6 ms·

A massive decline in post quality. I don’t know what happened but ever since the blackout only garbage gets posted. Even the quality of niche subreddits has fal

by rabbits_2002 3y ago

A massive decline in post quality. I don’t know what happened but ever since the blackout only garbage gets posted. Even the quality of niche subreddits has fallen. I think the blackout meant that all the well moderated “good” subreddits closed while the bad ones stayed open. Now the bad subreddits are more popular and have eclipsed the good subreddits. As for other websites, Lemmy and other federated aggregators have gained a bit of a foothold.

muzani 3y ago
Many of the subs had a moderator protest, where mods were purposely not moderating and major subs would fill up with porn. Then Reddit removed the old mods and it seems that it hit the same old low quality that was always there. Power vacuums filling up always lead to lower quality governance, but it seems that reddit did not have to be governed that well after all.
raverbashing 3y ago
Less good moderators + more GPT generated comments Yeah, I can see the average quality has been going down. Also I've felt less enthusiastic about contributing. I just won't bother submitting articles, writing a more insightful comment, etc Lately, they only deserve bottom of the barrel engagement
- ratg13 3y ago
  I don’t know how more people don’t notice this. I truly believe Reddit themselves are using the bots to fake participation. This was noticeable immediately after the blackout, with all of the “I’m sorry I’m not allowed to generate offensive content” comments .. which I’m sure they only learned to filter away.
davesmylie 3y ago
I don't know about "only garbage gets posted". In one of the craft based subs I moderate (5m subs - reasonably sized one), it's not so much the quality of posts has dropped, it's that the quantity has dropped, and dropped significantly. This seems to directly translate to garbage posts getting a lot more visibility and sticking around for a lot longer. The good quality posts are still there, but proportionally the garbage is much more visible now. This is enough of a problem that subscribers have been complaining about it. Not much can be done until (and only if) the number of actual contributors begins to rise again. On the other hand, I also run a tiny local city sub (maybe 20k ppl) - the number of posts has been steadily growing. I can't work that one out.
- veqq 3y ago
  > the quantity has dropped, and dropped significantly Mine's gone from 1-1.5k to 2-400 posts a day.
  - davesmylie 3y ago
    I suspect over time the numbers will grow back to where they were.... but it's gonna be a completely different crowd that what made it great originally. reddit wants to jump on to the low-effort click-drawing content bandwagon - whilst good for their numbers in short term I think low term it's not going to be great. I know for my sub, the discord community has now taken off and is probably more vibrant than the sub currently is.
- jwells89 3y ago
  That drop in quantity in hobby subs tracks pretty well with the theory that was getting tossed around a few months ago that the most frequent posters and power users disproportionally used third party apps while users of the official app had more of a tendency to be only very casual posters or just lurkers. Local subs growing despite power users vacating kind of lines up with this too — casual users seem more likely to treat Reddit like one of the bigger platforms like Facebook, seeking out subreddits that are more broadly appealing or based around locality rather than interest-based subreddits.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
As I see it, post quality declined massively starting from when the smartphone became the device most users were browsing from. No matter how proficient people claim to be with a phone keyboard, it is a medium that discourages longform text. The blackout made no difference with regard to that, the damage was already done. Post quality also declined after the 2017 redesign. The old design had a sidebar where subreddits kept a FAQ and wiki. Today, the same questions get asked again and again on many subreddits. Mods can't lock those posts and direct the author to the FAQ, because most users can't even see the FAQ. Mods who try to ensure a firm hand regularly get excoriated by the community, even by regulars on the sub, as "gatekeepers".
- bobsmooth 3y ago
  The concept of "gatekeeping" has ruined online communities. Remember when "lurk more" was the common advice to new users?
  - dmix 3y ago
    That is still the default. People backlashed against excessive modding and power abuse. Top commenters are still top commenters and guide the conversations with authority. They are still in most threads with the most upvotes. Communities are defined by the content contributors first and for most. That's something Reddit forgot. Reddit started with a little bit of modding to clean up the mess which is always needed (how it works on HN). Then every year it seemed to grow and grow, mods were now self-annoited editors of their own pet magazines. A hundred plus mods were added to major subs, where in some 50% of comments can get removed in major threads. r/science has many many threads where 75% of comments were removed, almost entirely as they didn't fit some idea of what should be discussed, what was acceptable. That's a big difference from RTFM culture on forums.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      No, people don't backlash against just "excessive modding". I have witnessed on several subs a belief that mods should never be able to lock a post of a question that comes up several times a week. The thinking goes, for example, that a person posting a discussed-to-death question isn't just looking for an answer to the question, but rather he/she is trying to socialize and feel part of a community. Therefore, mods who lock such posts are cruelly denying a person an outlet for socializing. You write about developments on major subs, but those are just that, the major subs. Niche hobby subs, on the other hand, often don't see the level of moderation they actually need in order to retain knowledgeable contributors. People with a certain level of proficiency in a hobby will bail if the discussion is predominantly newbie questions or repetitive arguments.
chaosharmonic 3y ago
Yeah, several of the more technical subs that I used to frequent either just never reopened or splintered off to Lemmy. Some (like /r/Android) actually have entire instances. I personally wrote a userscript to wipe every post comment I've ever made, and have limited my usage to a few particular subs that I still lurk (/r/LocalLLaMA in particular) just bc Lemmy still doesn't seem to have a comparable level of activity. Speaking of which I'm still trying to sort out the situation involving which instances federate with which, and where to actually set up a primary account, and what the interop situation with different Fediverse platforms is even like in general for that matter.
- intothemild 3y ago
  I think that of the people that have left Reddit. There are two basic groups. Those that replaced it with Lemmy, and those that took it as a moment to kick a habit. I think the latter is the larger group.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Replaced it with Lemmy, sure. I think you're underestimating how many others went off to other large, centralized places, even if they barely relate to reddit. Discord, Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter, etc. If they first and foremost just wanna chat, they don't need a long form forum like reddit, and I imagine most aren't making sizeable comments anyway. I'd be surprised if the mean comment length on a large sub wasn't below Twitter's character limit.
- user_7832 3y ago
  Since you mentioned r/android, I wanted to ask - have you noticed a drop in quality post the blackouts? There was a point of time when I had read nearly every post there, and all posts would either have 100+ upvotes or would get removed. Now there appear to be tons of low upvote (while legitimate) posts.
  - chaosharmonic 3y ago
    I haven't been back there much actually. My rabbit holes lately have skewed further toward desktop Linux and the Web as ecosystems, just since I generally feel Android has gotten stagnant over the last few years. Sure, foldables exist, but they're still out of a typical user's price range and are more fragile than either of the things they're replacing. And while personally I more just lost track of it because my last couple of devices have been carrier-locked initially, custom ROMs have gotten to be substantially more of a pain in the ass to daily-drive. Not only has Google opted to mostly let the core applications rot in favor of ones that depend on the Google Play libs, but SafetyNet is now being used for everything from DRM to anti-cheat. (Not that I should be picking up a Fate: G/O habit anyway, but still.) I do have hope for things in this space to get interesting again -- I think the full potential of GKIs is more of a long-term bet, and I think the landscape for Android on larger screens is a lot better this time around -- but I'm also just as interested in any way I can get my old devices running Linux at this point instead. (I am aware of PostmarketOS, but my OP7T doesn't have a port yet, and mainlining a device is as daunting a research dive as it is fascinating.) To more directly answer your question though, you might want to check Lemdroid (lemdro.id) if you haven't already.
qznc 3y ago
Lemmy certainly got a boost but I'm not sure yet that is stable. https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy Nearly half the active users have disappeared again since the peak.
sdflhasjd 3y ago
I internally laughed by ass off when I found out my mostly technology inept mother now uses lemmy instead of reddit. I entirely quit it myself, and when I do end up driving bythe more niche subreddits from typical search results, I find that it feels way more dead.
chronicsonic 3y ago
Yeah and a lot of the Ask posts are dominating and seem like bot posts by being a single simple questions.
splonk 3y ago
I concur with this. I've spoken with friends at Reddit who tell me that overall post volume is basically back up to normal, but my participation was mostly in smaller subs. Some of them got killed for lack of moderators, some are basically dead because people left and didn't come back, and a couple that are at similar levels of traffic seem to have had a lot of the good posters leave and be replaced by a bunch of shitposters, self promotion, and bots. That said, sounds to me like the conclusion Reddit will take from this is that everything's fine.
n3dm 3y ago
As if the quality was ever high? Nah, man.
slg 3y ago
>A massive decline in post quality. I don’t know what happened but ever since the blackout only garbage gets posted. Even the quality of niche subreddits has fallen. The official mobile app is also really persistent about pushing content it thinks you might like which has the unintended consequence of generalizing those niche subreddits to the degree that they lose that niche focus. For example, if every /r/movies user gets /r/criterion pushed to them, the content of /r/criterion will slowly transform to match the tastes of the /r/movie users.
gumballindie 3y ago
The blackout is one reason for a decline in quality. The other, main reason, is people not wanting their content ingested by ai. That reason applies to a steady decrease in blog content and quality.
gardenhedge 3y ago
This comes from Reddit's focus on mobile. Commenting is now quicker, shorter and likely repetitive. Users don't really read through comments, they just broadcast their thoughts like Twitter.

muzani 3y ago

Many of the subs had a moderator protest, where mods were purposely not moderating and major subs would fill up with porn. Then Reddit removed the old mods and it seems that it hit the same old low quality that was always there. Power vacuums filling up always lead to lower quality governance, but it seems that reddit did not have to be governed that well after all.

raverbashing 3y ago

Less good moderators + more GPT generated comments Yeah, I can see the average quality has been going down. Also I've felt less enthusiastic about contributing. I just won't bother submitting articles, writing a more insightful comment, etc Lately, they only deserve bottom of the barrel engagement

ratg13 3y ago
I don’t know how more people don’t notice this. I truly believe Reddit themselves are using the bots to fake participation. This was noticeable immediately after the blackout, with all of the “I’m sorry I’m not allowed to generate offensive content” comments .. which I’m sure they only learned to filter away.

davesmylie 3y ago

I don't know about "only garbage gets posted". In one of the craft based subs I moderate (5m subs - reasonably sized one), it's not so much the quality of posts has dropped, it's that the quantity has dropped, and dropped significantly. This seems to directly translate to garbage posts getting a lot more visibility and sticking around for a lot longer. The good quality posts are still there, but proportionally the garbage is much more visible now. This is enough of a problem that subscribers have been complaining about it. Not much can be done until (and only if) the number of actual contributors begins to rise again. On the other hand, I also run a tiny local city sub (maybe 20k ppl) - the number of posts has been steadily growing. I can't work that one out.

veqq 3y ago
> the quantity has dropped, and dropped significantly Mine's gone from 1-1.5k to 2-400 posts a day.
- davesmylie 3y ago
  I suspect over time the numbers will grow back to where they were.... but it's gonna be a completely different crowd that what made it great originally. reddit wants to jump on to the low-effort click-drawing content bandwagon - whilst good for their numbers in short term I think low term it's not going to be great. I know for my sub, the discord community has now taken off and is probably more vibrant than the sub currently is.
jwells89 3y ago
That drop in quantity in hobby subs tracks pretty well with the theory that was getting tossed around a few months ago that the most frequent posters and power users disproportionally used third party apps while users of the official app had more of a tendency to be only very casual posters or just lurkers. Local subs growing despite power users vacating kind of lines up with this too — casual users seem more likely to treat Reddit like one of the bigger platforms like Facebook, seeking out subreddits that are more broadly appealing or based around locality rather than interest-based subreddits.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

As I see it, post quality declined massively starting from when the smartphone became the device most users were browsing from. No matter how proficient people claim to be with a phone keyboard, it is a medium that discourages longform text. The blackout made no difference with regard to that, the damage was already done. Post quality also declined after the 2017 redesign. The old design had a sidebar where subreddits kept a FAQ and wiki. Today, the same questions get asked again and again on many subreddits. Mods can't lock those posts and direct the author to the FAQ, because most users can't even see the FAQ. Mods who try to ensure a firm hand regularly get excoriated by the community, even by regulars on the sub, as "gatekeepers".

bobsmooth 3y ago
The concept of "gatekeeping" has ruined online communities. Remember when "lurk more" was the common advice to new users?
- dmix 3y ago
  That is still the default. People backlashed against excessive modding and power abuse. Top commenters are still top commenters and guide the conversations with authority. They are still in most threads with the most upvotes. Communities are defined by the content contributors first and for most. That's something Reddit forgot. Reddit started with a little bit of modding to clean up the mess which is always needed (how it works on HN). Then every year it seemed to grow and grow, mods were now self-annoited editors of their own pet magazines. A hundred plus mods were added to major subs, where in some 50% of comments can get removed in major threads. r/science has many many threads where 75% of comments were removed, almost entirely as they didn't fit some idea of what should be discussed, what was acceptable. That's a big difference from RTFM culture on forums.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    No, people don't backlash against just "excessive modding". I have witnessed on several subs a belief that mods should never be able to lock a post of a question that comes up several times a week. The thinking goes, for example, that a person posting a discussed-to-death question isn't just looking for an answer to the question, but rather he/she is trying to socialize and feel part of a community. Therefore, mods who lock such posts are cruelly denying a person an outlet for socializing. You write about developments on major subs, but those are just that, the major subs. Niche hobby subs, on the other hand, often don't see the level of moderation they actually need in order to retain knowledgeable contributors. People with a certain level of proficiency in a hobby will bail if the discussion is predominantly newbie questions or repetitive arguments.

chaosharmonic 3y ago

Yeah, several of the more technical subs that I used to frequent either just never reopened or splintered off to Lemmy. Some (like /r/Android) actually have entire instances. I personally wrote a userscript to wipe every post comment I've ever made, and have limited my usage to a few particular subs that I still lurk (/r/LocalLLaMA in particular) just bc Lemmy still doesn't seem to have a comparable level of activity. Speaking of which I'm still trying to sort out the situation involving which instances federate with which, and where to actually set up a primary account, and what the interop situation with different Fediverse platforms is even like in general for that matter.

intothemild 3y ago
I think that of the people that have left Reddit. There are two basic groups. Those that replaced it with Lemmy, and those that took it as a moment to kick a habit. I think the latter is the larger group.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Replaced it with Lemmy, sure. I think you're underestimating how many others went off to other large, centralized places, even if they barely relate to reddit. Discord, Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter, etc. If they first and foremost just wanna chat, they don't need a long form forum like reddit, and I imagine most aren't making sizeable comments anyway. I'd be surprised if the mean comment length on a large sub wasn't below Twitter's character limit.
user_7832 3y ago
Since you mentioned r/android, I wanted to ask - have you noticed a drop in quality post the blackouts? There was a point of time when I had read nearly every post there, and all posts would either have 100+ upvotes or would get removed. Now there appear to be tons of low upvote (while legitimate) posts.
- chaosharmonic 3y ago
  I haven't been back there much actually. My rabbit holes lately have skewed further toward desktop Linux and the Web as ecosystems, just since I generally feel Android has gotten stagnant over the last few years. Sure, foldables exist, but they're still out of a typical user's price range and are more fragile than either of the things they're replacing. And while personally I more just lost track of it because my last couple of devices have been carrier-locked initially, custom ROMs have gotten to be substantially more of a pain in the ass to daily-drive. Not only has Google opted to mostly let the core applications rot in favor of ones that depend on the Google Play libs, but SafetyNet is now being used for everything from DRM to anti-cheat. (Not that I should be picking up a Fate: G/O habit anyway, but still.) I do have hope for things in this space to get interesting again -- I think the full potential of GKIs is more of a long-term bet, and I think the landscape for Android on larger screens is a lot better this time around -- but I'm also just as interested in any way I can get my old devices running Linux at this point instead. (I am aware of PostmarketOS, but my OP7T doesn't have a port yet, and mainlining a device is as daunting a research dive as it is fascinating.) To more directly answer your question though, you might want to check Lemdroid (lemdro.id) if you haven't already.

qznc 3y ago

Lemmy certainly got a boost but I'm not sure yet that is stable. https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy Nearly half the active users have disappeared again since the peak.

sdflhasjd 3y ago

I internally laughed by ass off when I found out my mostly technology inept mother now uses lemmy instead of reddit. I entirely quit it myself, and when I do end up driving bythe more niche subreddits from typical search results, I find that it feels way more dead.

chronicsonic 3y ago

Yeah and a lot of the Ask posts are dominating and seem like bot posts by being a single simple questions.

splonk 3y ago

I concur with this. I've spoken with friends at Reddit who tell me that overall post volume is basically back up to normal, but my participation was mostly in smaller subs. Some of them got killed for lack of moderators, some are basically dead because people left and didn't come back, and a couple that are at similar levels of traffic seem to have had a lot of the good posters leave and be replaced by a bunch of shitposters, self promotion, and bots. That said, sounds to me like the conclusion Reddit will take from this is that everything's fine.

n3dm 3y ago

As if the quality was ever high? Nah, man.

slg 3y ago

>A massive decline in post quality. I don’t know what happened but ever since the blackout only garbage gets posted. Even the quality of niche subreddits has fallen. The official mobile app is also really persistent about pushing content it thinks you might like which has the unintended consequence of generalizing those niche subreddits to the degree that they lose that niche focus. For example, if every /r/movies user gets /r/criterion pushed to them, the content of /r/criterion will slowly transform to match the tastes of the /r/movie users.

gumballindie 3y ago

The blackout is one reason for a decline in quality. The other, main reason, is people not wanting their content ingested by ai. That reason applies to a steady decrease in blog content and quality.

gardenhedge 3y ago

This comes from Reddit's focus on mobile. Commenting is now quicker, shorter and likely repetitive. Users don't really read through comments, they just broadcast their thoughts like Twitter.