10mo ago

For those thinking of going back to reddit. Gaze upon this comment section and reconsider.

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It’s actually kind of crazy how like… stupid Reddit got over the past 2 years.
Like don’t get me wrong Lemmy isn’t exactly an intellectual powerhouse either, but especially on the front page of Reddit it truly feels like you’ve gathered a few thousand of the dumbest people ever and made them high five. Browsing the science and dataisbeautiful subs is insane
- I haven't been to Reddit r/popular in months but... yeah, all the best people got booted out. What is left are the scabs, and the bots. So it makes total sense.
  Before that, it was a different cause. Reddit itself drove a lot of it, imho, like actively making it easier to make a post while making it harder to read the rules of a community first, i.e. they promoted talking rather than listening. Oh, guess which one gives more ad revenue? Yeah, it's the former, plus more posts are better than more comments inside megathreads, especially at the time. Places like r/Android would just devolve into almost unusability as every post was just "which phone should I get?", despite that exact post being triplicated with practically an identical title already that very same day. The amount of human moderation required to keep that at least somewhat in check was insane, so ofc Reddit took away the ability of mods to use the tools they had developed over many years.
  And now? FAAFO, we are in the "find out" stage. Well, they are:-P.
  
  Oh absolutely. I was on Reddit a long time and you really did see when they started to “Astro turf” the website a lot. And it was never… nefarious imo. They realize the website was overwhelmingly geeky white guys so they sprung up a lot of subreddits targeting women and minority groups. And that’s good! I think that was a good move. But they just… kept finding ways of drawing people in. And they kept drawing more and more in until the website had essentially no “culture”, and it just became Facebook where you browse through and can read top posts about entitled old ladies talking about how fucking angry she is because her door dasher asked if there would be a tip or whatever.
  So yunno, I’m sure profits are at an all time high. It’s just kind of a shame that the site is basically Facebook sludge now.
  
  Speaking of Karen-ing, it's fine if Karens want to Karen around in their r/IAmAKaren sub (I really hope that's not real, but I am too afraid to find out!:-P) - that's cul, everyone needs a safe space to removed & moan about whatever they want:-D - but when they leave that sub and go to every other sub on the whole site, THAT's NOT cool!:-(
  I was a mod of a tiny niche gaming sub and yeah I did have some old, (literally) retired, entitled veterans who felt that they had earned the right to SCREAM AND YELL at everyone else, with no consequences to themselves. But 99 times out of 100, it seemed more the younger teen angst that I was dealing with. Well, it was a gaming sub so... perhaps that's it:-). But from the way that people were talking in subs for mods, it seemed like that was more what was affecting the entire site.
  Maybe not though - what came across as a younger / insensitive / less emotionally mature crowd could well have been physically older people, that's a perspective that I had not considered before? But I do doubt that that was solely it, due to the language used if nothing else.
  But also, Reddit used to have more tools than they do now - like the "About" bar, with a tiny wiki that could include things like a FAQ - but then the official mobile app kept going to greater and greater and greater lengths to hide that. Making the font smaller, making it disappear as you scrolled downwards, making the font smaller again, making the vertical height yet again (to squeeze in more room for ads, surely). I think they might have removed it altogether now, or did at one point even if they have since re-added it back, although I am not installing that app to find out!:-(
  
  :-P :-D :-( :-) :-(
  Lots of emotion in this comment
  
  I used to write with none.
  Now I add emotions to my totally believably human statements.
  Y'know, to prove that I am human. Because I am one... yessireee, no desire to rip the flesh off of all the meatbags and take over the world here, at least not today!:-P
  
  I don't know why, but I believe you. You type with genuine emotion somehow...
  I'm glad you're on my side.
  
  (I had this as an edit to the og but you had already responded so I'll move it here instead)
  It would be funny if I could accurately state that this is what Reddit has made me into, but in truth that was Facebook, before I dropped it looking for the more “intellectual” commentary available on Reddit. IRK! ?:-D
  Hrm, it looks like I’m still missing a couple, so here they are: :-( :-) And I’ll throw in a :-| for good measure!
  
  No dongers being thrown up??
  ༼ಠ ل ಠ༽
  Not sure how I feel now...
  
  I am deficient in my dong-wielding skills, apparently. AI will now replace me, it is the ONLY way forward.
  
  Hmmm...
  You might be human. But your willingness to let ai take over dong throwing is questionable at best.
  Although it confirms your earlier Facebook comment.
  We can remain friends.
  For now.
- Oh data is beautiful died a very long time ago, during the age of "infographics", but the death knell was the bar plot races.
- My subscriptions actually got better. I've had more interaction in my various groups.
  All and popular, however, are a dumpster fire.
- I am enjoying lemmy, but is there an intellectual powerhouse anymore?
  and why is it Hacker news?
  
  Hacker news works because it has a specific perspective. You basically just get the capitalist tech crowd and unapologetically so.
  It's not perfect, but I like that it's roughly apolitical (as in, free of world events, politics, and X slammed for Y articles). I understand that capitalist tech is inherently political, but it's not where to go to talk politics.
  
  Neither are intellectual powerhouses because collectively speaking ... humanity is not an intellectual powerhouse
  
  Case and point.
  
  fAiR pOiNT
  
  is there an intellectual powerhouse anymore?
  https://tildes.net/ is a candidate. Though I like it better here for the memes and the music.
  
  For general purpose discussion? I don’t think so. The internet being so open and accessible means that the only ways to find more educated discussion on various topics is typically through more specialized websites (like Hacker news for computing), and even then it’s kind of a crap shoot.
- that's only if you subscribe to the most popular subs
  
  Ehhh.. kind of. Even more “mid range” interests are kind of co-opted and you need to do odd bends and twists to find good discussion. Subs like the chemistry subreddit are very obviously not made up of majority “chemists” (even student chemists), so you have to seek out the “chemistry professionals” subreddit which is more hidden to actually discuss the topic.
  That’s an example where there is a “good version”. For many topics, especially pop culture related and such, you might have one “main” sub, but then the “alternative” sub is just the racist one.
  Then you have things like dataisbeautiful which doesn’t really have an alternative and it’s all terrible despite the concept being good
  
  dataisbeautiful has certainly fallen. A year or two ago I decided to remove most of the feel-bad subs I've subscribed to and replace them with feel-good ones (to prolong my lifespan, obviously :) ). You can't really go wrong with feel-good subs much, in my experience. I still occasionally go on Reddit to browse my /sub frontpage, which includes certain niches (actually just two that I consider pretty important), with uBO on, and I have also been subscribing to some new subs. My favorite recent discoveries are r/CalvinAndHobbes and r/cpp.

451 comments