8 ms·

Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

57 points by robin_reala 3y ago

halicarnassus 3y ago
Did anybody expect Reddit to become a better place after all what happened a couple of weeks ago? I was never a big Reddit user, but I'm sure as hell not going to be one in the future.
- dsgnr 3y ago
  I was a big reddit user, with 2 small subreddits I started and managed, and I abandoned things and havent gone back. Losing the addiction has been healthy. Going back is laughable.
  - Jgrubb 3y ago
    I’m not sure if this is a downside yet, but I know even less of what’s going on in the world since July, having bailed on Twitter and FB years earlier and having made a conscious decision to stop purposefully consuming “news” a few years ago. Reddit was the only site I would scroll by world events to learn of their happening. (clearly I’m still here, but it’s a bit more niche)
    - Kye 3y ago
      An RSS feed for you: https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=when:24h+allinurl:apnews.com https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=when:24h+allinurl:apnew...
- bombcar 3y ago
  Has there ever been an online community that improves over time? At best it seems they grow, then they’re doomed to either maintain at a certain level (like HN), or slowly slump into the melt and burn away.
- mythhabit 3y ago
  What happened "a couple of weeks ago"?
  - Devasta 3y ago
    Reddit started charging huge money for API access. Thing is, reddits leadership are wildly incompetent and those APIs were relied upon by the mods to actually handle the vast oceans of posts that go on each day. Its left the mods with greatly increased workload as they now need to use the crappy tools Reddit gives them, and for some communities like the folks on /r/blind the site is totally unusable. Most subreddits have ended the protests, and those that don't have had their mod teams forceably replaced, usually be people who are more interested in being mods than actually moderating. Reddit had hundreds, if not a thousand people willing to work for free managing their site for them and they still screwed it up, just unbelievable stuff.
    - cimov 3y ago
      Perhaps that's a good thing in some ways. The communities with only a very light-touch moderation to get rid of spam are often the most enjoyable, where you can speak relatively freely without the looming threat of some overbearing mod censoring and banning you because they don't like your opinion.
    - sentientslug 3y ago
      API access is still free for moderation and accessibility tools. It’s just third party clients with high API usage that were effectively killed with the pricing change.
      - robin_reala 3y ago
        For non-commercial accessibility tools. Because Reddit doesn’t know how to fix accessibility in their own app. A shitshow, either way you look at it.
        Devasta 3y ago
- everdrive 3y ago
  I agree with your sentiment, but I do wonder what could replace reddit. It's true that the larger subreddits have been pretty terrible for years. However, reddit has often been the _only_ good source for useful and true user-sourced information. What vacuum should I buy? How can I get some old PS2 game to run on my steam deck? Can I disable the telematics system on a Toyota Tacoma? etc. It's easy to see this sort of access to information disappearing, and it's also easy to imagine that even if it didn't die now, it would soon be destroyed by large-scale usage of AI. I think the internet very briefly put a lot of power in the hands of users, but the pendulum is swinging back hard.
  - drukenemo 3y ago
    I completely agree and it often baffles me the lack of nuance I see here on HN. “Reddit became crap”. No it didn’t. Maybe it’s less appealing and valuable than in the past, but it certainly still is a goldmine in more niche subreddits. Or simply to have a laugh at r/funny.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      There's goldmine of information on 4chan's niche boards as well. But people referring to "4chan" the website tend to talk about the wide strokes of communities. It's the same with reddit. Sure, I do appreciate some small gaming communities that I can't find anywhere else, but it's not what the site cares about, nor what many people see when they go to reddit.com. You need to search for those communities,and they aren't guaranteed to be good. Or active for that matter.
  - Kye 3y ago
    What we're seeing is the downsides of centralizing. Replacing Reddit would require putting everything in one place again, and would likely lead to the same result down the road. There are still active forums for most topics, and site search works just as well. What changes is a return to the old world where you can't put in one site to get it all anymore.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
- pndy 3y ago
  This isn't "a couple of weeks ago" issue. The enshittification most likely begin when they rolled this modern design and used variety of darkpatterns on existing users to trick them to move into updated interface. This was all done to attract younger audience who has short attention spawn and who doesn't mind ads and sponsored content served via this bulky interface that keeps you interacting with site under dozens of "load more" elements. Tho, perhaps the slow decay of site started even earlier with arrival of Ellen Pao; content already was spiraling down at that time I don't think there's any hope for reddit; I expect that site will be even more sanitized to the point no "unsafe" content will be allowed to be posted. There are subs around that already are being used as platform for spreading PR of companies, which have nothing in common with these exotic truly run by ordinary people small communities.
perteraul 3y ago
Are we witnessing yet-another platform making solid steps towards extinction?
- watwut 3y ago
  I would not say so. Just getting worst and less used. But, it is very far from extinction.
  - wds 3y ago
    Digg is 'still around', too.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Perhaps, but it needs a proper competitor before it truly fades to irrelevancy.
  - bezier-curve 3y ago
    Maybe it doesn't need a competitor but something that supersedes its design while staying inside the community of communities structure. Most Reddit clones do nothing better than Reddit, they just attempt to painstakingly emulate it. Karma is gamed too easily. Why hasn't someone tried to rank content by a mix of votes and quality indicators (grammar checks, NLP sentiment, engagement)? Innovation usually disrupts.
mcphage 3y ago
Reddit has gotten very aggressive about pushing random subs onto you. I’ve really come to loathe the phrase “Because you interacted with a similar community”. I have muted so many subs, I’m getting sick of the site.
- drivers99 3y ago
  Must be an app thing. I use https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com and don’t get that.
  - markx2 3y ago
    Agreed. I use old.reddit.com + umatrix + ublock + custom css with tampermonkey I now see nothing they want me to see. I am very happy to leech. Said as a previous mod who helped grow a sub from <25k users to almost 1 million.
    - landmass 3y ago
      My participation has changed since the API change. I use old.reddit and uBlock Origin as I always have. I limit myself to scanning a few sub-reddits to ensure nothing bad has happened to Bitwarden and Yubikey, I don't log in and certainly don't contribute as I used to. If/when old.reddit stops functioning I'll stop even that low level of participation.
- jvm___ 3y ago
  Facebook's recommended images are even worse. [picture of a surveyors dot on the ground] "This dot in a field in Wisconsin is the center of the world. The other points are inaccessible due to water, but this tiny dot is..." [picture of a dead something with a pig snout completely covered in farmers field mud] "This 30,000 year old cave bear was found with DNA still extractable."
  - pndy 3y ago
    > Facebook's recommended images are even worse. I did log into Messenger (Lite version if that matters) quite recently - while I'm not using site anymore for more than 10 years or so, I do periodically check if people on my friends list want something. So I started scrolling thru contact list to see who's online and at some point some random people started to appear. Some whom I sent once a message, then even totally random ones I never heard about (perhaps some cross-friends pairing happen) and next, some local celebrities that perhaps I'd like to talk to acc. to fb, and some weird profiles pulled out of nowhere.
javcasas 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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- bagels 3y ago
  This concept really could have been better served by a different name. It's hard to take it seriously with this name.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    Enshittification is a good name because it's deliberately provocative and attention-grabbing. There's no need to sugarcoat what these shitty companies are doing.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >There's no need to sugarcoat what these shitty companies are doing. if you're fine with it remaining as internet ramblings, sure. If you want anyone serious to challenge these companiies, then you already made their jobs harder to do. But I guess the internet never really cared about change. Just a place to yell into the void.
  - dghughes 3y ago
    Agreed. It's 14 year old boy drama trying to sound intelligent.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Depends on ones cultural lense. I think it's quite succinct and memorable.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      the cultural lens of "it's not okay to casually curse in professional settings" doesn't agree, unfortunately.
TMWNN 3y ago
[flagged]
- watwut 3y ago
  > Most mods know that there are dozens/hundreds of other similar volunteers ready to take their place Not really. There are not.
  - TMWNN 3y ago
    As I said, the fear of being replaced is exactly what the /r/formula1 mods cited. <https://np.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/14b5vu3/rformula1_and_the_canadian_gp_weekend/ https://np.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/14b5vu3/rformula1_...> "My small subreddit can't find people who want to be mods!", you say. That may be true, but those are also, by and large, not the subreddits that were closed in the first place.
    - watwut 3y ago
      Communities in the big subreddits have problems to find mods too. The mods from elsewhere do not cut it, because they wont share community values and will destroy the community. And result are "quality concerns".
- cimov 3y ago
  > The Challenor mess should never have happened, but at least the person was fired by Reddit. I'm amazed he was hired in the first place, they must not have bothered to do any background checks at all. I think it revealed a lot ideologically about how Reddit operates, in particular this likely explains some of the more controversial subreddit bans in recent years.
  - TMWNN 3y ago
    > I think it revealed a lot ideologically about how Reddit operates, in particular this likely explains some of the more controversial subreddit bans in recent years. I have no doubt that there are hundreds of Challenors who are "working" as Reddit mods. "Doreen", the /r/antiwork head mod who got embarrassed on national television, <https://mashable.com/article/antiwork-subreddit-fox-news-interview https://mashable.com/article/antiwork-subreddit-fox-news-int...> is merely a famous example. Similarly, back when the SCP-2721 <https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/protected:scp-2721 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/protected:scp-2721> controversy <https://np.reddit.com/r/SCP/comments/8ubmjp/so_they_dissabled_2721s_ratings/ https://np.reddit.com/r/SCP/comments/8ubmjp/so_they_dissable...> occurred, wiki mod Decibelles stated that a majority of (I think one dozen) SCP mods (including Decibelles), is transvestite. A majority!
jiofj 3y ago
If the moderators of canning cared so much about their community they wouldn't have closed it I guess.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  The problem is that Reddit's own features for moderators are abysmal. I don't know what Reddit's 2.000 employees are doing all day, but people have lamented that for years now without much significant change - and then Reddit just shut down the public API, which made moderation work muuuch more difficult.
  - jiofj 3y ago
    If they don't want to moderate for whatever reason (including shortcomings in the moderation tools) that's ok - I also don't want to moderate. What you can't do is close the community. If you care about it it makes more sense to have the usual spam here and there than to completely block every discussion. That's low and petty.
    - z500 3y ago
      Reddit already closes unmoderated subs specifically so they won't fill up with spam, so what's the difference?
nickpeterson 3y ago
Sort of a side question, but what is the state of the art in open source community hosting? I know a bit about tools like Zulip, but was thinking something more like forums. They feel very dated, which surprises me since Reddit seems a straightforward thing to compete against.
- Freak_NL 3y ago
  Discourse perhaps? I've seen it in use in a few places; it has a modern look and feel to it at least. https://discourse.org/ https://discourse.org/
  - pelagicAustral 3y ago
    I really dislike this community paradigm. The design, I actually prefer the good old forums like vBulletin or IPB. Discourse is a nice project, but I really don't dig this marriage between forum and Q&A.
- LeSaucy 3y ago
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy is a social link aggregator very similar to Reddit, powered by fediverse. Think of it like anyone can host an instance for their community, and all instances can interact with each other. For example check out the instance at https://beehaw.org/ https://beehaw.org/
  - jaggs 3y ago
    I use old.lemmy.world for a Reddit classic experience.
    - goplayoutside 3y ago
      There's also a *monkey script for an old.reddit UI[1] (no affiliation). 1. https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey
  - 3y ago
brisdak 3y ago
Not sure if bias but I feel like the quality of content on reddit has gone downhill since the mod purge and the killing of 3rd party apps
- hellweaver666 3y ago
  You just have to sign-out and look at the homepage to see this. It's all attention grabbing subs like AITAH or "amiugly" or "ratemyface" etc etc etc. All the interesting subs have withered away and died. Take /r/3dprinting for example, there used to be cool new models shared there every single day, now it's just people sharing pictures of benchies, globs of spaghetti and the odd question from someone that hasn't done any research.
  - nunez 3y ago
    It's been that way for a while before the Great Purge; at least a few years. This was a driver behind me unsubscribing from all of my subs and grouping them into multireddits instead and enjoying a blank front page.
    - gingerrr 3y ago
      It's both. I'd also done the same with multis but kept a "casuals" multi for the defaults + populars, and it had been declining in quality for a while - but it genuinely fell off a sharp cliff with the Great Purge, even my multireddits now feel like the frontpage. Cacophonous shallow dreck.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      On one hand you're correct. On the other hand: holy crap I thought all the "roast me" trends were dying down. I check back for one day and there's like 3 new variation of "AmITheAsshole" and "Roastme" each on the front page. Why?
  - terribleperson 3y ago
    /r/3dprinting dropped substantially in quality when /u/billierubencamgirl left the mod team. They had fought hard against meme posts, "look at my new printer/1st print" posts, and fad print spam. They had also tried very hard to maintain useful documentation for people. It seems that keeping a subreddit high quality is a difficult and thankless job. You will be seen as the fun police and all your efforts downplayed as unnecessary.
realusername 3y ago
There's also a high number of quality contributors which just left without any ceremony. It's the same as Twitter, officially the metrics are saying that it's alright but in reality the quality contributors leaving makes it a repost ghost-town.
drumhead 3y ago
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- toenail 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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- ftyop 3y ago
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PrimeMcFly 3y ago
Honestly not much has changed. Some of the big subs that did their protests had their mods replaced, that's it. I'm not on any of the big ('default') subs, all the smaller ones I'm on are operating the same as they ever did, with some doing a stupid one day a week protest. That's literally the only change.
- causality0 3y ago
  I have the same impression. Frankly some of mine have gotten better after the replacement mods have less of a stick up their ass. A couple have even changed posting rules to be less restrictive, like allowing people to talk about ROM sites.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    > Frankly some of mine have gotten better after the replacement mods have less of a stick up their ass Very much this. A few tiny little despots got toppled, and the world goes on.
    - causality0 3y ago
      I fully supported the protests by major subreddits. My problem was that a lot of the smaller subs couldn't see the forest for the trees and, ostensibly for the sake of the survival of Reddit, destroyed themselves. The subreddit that gets five hundred posts per day bounces right back after two days offline. The niche sub that gets about ten posts per day, however, doesn't survive being shut down for two weeks. A lot of the mods seemed to be fine with the destruction of their communities as long as it was them who got to pull the trigger and not the admins.
      - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        > A lot of the mods seemed to be fine with the destruction of their communities as long as it was them who got to pull the trigger and not the admins. Well, yeah. Most reddit mods are in it to some extent for the power, not pure benevolence. This tracks completely.
haunter 3y ago
I haven't noticed anything. I follow some video game and hobby subs through RSS. Everything is pretty much the same.
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  Definitely a shift towards our base instincts. Several subs started showing up in r/popular that never did before or as suggested subs. All along the lines of r/truerateme, r/facerating, r/rateme, r/amiugly, r/OUTFITS, etc. Never recall seeing these before the mod protests but suddenly see them all the time. All very similar in concept: attractive women posting pictures "asking for feedback". Similar to when you first sign up for TikTok or IG before you start to follow people, the content is mildly sexual in nature. Several decidedly more right wing subs are being "suggested" to me. One that sticks out is r/canada_sub but there have been others that have a decidedly right lean. (I'm not Canadian) Several subs that used to show up in r/popular before no longer do or the do so with reduced frequency. r/news, r/worldnews, r/politics. In fact, when the Trump indictment was announced, it was nowhere to be seen on r/popular for several hours while it was the top topic on Lemmy and Mastodon. I'm not keeping stats on this; just seat of the pants I've noticed a subtle shift in the content.
  - soneil 3y ago
    I’ve also noticed a huge shift in which topics it tries to suggest, but I suspect it’s natural selection rather than intent. It feels like the ‘strike’ allowed subs which didn’t participate to rank higher, and it seems those gains are self-reinforcing (more members/participation lead to greater prominence, which leads to higher placement, which becomes circular). I don’t like the results, but I’m not convinced it was intentional- more just self-selection between which communities did and didn’t participate.
    - CharlieDigital 3y ago
      Could be; but it's interesting that several of the subs like r/amiugly and r/truerateme and such have relatively low sub numbers and I do not recall seeing them at all until just a few weeks back.
jedilance 3y ago
I personally stopped visiting Reddit on regular basis after all these actually.
Bloodhail 3y ago
Reddit has a massive botting and scamming problem, but they provide almost no meaningful ways for mods to counteract it. It's the same issue that other social media sites like Twitter have. Bots pad their user metrics, so it's in their best interest to look the other way. This has resulted in a degradation of content quality, especially so in the last three years with the rise of short-form garbage. A loss of mods who had genuine passion for their respective sub-communities will only worsen the problem. I give it a few years before Reddit is dominated by bots talking to one another using ChatGPT-generated swill.
random97531 3y ago
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yanderekko 3y ago
>Yet Reddit removed both moderators from their positions this summer because the mods refused to end r/canning's protest against Reddit and its new API fees; the protest had made the entire subreddit "read only." Now, the ousted mods fear that r/canning could become subject to unsafe advice that goes unnoticed by new moderators. "My biggest fear with all this is that someone will follow an unsafe recipe posted on the sub and get badly sick or killed by it," Dromio05 told me. bikespokememe.jpg I totally buy the argument that the protest probably lead to their being some sort of marginal shift from hobbyist moderators to admin-friendly powermods. But to this point: - This happened to the extent that hobbyist mods rendered their own forums unusable on an indeterminate basis. They chose the hill they died on, and cannot claim they were acting in the interests of their community in doing so. - Powermods dominated wide swaths of the site prior to the protests and this sort of concern was never raised (there were concerns about powermods, but not powermods vs. hobbyist mods.) So the entire article likely represents an act of concern trolling. The underlying point may still be valid, but its bad-faith motivations deserve to be called out.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >Powermods dominated wide swaths of the site prior to the protests and this sort of concern was never raised I don't think most powermods really revolted. Many probably have financial motivations to keep running, so they can see inconvvinence as the cost of doing business. I am very worried about the "hobbyist mods". And yea, they weren't talked about for the same reason you don't talk about stuff you expect is "the ideal". If a mod is kind, has clear rules, and is even a domain expert in some cases, what is there to talk about? Reddit isn't like HackerNews where they will praise the Dangs of their site everynow and then. Mods are also pseudoanonymous and as such praise is minimized, or reduced to zero. You don't know what you have until it's gone.
  - yanderekko 3y ago
    >I don't think most powermods really revolted Well, at least a substantial minority did. >I am very worried about the "hobbyist mods". And yea, they weren't talked about for the same reason you don't talk about stuff you expect is "the ideal". If a mod is kind, has clear rules, and is even a domain expert in some cases, what is there to talk about? Actually, this raises a good point. The hobbyist mods who were yeeted were probably disproportionately likely to be the sort of intemperate, authoritarian mods that given Reddit mods a bad name. Additionally, these mods are probably the most likely to see the easing of their authoritarian policies as tantamount to opening the doors to hatred, spam, misinformation, etc. Can their judgment really be trusted?
simonblack 3y ago
Even worse is Reddit's use of Moderator-Bots that can remove posts for any ridiculous reason they feel like making up, such as 'Self-post too short'. Reddit jumped the shark long ago with its censoring of posts.
GoofballJones 3y ago
It's like the owners and managers of Reddit have no idea how Reddit operates. "Mods? Who needs mods? Or users? That's not what our company is about. And what is a "subreddit?"".
Anon_Forever 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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Anon_Forever 3y ago
Not sure why this was [dead], but I can't delete it now: Ah yes, the newspeak term "at risk" for describing a community that's better off after delusional fascistic mods we're rightfully removed. It's like an abusive partner that tells their victim how shitty their life would be without them. Subreddits are not mods' personal fiefdoms. They learned the hard way who actually owns the platform (Reddit Inc.), and who the platform serves (the users).

57 points by robin_reala 3y ago

Did anybody expect Reddit to become a better place after all what happened a couple of weeks ago? I was never a big Reddit user, but I'm sure as hell not going to be one in the future.

dsgnr 3y ago
I was a big reddit user, with 2 small subreddits I started and managed, and I abandoned things and havent gone back. Losing the addiction has been healthy. Going back is laughable.
- Jgrubb 3y ago
  I’m not sure if this is a downside yet, but I know even less of what’s going on in the world since July, having bailed on Twitter and FB years earlier and having made a conscious decision to stop purposefully consuming “news” a few years ago. Reddit was the only site I would scroll by world events to learn of their happening. (clearly I’m still here, but it’s a bit more niche)
  - Kye 3y ago
    An RSS feed for you: https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=when:24h+allinurl:apnews.com https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=when:24h+allinurl:apnew...
bombcar 3y ago
Has there ever been an online community that improves over time? At best it seems they grow, then they’re doomed to either maintain at a certain level (like HN), or slowly slump into the melt and burn away.
mythhabit 3y ago
What happened "a couple of weeks ago"?
- Devasta 3y ago
  Reddit started charging huge money for API access. Thing is, reddits leadership are wildly incompetent and those APIs were relied upon by the mods to actually handle the vast oceans of posts that go on each day. Its left the mods with greatly increased workload as they now need to use the crappy tools Reddit gives them, and for some communities like the folks on /r/blind the site is totally unusable. Most subreddits have ended the protests, and those that don't have had their mod teams forceably replaced, usually be people who are more interested in being mods than actually moderating. Reddit had hundreds, if not a thousand people willing to work for free managing their site for them and they still screwed it up, just unbelievable stuff.
  - cimov 3y ago
    Perhaps that's a good thing in some ways. The communities with only a very light-touch moderation to get rid of spam are often the most enjoyable, where you can speak relatively freely without the looming threat of some overbearing mod censoring and banning you because they don't like your opinion.
  - sentientslug 3y ago
    API access is still free for moderation and accessibility tools. It’s just third party clients with high API usage that were effectively killed with the pricing change.
    - robin_reala 3y ago
      For non-commercial accessibility tools. Because Reddit doesn’t know how to fix accessibility in their own app. A shitshow, either way you look at it.
      - Devasta 3y ago
everdrive 3y ago
I agree with your sentiment, but I do wonder what could replace reddit. It's true that the larger subreddits have been pretty terrible for years. However, reddit has often been the _only_ good source for useful and true user-sourced information. What vacuum should I buy? How can I get some old PS2 game to run on my steam deck? Can I disable the telematics system on a Toyota Tacoma? etc. It's easy to see this sort of access to information disappearing, and it's also easy to imagine that even if it didn't die now, it would soon be destroyed by large-scale usage of AI. I think the internet very briefly put a lot of power in the hands of users, but the pendulum is swinging back hard.
- drukenemo 3y ago
  I completely agree and it often baffles me the lack of nuance I see here on HN. “Reddit became crap”. No it didn’t. Maybe it’s less appealing and valuable than in the past, but it certainly still is a goldmine in more niche subreddits. Or simply to have a laugh at r/funny.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    There's goldmine of information on 4chan's niche boards as well. But people referring to "4chan" the website tend to talk about the wide strokes of communities. It's the same with reddit. Sure, I do appreciate some small gaming communities that I can't find anywhere else, but it's not what the site cares about, nor what many people see when they go to reddit.com. You need to search for those communities,and they aren't guaranteed to be good. Or active for that matter.
- Kye 3y ago
  What we're seeing is the downsides of centralizing. Replacing Reddit would require putting everything in one place again, and would likely lead to the same result down the road. There are still active forums for most topics, and site search works just as well. What changes is a return to the old world where you can't put in one site to get it all anymore.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
pndy 3y ago
This isn't "a couple of weeks ago" issue. The enshittification most likely begin when they rolled this modern design and used variety of darkpatterns on existing users to trick them to move into updated interface. This was all done to attract younger audience who has short attention spawn and who doesn't mind ads and sponsored content served via this bulky interface that keeps you interacting with site under dozens of "load more" elements. Tho, perhaps the slow decay of site started even earlier with arrival of Ellen Pao; content already was spiraling down at that time I don't think there's any hope for reddit; I expect that site will be even more sanitized to the point no "unsafe" content will be allowed to be posted. There are subs around that already are being used as platform for spreading PR of companies, which have nothing in common with these exotic truly run by ordinary people small communities.

perteraul 3y ago

Are we witnessing yet-another platform making solid steps towards extinction?

watwut 3y ago
I would not say so. Just getting worst and less used. But, it is very far from extinction.
- wds 3y ago
  Digg is 'still around', too.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
Perhaps, but it needs a proper competitor before it truly fades to irrelevancy.
- bezier-curve 3y ago
  Maybe it doesn't need a competitor but something that supersedes its design while staying inside the community of communities structure. Most Reddit clones do nothing better than Reddit, they just attempt to painstakingly emulate it. Karma is gamed too easily. Why hasn't someone tried to rank content by a mix of votes and quality indicators (grammar checks, NLP sentiment, engagement)? Innovation usually disrupts.

mcphage 3y ago

Reddit has gotten very aggressive about pushing random subs onto you. I’ve really come to loathe the phrase “Because you interacted with a similar community”. I have muted so many subs, I’m getting sick of the site.

drivers99 3y ago
Must be an app thing. I use https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com and don’t get that.
- markx2 3y ago
  Agreed. I use old.reddit.com + umatrix + ublock + custom css with tampermonkey I now see nothing they want me to see. I am very happy to leech. Said as a previous mod who helped grow a sub from <25k users to almost 1 million.
  - landmass 3y ago
    My participation has changed since the API change. I use old.reddit and uBlock Origin as I always have. I limit myself to scanning a few sub-reddits to ensure nothing bad has happened to Bitwarden and Yubikey, I don't log in and certainly don't contribute as I used to. If/when old.reddit stops functioning I'll stop even that low level of participation.
jvm___ 3y ago
Facebook's recommended images are even worse. [picture of a surveyors dot on the ground] "This dot in a field in Wisconsin is the center of the world. The other points are inaccessible due to water, but this tiny dot is..." [picture of a dead something with a pig snout completely covered in farmers field mud] "This 30,000 year old cave bear was found with DNA still extractable."
- pndy 3y ago
  > Facebook's recommended images are even worse. I did log into Messenger (Lite version if that matters) quite recently - while I'm not using site anymore for more than 10 years or so, I do periodically check if people on my friends list want something. So I started scrolling thru contact list to see who's online and at some point some random people started to appear. Some whom I sent once a message, then even totally random ones I never heard about (perhaps some cross-friends pairing happen) and next, some local celebrities that perhaps I'd like to talk to acc. to fb, and some weird profiles pulled out of nowhere.

javcasas 3y ago

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bagels 3y ago
This concept really could have been better served by a different name. It's hard to take it seriously with this name.
- kibwen 3y ago
  Enshittification is a good name because it's deliberately provocative and attention-grabbing. There's no need to sugarcoat what these shitty companies are doing.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >There's no need to sugarcoat what these shitty companies are doing. if you're fine with it remaining as internet ramblings, sure. If you want anyone serious to challenge these companiies, then you already made their jobs harder to do. But I guess the internet never really cared about change. Just a place to yell into the void.
- dghughes 3y ago
  Agreed. It's 14 year old boy drama trying to sound intelligent.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Depends on ones cultural lense. I think it's quite succinct and memorable.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    the cultural lens of "it's not okay to casually curse in professional settings" doesn't agree, unfortunately.

TMWNN 3y ago

[flagged]

watwut 3y ago
> Most mods know that there are dozens/hundreds of other similar volunteers ready to take their place Not really. There are not.
- TMWNN 3y ago
  As I said, the fear of being replaced is exactly what the /r/formula1 mods cited. <https://np.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/14b5vu3/rformula1_and_the_canadian_gp_weekend/ https://np.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/14b5vu3/rformula1_...> "My small subreddit can't find people who want to be mods!", you say. That may be true, but those are also, by and large, not the subreddits that were closed in the first place.
  - watwut 3y ago
    Communities in the big subreddits have problems to find mods too. The mods from elsewhere do not cut it, because they wont share community values and will destroy the community. And result are "quality concerns".
cimov 3y ago
> The Challenor mess should never have happened, but at least the person was fired by Reddit. I'm amazed he was hired in the first place, they must not have bothered to do any background checks at all. I think it revealed a lot ideologically about how Reddit operates, in particular this likely explains some of the more controversial subreddit bans in recent years.
- TMWNN 3y ago
  > I think it revealed a lot ideologically about how Reddit operates, in particular this likely explains some of the more controversial subreddit bans in recent years. I have no doubt that there are hundreds of Challenors who are "working" as Reddit mods. "Doreen", the /r/antiwork head mod who got embarrassed on national television, <https://mashable.com/article/antiwork-subreddit-fox-news-interview https://mashable.com/article/antiwork-subreddit-fox-news-int...> is merely a famous example. Similarly, back when the SCP-2721 <https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/protected:scp-2721 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/protected:scp-2721> controversy <https://np.reddit.com/r/SCP/comments/8ubmjp/so_they_dissabled_2721s_ratings/ https://np.reddit.com/r/SCP/comments/8ubmjp/so_they_dissable...> occurred, wiki mod Decibelles stated that a majority of (I think one dozen) SCP mods (including Decibelles), is transvestite. A majority!

jiofj 3y ago

If the moderators of canning cared so much about their community they wouldn't have closed it I guess.

mschuster91 3y ago
The problem is that Reddit's own features for moderators are abysmal. I don't know what Reddit's 2.000 employees are doing all day, but people have lamented that for years now without much significant change - and then Reddit just shut down the public API, which made moderation work muuuch more difficult.
- jiofj 3y ago
  If they don't want to moderate for whatever reason (including shortcomings in the moderation tools) that's ok - I also don't want to moderate. What you can't do is close the community. If you care about it it makes more sense to have the usual spam here and there than to completely block every discussion. That's low and petty.
  - z500 3y ago
    Reddit already closes unmoderated subs specifically so they won't fill up with spam, so what's the difference?

nickpeterson 3y ago

Sort of a side question, but what is the state of the art in open source community hosting? I know a bit about tools like Zulip, but was thinking something more like forums. They feel very dated, which surprises me since Reddit seems a straightforward thing to compete against.

Freak_NL 3y ago
Discourse perhaps? I've seen it in use in a few places; it has a modern look and feel to it at least. https://discourse.org/ https://discourse.org/
- pelagicAustral 3y ago
  I really dislike this community paradigm. The design, I actually prefer the good old forums like vBulletin or IPB. Discourse is a nice project, but I really don't dig this marriage between forum and Q&A.
LeSaucy 3y ago
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy is a social link aggregator very similar to Reddit, powered by fediverse. Think of it like anyone can host an instance for their community, and all instances can interact with each other. For example check out the instance at https://beehaw.org/ https://beehaw.org/
- jaggs 3y ago
  I use old.lemmy.world for a Reddit classic experience.
  - goplayoutside 3y ago
    There's also a *monkey script for an old.reddit UI[1] (no affiliation). 1. https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey
- 3y ago

brisdak 3y ago

Not sure if bias but I feel like the quality of content on reddit has gone downhill since the mod purge and the killing of 3rd party apps

hellweaver666 3y ago
You just have to sign-out and look at the homepage to see this. It's all attention grabbing subs like AITAH or "amiugly" or "ratemyface" etc etc etc. All the interesting subs have withered away and died. Take /r/3dprinting for example, there used to be cool new models shared there every single day, now it's just people sharing pictures of benchies, globs of spaghetti and the odd question from someone that hasn't done any research.
- nunez 3y ago
  It's been that way for a while before the Great Purge; at least a few years. This was a driver behind me unsubscribing from all of my subs and grouping them into multireddits instead and enjoying a blank front page.
  - gingerrr 3y ago
    It's both. I'd also done the same with multis but kept a "casuals" multi for the defaults + populars, and it had been declining in quality for a while - but it genuinely fell off a sharp cliff with the Great Purge, even my multireddits now feel like the frontpage. Cacophonous shallow dreck.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    On one hand you're correct. On the other hand: holy crap I thought all the "roast me" trends were dying down. I check back for one day and there's like 3 new variation of "AmITheAsshole" and "Roastme" each on the front page. Why?
- terribleperson 3y ago
  /r/3dprinting dropped substantially in quality when /u/billierubencamgirl left the mod team. They had fought hard against meme posts, "look at my new printer/1st print" posts, and fad print spam. They had also tried very hard to maintain useful documentation for people. It seems that keeping a subreddit high quality is a difficult and thankless job. You will be seen as the fun police and all your efforts downplayed as unnecessary.

realusername 3y ago

There's also a high number of quality contributors which just left without any ceremony. It's the same as Twitter, officially the metrics are saying that it's alright but in reality the quality contributors leaving makes it a repost ghost-town.

drumhead 3y ago

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toenail 3y ago
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ftyop 3y ago
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PrimeMcFly 3y ago

Honestly not much has changed. Some of the big subs that did their protests had their mods replaced, that's it. I'm not on any of the big ('default') subs, all the smaller ones I'm on are operating the same as they ever did, with some doing a stupid one day a week protest. That's literally the only change.

causality0 3y ago
I have the same impression. Frankly some of mine have gotten better after the replacement mods have less of a stick up their ass. A couple have even changed posting rules to be less restrictive, like allowing people to talk about ROM sites.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  > Frankly some of mine have gotten better after the replacement mods have less of a stick up their ass Very much this. A few tiny little despots got toppled, and the world goes on.
  - causality0 3y ago
    I fully supported the protests by major subreddits. My problem was that a lot of the smaller subs couldn't see the forest for the trees and, ostensibly for the sake of the survival of Reddit, destroyed themselves. The subreddit that gets five hundred posts per day bounces right back after two days offline. The niche sub that gets about ten posts per day, however, doesn't survive being shut down for two weeks. A lot of the mods seemed to be fine with the destruction of their communities as long as it was them who got to pull the trigger and not the admins.
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      > A lot of the mods seemed to be fine with the destruction of their communities as long as it was them who got to pull the trigger and not the admins. Well, yeah. Most reddit mods are in it to some extent for the power, not pure benevolence. This tracks completely.

haunter 3y ago

I haven't noticed anything. I follow some video game and hobby subs through RSS. Everything is pretty much the same.

CharlieDigital 3y ago
Definitely a shift towards our base instincts. Several subs started showing up in r/popular that never did before or as suggested subs. All along the lines of r/truerateme, r/facerating, r/rateme, r/amiugly, r/OUTFITS, etc. Never recall seeing these before the mod protests but suddenly see them all the time. All very similar in concept: attractive women posting pictures "asking for feedback". Similar to when you first sign up for TikTok or IG before you start to follow people, the content is mildly sexual in nature. Several decidedly more right wing subs are being "suggested" to me. One that sticks out is r/canada_sub but there have been others that have a decidedly right lean. (I'm not Canadian) Several subs that used to show up in r/popular before no longer do or the do so with reduced frequency. r/news, r/worldnews, r/politics. In fact, when the Trump indictment was announced, it was nowhere to be seen on r/popular for several hours while it was the top topic on Lemmy and Mastodon. I'm not keeping stats on this; just seat of the pants I've noticed a subtle shift in the content.
- soneil 3y ago
  I’ve also noticed a huge shift in which topics it tries to suggest, but I suspect it’s natural selection rather than intent. It feels like the ‘strike’ allowed subs which didn’t participate to rank higher, and it seems those gains are self-reinforcing (more members/participation lead to greater prominence, which leads to higher placement, which becomes circular). I don’t like the results, but I’m not convinced it was intentional- more just self-selection between which communities did and didn’t participate.
  - CharlieDigital 3y ago
    Could be; but it's interesting that several of the subs like r/amiugly and r/truerateme and such have relatively low sub numbers and I do not recall seeing them at all until just a few weeks back.

jedilance 3y ago

I personally stopped visiting Reddit on regular basis after all these actually.

Bloodhail 3y ago

Reddit has a massive botting and scamming problem, but they provide almost no meaningful ways for mods to counteract it. It's the same issue that other social media sites like Twitter have. Bots pad their user metrics, so it's in their best interest to look the other way. This has resulted in a degradation of content quality, especially so in the last three years with the rise of short-form garbage. A loss of mods who had genuine passion for their respective sub-communities will only worsen the problem. I give it a few years before Reddit is dominated by bots talking to one another using ChatGPT-generated swill.

random97531 3y ago

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yanderekko 3y ago

>Yet Reddit removed both moderators from their positions this summer because the mods refused to end r/canning's protest against Reddit and its new API fees; the protest had made the entire subreddit "read only." Now, the ousted mods fear that r/canning could become subject to unsafe advice that goes unnoticed by new moderators. "My biggest fear with all this is that someone will follow an unsafe recipe posted on the sub and get badly sick or killed by it," Dromio05 told me. bikespokememe.jpg I totally buy the argument that the protest probably lead to their being some sort of marginal shift from hobbyist moderators to admin-friendly powermods. But to this point: - This happened to the extent that hobbyist mods rendered their own forums unusable on an indeterminate basis. They chose the hill they died on, and cannot claim they were acting in the interests of their community in doing so. - Powermods dominated wide swaths of the site prior to the protests and this sort of concern was never raised (there were concerns about powermods, but not powermods vs. hobbyist mods.) So the entire article likely represents an act of concern trolling. The underlying point may still be valid, but its bad-faith motivations deserve to be called out.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Powermods dominated wide swaths of the site prior to the protests and this sort of concern was never raised I don't think most powermods really revolted. Many probably have financial motivations to keep running, so they can see inconvvinence as the cost of doing business. I am very worried about the "hobbyist mods". And yea, they weren't talked about for the same reason you don't talk about stuff you expect is "the ideal". If a mod is kind, has clear rules, and is even a domain expert in some cases, what is there to talk about? Reddit isn't like HackerNews where they will praise the Dangs of their site everynow and then. Mods are also pseudoanonymous and as such praise is minimized, or reduced to zero. You don't know what you have until it's gone.
- yanderekko 3y ago
  >I don't think most powermods really revolted Well, at least a substantial minority did. >I am very worried about the "hobbyist mods". And yea, they weren't talked about for the same reason you don't talk about stuff you expect is "the ideal". If a mod is kind, has clear rules, and is even a domain expert in some cases, what is there to talk about? Actually, this raises a good point. The hobbyist mods who were yeeted were probably disproportionately likely to be the sort of intemperate, authoritarian mods that given Reddit mods a bad name. Additionally, these mods are probably the most likely to see the easing of their authoritarian policies as tantamount to opening the doors to hatred, spam, misinformation, etc. Can their judgment really be trusted?

simonblack 3y ago

Even worse is Reddit's use of Moderator-Bots that can remove posts for any ridiculous reason they feel like making up, such as 'Self-post too short'. Reddit jumped the shark long ago with its censoring of posts.

GoofballJones 3y ago

It's like the owners and managers of Reddit have no idea how Reddit operates. "Mods? Who needs mods? Or users? That's not what our company is about. And what is a "subreddit?"".

Anon_Forever 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago

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Anon_Forever 3y ago

Not sure why this was [dead], but I can't delete it now: Ah yes, the newspeak term "at risk" for describing a community that's better off after delusional fascistic mods we're rightfully removed. It's like an abusive partner that tells their victim how shitty their life would be without them. Subreddits are not mods' personal fiefdoms. They learned the hard way who actually owns the platform (Reddit Inc.), and who the platform serves (the users).