a very liberal echo chamber. All of the seemingly worst ideas from the left are stated as fact and voicing a dissenting opinion can quite literally get you banned. r/antiwork and r/latestagecapitalism are the most egregious examples of this that I can think of. But the attitudes held there have leaked into 99% of the other subreddits to some degree. For the record, I lean left. But it really sucks to no longer have a town hall where both sides of the aisle can discuss things as adults. If there's one takeaway, I think it's some flavor of: Don't overmoderate/show favoritism. You can't have yin without yang, or salt without pepper. What made Reddit awesome was the discourse. Maybe they never realized that this was the secret sauce. That is, the clashing of ideas. And so they didn't cultivate that. Today, outside of a handful of niche/hobby subreddits, it no longer has anything close to educated discussions.

witchesindublin 3y ago
There's also a much more noticeable problem of Reddit being too US-centric. The moderation is the cause, but I think it's also symbolic of US political culture that fails to take into account that politics can work differently across cultural lines. In a way the website has become more racist than the pre-Trump-election moderation Reddit.
nocoiner 3y ago
This is really well stated. Sometimes out of morbid curiosity, I’ll read one of the /r/all posts on a topic where I know the discussion is going to be reductive and generally uninformed (the example that comes immediately to mind is anything involving the energy industry - there’s not much to find beyond “hurrr durr Exxon bad thorium good”), and every single time it’s the same type of self-satisfied navel-gazing commentary totally untethered from the real world. I still read it most days (through Apollo) but when/if this kicks in, that’s the end of it for me.
- sph 3y ago
  Not only that, the posts themselves on /r/popular are mostly Facebook anger bait (/r/LeopardsAtMyFace, /r/IdiotsInCars, /r/whatcouldgowrong) or political anger bait: Reddit leans left so it's all "Look at what the right said." Reddit is one of the largest spreader of US political bullshit unto the rest of the world, turning kids into flag-weaving partisans and fostering a us vs them mentality. It's a low brow dismissal, I know, but between the posts and the comments, Reddit has gone to total shit. Also to note that the average age has remained the same, so it's really hard to talk about anything serious when the majority are 18 yo US middle class white males. And the only rebuttal I hear is "oh, I'm on /r/askhistorians and it's good here." The exception that proves the rule. May it all come crashing down so we can build something anew. They're just rearranging the chairs on the Titanic at this point.
  - witchesindublin 3y ago
    I disagree that the community is middle class (at least now). I often write about common middle class tropes that seemingly go down like a lead balloon as if they had never heard of them, and more importantly there is often a distain for middle class people in favour of working class people on Reddit in political discussions. Outside the US the subreddits seem to be much older as well, not sure about the situation in the US itself.
    - sph 3y ago
      That's because the middle class itself has been disappearing post-2008. You need much more money these days to feel you're not rich, but money isn't a major concern either. Perhaps that's a longer topic not really relevant here.
    - antifa 3y ago
      > often a distain for middle class I've literally never seen this, but I regularly see upperclass people misrepresent themselves as middleclass.
  - mustacheemperor 3y ago
dahwolf 3y ago
I think it's a sign of the times, also replicated outside of reddit, for example Mastodon. I enjoyed a solid 20 years of online discourse that was overall reasonable, and most of it not very political. Now everything is highly politicized with a hard split across two camps where before I barely could detect the very concept of a camp at all. There's no detectable reasonable right-wing online, it always escalates into 4chan. Hence, the "civil" people clean the place, and you'll have centrists and moderate-left remaining. Give it time and far-left will dominate as moderates silence themselves out of fear.
- dimgl 3y ago
  > Give it time and far-left will dominate as moderates silence themselves out of fear. This is already happening across the board.
  - witchesindublin 3y ago
    It has happened in most subreddits IMO. Any palatable subreddit is only palatable because the moderation does not ban you, not because it is more centrist.
  - Durably5522 3y ago
    [dead]
  - hnick 3y ago
    I feel like for every comment on Reddit that's even slightly controversial, I need to watch my words and add various layers of overtones in order to avoid things being taken out of context or given the worst possible interpretation. People are there to score points, so comments are longer than they need to be or people attack. It's part of why the dreaded "/s" is so popular over there. I greatly appreciate the rules here that we should read and interpret in good faith - and the fact that it's enforced.
- witchesindublin 3y ago
  One thing I want to point out is that political culture, and defines right and left, varies globally. This is key to understanding why Reddit is so unbelievably US centric even in the international subreddits - the moderation has had the effect of creating echochambers that don't make any sense in the local political discourse. I think moderation on Reddit had the effect of cleaning out centrists as well, since it was a comment that got you banned from reddit and not your political position (e.g. a post which was positive towards a trump policy would get you caught up in the post-2016 moderation sweep). You can see the effect on Indians. Quora was popular with Indians because it was intellectual and centrist in the western political spectrum, from a culture that has the right-wing as being Hindu-leaning and the left-wing as being Muslim-leaning. Indians are absent from Reddit comparatively.
dimgl 3y ago
It's truly depressing. Reddit's usefulness as an aggregator is what's kept me around for so long. But the sheer extremist views I see on a daily basis are so off-putting. My wife jokes about how I say every other month that "I'm going to quit Reddit". It's so weird to me that they've let the mods go absolutely bonkers. I've gotten banned from so many subreddits simply for having a different opinion.
- dendriti 3y ago
  Nearly every time a user whines about being banned from a subreddit by evil mods for "muh different opinion", they were just being assholes.
  - dimgl 3y ago
    If you comment any pro-Elon Musk argument on a subreddit, no matter how tame, you will get banned. Happened to me in /r/worldnews. This isn't some conspiracy: mods are actively banning discussion.
  - TabithaES 3y ago
    > asshole mods, asshole users Both scenarios too common to judge.
nitwit005 3y ago
Much of it seems to be people's behavior changing, rather than the company changing. Reddit has subreddits on the right and left that will ban you for disagreeing, or even for having made a comment in a subreddit they don't like. That was theoretically always possible, but at some point people decided such a policy was a good idea. I personally think a misstep of reddit's has been relying so much on volunteer moderators. Why are people willing to put in so many unpaid hours of labor? Apparently, the answer is sometimes because they have a political cause they want to promote.
- thedaly 3y ago
  Reddit admins did ban a lot of subreddits on both the far right and left ends of the political spectrum. I don't agree with extremist voices, but I think that silencing and pushing people off the platform is bad for discourse overall.
stjohnswarts 3y ago
nothing is stopping you from starting conservative versions of things on reddit. Reddit has been since it started pretty left leaning, but they don't stop r/conservative from existing as long as they maintain some decorum rather than act like 4chan or r/TheDonald which was riddled with nuts and russian bots. There are a ton of conservative leaning subs on there, just don't expect them to have thousands of visitors like r/pics or r/memes . You can start r/ConservativeMemes and r/ConservativePics if you like!
- fendy3002 3y ago
  What I see (from reddit) as an US outsider is the people in US are already too polarized. It's either you are my friend or my enemy, no middle ground. No wonder, seeing what the political news are there at the last 3 years.
  - witchesindublin 3y ago
    The news culture in the US is toxic. It creates division and people react to the news rather than the policy. I believe Reddit has a similar effect by pushing moderates and centre-left people to the right.
- rybosworld 3y ago
  The isolation of particular viewpoints into their own subreddit is precisely the problem imo. There are political undertones in nearly every subreddit. But depending on which sub you are visiting, you can be downvoted or even banned for not having the "accepted" viewpoint. There's no place to have balanced discussion anymore, and that's one of the things that used to make reddit enjoyable. Creating more siloed echo chambers isn't a fix, it's the problem.
mmarq 3y ago
> What's left is a very liberal echo chamber. All of the seemingly worst ideas from the left are stated as fact and voicing a dissenting opinion can quite literally get you banned. A friend of mine is moving to Canada, another to Germany, both went to Reddit to ask for help, and what they got back was anti-immigration tropes of all kind (from "go away you cheap labour, you are stealing our jobs" to "go away you rich tech worker, you are gentrifying my town"). While social media are generally cesspools of psychological deragement, racism and xenophobia, I keep hearing people complaining about some undefined left wing bias because the occasional weirdo with pink hair complains about capitalism or fascism in r/weirdoswithpinkhair or r/randosthatcomplainaboutcapitalism.
- shrimpx 3y ago
  > "go away you cheap labour, you are stealing our jobs" to "go away you rich tech worker, you are gentrifying my town" It's pretty funny how these two quotes express similar sentiment (NIMBYism, in-group protectionism, deep-seated fear of disruption) yet are often placed on opposite ends of the spectrum (anti-gentrification vs. anti-immigration).
  - mmarq 3y ago
    I had the same person tell my girlfriend both things, complaining about our presence in the UK. He started saying that we were living in city center because, as immigrants, we were taking benefits. Then my girlfriend told him how much I was earning (which was 5-6 times what he was making), he stayed quiet for a few days and then came back complaining about foreigners stealing good jobs, gentrifying things and forcing the Brits to work as cleaners.

witchesindublin 3y ago

There's also a much more noticeable problem of Reddit being too US-centric. The moderation is the cause, but I think it's also symbolic of US political culture that fails to take into account that politics can work differently across cultural lines. In a way the website has become more racist than the pre-Trump-election moderation Reddit.

nocoiner 3y ago

This is really well stated. Sometimes out of morbid curiosity, I’ll read one of the /r/all posts on a topic where I know the discussion is going to be reductive and generally uninformed (the example that comes immediately to mind is anything involving the energy industry - there’s not much to find beyond “hurrr durr Exxon bad thorium good”), and every single time it’s the same type of self-satisfied navel-gazing commentary totally untethered from the real world. I still read it most days (through Apollo) but when/if this kicks in, that’s the end of it for me.

sph 3y ago
Not only that, the posts themselves on /r/popular are mostly Facebook anger bait (/r/LeopardsAtMyFace, /r/IdiotsInCars, /r/whatcouldgowrong) or political anger bait: Reddit leans left so it's all "Look at what the right said." Reddit is one of the largest spreader of US political bullshit unto the rest of the world, turning kids into flag-weaving partisans and fostering a us vs them mentality. It's a low brow dismissal, I know, but between the posts and the comments, Reddit has gone to total shit. Also to note that the average age has remained the same, so it's really hard to talk about anything serious when the majority are 18 yo US middle class white males. And the only rebuttal I hear is "oh, I'm on /r/askhistorians and it's good here." The exception that proves the rule. May it all come crashing down so we can build something anew. They're just rearranging the chairs on the Titanic at this point.
- witchesindublin 3y ago
  I disagree that the community is middle class (at least now). I often write about common middle class tropes that seemingly go down like a lead balloon as if they had never heard of them, and more importantly there is often a distain for middle class people in favour of working class people on Reddit in political discussions. Outside the US the subreddits seem to be much older as well, not sure about the situation in the US itself.
  - sph 3y ago
    That's because the middle class itself has been disappearing post-2008. You need much more money these days to feel you're not rich, but money isn't a major concern either. Perhaps that's a longer topic not really relevant here.
  - antifa 3y ago
    > often a distain for middle class I've literally never seen this, but I regularly see upperclass people misrepresent themselves as middleclass.
- mustacheemperor 3y ago

dahwolf 3y ago

I think it's a sign of the times, also replicated outside of reddit, for example Mastodon. I enjoyed a solid 20 years of online discourse that was overall reasonable, and most of it not very political. Now everything is highly politicized with a hard split across two camps where before I barely could detect the very concept of a camp at all. There's no detectable reasonable right-wing online, it always escalates into 4chan. Hence, the "civil" people clean the place, and you'll have centrists and moderate-left remaining. Give it time and far-left will dominate as moderates silence themselves out of fear.

dimgl 3y ago
> Give it time and far-left will dominate as moderates silence themselves out of fear. This is already happening across the board.
- witchesindublin 3y ago
  It has happened in most subreddits IMO. Any palatable subreddit is only palatable because the moderation does not ban you, not because it is more centrist.
- Durably5522 3y ago
  [dead]
- hnick 3y ago
  I feel like for every comment on Reddit that's even slightly controversial, I need to watch my words and add various layers of overtones in order to avoid things being taken out of context or given the worst possible interpretation. People are there to score points, so comments are longer than they need to be or people attack. It's part of why the dreaded "/s" is so popular over there. I greatly appreciate the rules here that we should read and interpret in good faith - and the fact that it's enforced.
witchesindublin 3y ago
One thing I want to point out is that political culture, and defines right and left, varies globally. This is key to understanding why Reddit is so unbelievably US centric even in the international subreddits - the moderation has had the effect of creating echochambers that don't make any sense in the local political discourse. I think moderation on Reddit had the effect of cleaning out centrists as well, since it was a comment that got you banned from reddit and not your political position (e.g. a post which was positive towards a trump policy would get you caught up in the post-2016 moderation sweep). You can see the effect on Indians. Quora was popular with Indians because it was intellectual and centrist in the western political spectrum, from a culture that has the right-wing as being Hindu-leaning and the left-wing as being Muslim-leaning. Indians are absent from Reddit comparatively.

dimgl 3y ago

It's truly depressing. Reddit's usefulness as an aggregator is what's kept me around for so long. But the sheer extremist views I see on a daily basis are so off-putting. My wife jokes about how I say every other month that "I'm going to quit Reddit". It's so weird to me that they've let the mods go absolutely bonkers. I've gotten banned from so many subreddits simply for having a different opinion.

dendriti 3y ago
Nearly every time a user whines about being banned from a subreddit by evil mods for "muh different opinion", they were just being assholes.
- dimgl 3y ago
  If you comment any pro-Elon Musk argument on a subreddit, no matter how tame, you will get banned. Happened to me in /r/worldnews. This isn't some conspiracy: mods are actively banning discussion.
- TabithaES 3y ago
  > asshole mods, asshole users Both scenarios too common to judge.

nitwit005 3y ago

Much of it seems to be people's behavior changing, rather than the company changing. Reddit has subreddits on the right and left that will ban you for disagreeing, or even for having made a comment in a subreddit they don't like. That was theoretically always possible, but at some point people decided such a policy was a good idea. I personally think a misstep of reddit's has been relying so much on volunteer moderators. Why are people willing to put in so many unpaid hours of labor? Apparently, the answer is sometimes because they have a political cause they want to promote.

thedaly 3y ago
Reddit admins did ban a lot of subreddits on both the far right and left ends of the political spectrum. I don't agree with extremist voices, but I think that silencing and pushing people off the platform is bad for discourse overall.

stjohnswarts 3y ago

nothing is stopping you from starting conservative versions of things on reddit. Reddit has been since it started pretty left leaning, but they don't stop r/conservative from existing as long as they maintain some decorum rather than act like 4chan or r/TheDonald which was riddled with nuts and russian bots. There are a ton of conservative leaning subs on there, just don't expect them to have thousands of visitors like r/pics or r/memes . You can start r/ConservativeMemes and r/ConservativePics if you like!

fendy3002 3y ago
What I see (from reddit) as an US outsider is the people in US are already too polarized. It's either you are my friend or my enemy, no middle ground. No wonder, seeing what the political news are there at the last 3 years.
- witchesindublin 3y ago
  The news culture in the US is toxic. It creates division and people react to the news rather than the policy. I believe Reddit has a similar effect by pushing moderates and centre-left people to the right.
rybosworld 3y ago
The isolation of particular viewpoints into their own subreddit is precisely the problem imo. There are political undertones in nearly every subreddit. But depending on which sub you are visiting, you can be downvoted or even banned for not having the "accepted" viewpoint. There's no place to have balanced discussion anymore, and that's one of the things that used to make reddit enjoyable. Creating more siloed echo chambers isn't a fix, it's the problem.

mmarq 3y ago

> What's left is a very liberal echo chamber. All of the seemingly worst ideas from the left are stated as fact and voicing a dissenting opinion can quite literally get you banned. A friend of mine is moving to Canada, another to Germany, both went to Reddit to ask for help, and what they got back was anti-immigration tropes of all kind (from "go away you cheap labour, you are stealing our jobs" to "go away you rich tech worker, you are gentrifying my town"). While social media are generally cesspools of psychological deragement, racism and xenophobia, I keep hearing people complaining about some undefined left wing bias because the occasional weirdo with pink hair complains about capitalism or fascism in r/weirdoswithpinkhair or r/randosthatcomplainaboutcapitalism.

shrimpx 3y ago
> "go away you cheap labour, you are stealing our jobs" to "go away you rich tech worker, you are gentrifying my town" It's pretty funny how these two quotes express similar sentiment (NIMBYism, in-group protectionism, deep-seated fear of disruption) yet are often placed on opposite ends of the spectrum (anti-gentrification vs. anti-immigration).
- mmarq 3y ago
  I had the same person tell my girlfriend both things, complaining about our presence in the UK. He started saying that we were living in city center because, as immigrants, we were taking benefits. Then my girlfriend told him how much I was earning (which was 5-6 times what he was making), he stayed quiet for a few days and then came back complaining about foreigners stealing good jobs, gentrifying things and forcing the Brits to work as cleaners.