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Reddit has been a cesspit of recycled pablum, populist image macros and low effort reply comments for more than a decade. Enthusiast subreddits are astroturfed
by alexjplant 9mo ago
Reddit has been a cesspit of recycled pablum, populist image macros and low effort reply comments for more than a decade. Enthusiast subreddits are astroturfed to hell and back by people with a Shopify storefront and a dream trying to growth hack their way to a hockey stick. The low barrier to entry to each community means that this vapid culture eventually diffuses itself across subreddits that might otherwise be good. It's a postmodern toilet that flushes into its own tank.
I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB and Invision forums. Even those are being bought up by marketing companies to sell ads and transformed with social media features... Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds.
- SauntSolaire 9mo agoAgreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.
- slumberlust 9mo agoReddit could pay the mods. Let us not act like spam accounts are undesirable for the lil piggy. MAU doesn't differentiate between real and fake users.
- shevy-java 9mo agoBut one problem on reddit were the mods. It was why I retired. Bots and AI spam can be annoying but mods that lock you out of discussions are much worse.
- AngryData 9mo agoYeah the reddit mod system is just ripe for abuse. They have little to no accountability, the people acting as police were the same people you appealed to and who acted as judge, there was a clear reddit mod political class with certain users or groups of users controlling significant swaths of subreddits, and with it judgements in 1 sub might get you banned from other subs. And if someone got enough mod shills in a sub they could oust original or well liked mods. And there is clear financial gains and benefits to doing all of that. Meanwhile regular users that built the site and made it a place people wanted to visit had basically zero say or influence on any of it.
- AlexeyBelov 9mo agoI remember your story differently. You were consistently trolling /r/programming from multiple accounts for years (shevegen, shevy-ruby, shevy-java). You relied on the fact that /r/programming pretty much wasn't moderated at all.
- intended 9mo agoI heartily recommend people volunteer for moderation. There’s tons of subs that need help, and the more diversity of voices in conversations like this, the better. Modding is a shit show, and being on the other side can be quite the experience. The more people who can chime in, the better as a society we can figure out what needs to be done. Right now it’s rough for users, and insane for mods.
- embedding-shape 9mo ago> give subreddit moderators a fighting chance Moderators are part of the problem really, there are a handful of moderators holding the reins over all the popular subreddits, and "smaller" (even big ones) subreddits suffer from the same problem. As an example, r/MistralAI, r/LocalLLaMA, r/ChatGPT, r/OpenAI and r/grok are all run by the same person. The only survivable places on reddit left are the subreddits with small amount of contributors that aren't trying to gain something by participating and organizing. But they're so few.
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago> But they're so few. Given how many subreddits there, I have to ask if you have statistics to back up this claim. My intuition is that people have problems with a bunch of popular subreddits, but the vast majority of subreddits are just fine. I have no statistics to back up this intuition. Do you?
- junofan 9mo agoThere’s a whole vibrant industry of people you can pay to market whatever you want on Reddit. They can’t all be competing for the same few popular subreddits. They must be differentiated by targeting niche subreddits.
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo agoThere's about 138,000 active subreddits. I don't believe that this industry is targetting even a majority of them.
- bostik 9mo agoThat number alone is a very good reason for the industry to target as much of it as they can / dare. You say "sudreddit". Marketing teams say "self-selecting target segment".
- 9mo ago
- crooked-v 9mo agoSomething Awful has retained a weirdly high level of quality these days by (still) charging :tenbux: to register an account.
- Bender 9mo agoAlso survived the great cancellation [1] [1] - https://www.somethingawful.com/cliff-yablonski/i-hate-you-01/ https://www.somethingawful.com/cliff-yablonski/i-hate-you-01...
- isk517 9mo agoAlso manages to sustain itself on it's own weird brand of whales, a handful of disgruntled users with enough money to just keep buying accounts using random characters as a username just to get immediately banned after their first post. Some taking a dump in the middle of your living room isn't so bad if they are paying your rent and you can just kick them back out.
- alisonatwork 9mo ago$1 is far too low to discourage abuse. Spammers and scammers will still make exponential returns. PR agencies are paid tens of thousands to craft narratives for their clients. With institutional actors the sky is the limit. Even just your average basement dwelling troll might consider it worth their while to pay a dollar for a sock puppet account.
- rchaud 9mo agoRequiring a valid payment method before posting will take out 99.9% of spammers and trolls. Newspapers discovered this when they went behind paywalls. SomethingAwful discovered this 20 years ago when they required $10 to create an account.
- leptons 9mo agoLol, I guess I'm glad I checked-out from reddit before the whole "AI" thing took off. My life is honestly way better without reddit. HN isn't far behind though, honestly. The less time I spend here, the better for everything else going on in my life. HN has at least been somewhat useful for my day-job and employment future.
- shevy-java 9mo agophpBB was quite nice, but you must remember that people used phpBB less and less over the years. Many phpBB style webforums are dead, and died before discourse etc... came about. People's habits changed. I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.
- Arainach 9mo agoThe legal landscape has also changed. 20 years ago I helped run a web forum, but with today's legal landscape - DMCA in the US, various different laws in the EU and other countries - I would never do so. The amount of liability on the host for user-created content is far too high.
- int_19h 9mo agoDMCA was already a thing 20 years ago?
- pests 9mo agohe ran a forum 20 years ago, but today, with things like DMCA.....
- direwolf20 9mo agoDMCA was already a thing 20 years ago
- pests 9mo agoWow that seems like yesterday. Time really does fly. Yeah you are correct I didn't think of the actual dates.
- Manuel_D 9mo agoIt's closer to 30 now, passed in 1998.
- Bender 9mo ago
- AlienRobot 9mo agoThe craziest thing about Reddit for me is how most communities forbid "self-promotion." To me that sounds like a thing only admins would want because it keeps users on the site/app, but this is enforced by moderators for some reason and a lot of drama has occurred over banning creators over these silly rules. It's a place that originally was a link-sharing platform, where you literally can't share a link to your own website on any subreddit. At least not if you are honest about it. It's okay if you pretend you aren't associated to it. Reddit has become essentially watermarked videos posted by people pretending they aren't the creator of the video, twitter screenshots with 10 likes posted by people pretending they aren't the user who tweeted the tweet, and links to news websites posted by users whose only activity on reddit seems to be posting the same link to 5 different subreddits as if it was their job, because it probably is.
- CuriouslyC 9mo agoI'm not a good marketer, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but the only thing I've found that works is replying to relevant comments in popular threads with neutral looking promotional material (e.g. github links). A well placed reply in a hot thread will easily drive 10x the value of a blog post.
- cube00 9mo agoSadly a few have started doing this on HN now. (Short low effort comment agreeing with parent comment) I wrote more about this here...<url>
- CuriouslyC 9mo agoI think it's possible to do it ethically, but anything that works is going to get gamed. It's a pretty dark dystopian future where the only way for anyone to hear about anything is advertising or paid promotion by influencers because we're so aggressive about policing individuals marketing themselves.
- Revolution1120 9mo ago
- whatshisface 9mo agoAfter a certain point, these threads start sounding like, "I hate my rights. I hate the town square. There is litter in the common square. There is a child outdoors. Take away my pubic square."
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Aeglaecia 9mo agoI think it sounds more like "why is the town square covered in ads now , who installed actual mantraps in the town square , why is everything we do in the town square used against us , town squares were fine less than two decades ago and we let the rich parasitize them for profit"
- heavyset_go 9mo agoExcept you're doing nothing about that besides going "let's keep the town square terrible" and ensuring kids are 100% unprepared for the way the modern world communicates in the 21st century lol
- collingreen 9mo agoWhich part is "keep the town square terrible"?
- heavyset_go 9mo agoThe part where social media goes completely unchanged except for banning some kids from communicating with their friends
- yallpendantools 9mo agoWhich just begs the question, how much can you really change social media? How much are you really in control of your feed? This is where the "pubic square" analogy breaks down. Besides, there are a lot of communication mediums/messaging apps that are not social media. Even back in the early 2010s I've been trying to consume social media mindfully. I made sure to follow pages with meaningful content (e.g., The Dalai Lama, The Long Now Foundation, Aeon Magazine, tech-related pages, SpaceX, Elon Musk, indie creators). I don't just add or follow blindly. Back then I could justify why my selection was "good" but even then, they were drowned out by the tedium of vacations, new restaurants, felt-cute-might-delete-later selfies. Slop/engagement bait is quicker to produce than meaningful thought-provoking content. I am also pretty sure Facebook's negative signals (unfollow, don't show me this type of content) did not work back then, at least not deterministically. If something I did not like had enough traction, it will still pop up in my feed. And of course, goes without saying that a lot of my choices aged like milk. Elon Musk turned out to be, well, Elon Musk. Some of the tech pages started shilling out crypto (and nowadays doubtless AI). The indie creators either stopped posting or fell out of favor with the algorithm which meant exodus from the platform. All that goes on top of my pre-existing grievances against my feed recommendations.
- GeoAtreides 9mo ago>Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds. On spacebattles you get infracted for chan-like (or instagram-like) behaviour. It's all about how strict moderation is. They do allow likes (but there's no algo)
- sarchertech 9mo agoOh man spacebattles is still active? I haven’t been there regularly in 20 years.
- bananaflag 9mo agoThere's also sufficientvelocity, its offshoot.
- ValentineC 9mo ago> I miss phpBB and Invision forums. As someone who's paid for an Invision Power Board licence before: I remember when they screwed all existing "lifetime/perpetual" licence holders with v3, and once again with v4.
- huflungdung 9mo ago[dead]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- insane_dreamer 9mo agoI miss slashdot 20 years ago :/
- stateofinquiry 9mo agoI still visit regularly (and have since about 2000 or so), but I agree that it is not the same as in those days. I remember feeling like I was gaining actual insight into the topics from the comments, today... much less so. Maybe being older also plays a role, but I think /. has certainly changed as well.
- CRConrad 9mo agoMore like 25-30 years, innit?
- MatejKafka 9mo agoTrue for the popular subreddits, but there are occasional niche communities that imo managed to keep the forum vibe (e.g., r/progmetal, r/cpp).
- jwr 9mo ago> I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB I'll one-up this: I miss USENET. I never understood how anyone could like phpBB, compared to USENET news readers, it was a chaotic mess. But USENET, that was great for discussing things.
- netsharc 9mo agoUsenet before the Eternal September? I remember using some forums, and there'd be pages and pages of idiots just replying "Wow, this is great, thanks OP!", or "Thanks from me too!". How the fuck do you think you're contributing rather than polluting? And nowadays they can even create Github accounts and do this...
- lizknope 9mo agoI first got on the Internet in 1991. The older students told me to lurk on Usenet and not post anything for a month or 2 to avoid getting flamed. I did and then I loved it. Once all the @aol.com people started showing up it went downhill. By 2000 it was so full of spam and garbage that I stopped going. I connected to a Usenet server last year for the first time in over 20 years and it was just full of junk.
- jwr 9mo agoFunny thing is, if we were to revive it now, it might end up as a pretty nice place, given that all the dumb crowds now have their 4chans, reddits, phpBBs, facebooks, instagrams, etc.
- CRConrad 9mo ago> Usenet before the Eternal September? Even well after it, in many places. The effect wasn't universally immediate.
- appstorelottery 9mo agoMAKE. MONEY. FAST ;-)
- afandian 9mo agoI’ve just set up a forum for up and coming bagpipe makers (not the loud Scottish kind). It’s been a real breath of fresh air seeing a community coalesce without the feeling of predators on the horizon (eg a hosting provider with misaligned incentives or astroturfers). I don’t do social media (beyond HN) much at all these days but I’m enjoying seeing it slowly take off. Using hosted Discourse. I’m glad there’s still a market for it.
- lawn 9mo agoThe problem with reddit is that subreddits vary wildly in feeling and quality. On one hand you have absolute garbage but on the other you have very niche subreddits that does feel like the internet of old.
- this_steve_j 9mo agoComment of the week!
- johnisgood 9mo agoYeah, we all had such forums set up. I personally used Vanilla Forums and phpBB. I remember I did set up Invision once and I felt great about myself. (I was a kid) :D