2y ago

What was the subreddit that represented to you the best example of downspiral of quality? To me it was /r/dataisbeautiful

At first it was all about presenting data in an original looking way. In the end it was about pushing political ideas in your throat using a plain bar graph. It was not about sharing something interesting you found but about taking advantage of a captive audience.

124 comments

There's quite a few but I'll give my top 3:
r/TIFU and r/AITA - The former became a repository for preteen fanfiction and the latter became a place for confirmation bias/rhetorical questions looking for validation.
Then there's r/UnpopularOpinion which ended up being an oxymoron unto itself. I honestly don't understand how anyone thought that concept would work given that the literal point of a social media discussion platform, that utilizes an upvote/downvote system to determine visibility, is to push popular (highly upvoted) posts to the top/front. Very few people actually upvoted something that was unpopular and instead just upvoted the low hanging fruit popular opinion posts that were 'controversial' but still blatantly have a clear majority who support that side that OP took.
- r/UnpopularOpinion became a place to either validate some truly reprehensible views or say something well liked for internet points.
  
  Thank you! I was racking my brain trying to recall the word/term for it and self-validation was the one I was trying to think of for the r/AITA, but you're absolutely right - it can be applied to r/UnpopularOpinion as well.
- Most of AITA was fanfic too - just a deeply improbable amount of twins, pregnancies, weddings, and twin pregnancies at weddings. Once I stumbled upon a megapost that was all the ones about food, though, and it was great, because nearly no one bothers to make up a drama about lasagna.
  The one silver lining was it brought us the glory that was the “everything in this sub is fake” punchline story, if anyone else remembers that one.
  
  SO. MANY. WEDDINGS.
- Imo even with how the downvote/upvote in Reddit work, theoretically speaking there could be ways for r/unpopularopinion to work with some configurations. For example, automatically delete any post that gained a certain amount of upvotes. It's understandable that upvotes should be given to unpopular but interesting opinions that actually fits the sub, but since it's been shown that's not how people do it that behaviour should have been used to keep the content relevant.
  
  Change the css so that hitting the up arrow downvotes and hitting the down button up votes. The users could use the voting buttons as usual but the unpopular posts and comments would be pushed to the top.
  
  A sub "the tenth dentist" (I forget the specific name) had a system where if you agreed with it you down vote, whereas if you disagree you upvote. I think it made moderation probably kind of tricky (they also had a way to flag things as hugely improbable/karma farming) but it at least kept the spirit of truly unpopular opinions at the forefront.

r/mapporn for me. Originally it was for beautiful high quality, high-resolution maps - the standard was so high that I would have been scared to post anything myself unless I found something exceptional, but eventually it became mainly low-quality (and usually inaccurate) data maps that all get mass-upvoted for some reason.
- It became /r/people live-in cities
- Very true. The blatant inaccuracy was the worst for me. And people usually just ignored it too.
  
  Worse than ignore it, mostly they seemed to upvote it which is what drove me crazy. Unless there were huge numbers of upvote bots as well.

It wasn't really one sub in particular for me, honestly. The one big thing was the ever-increasing repost comment bots: they started to show up here and there and by now they're all over comment sections. I don't get the point of why they were created in the first place, and to me it was very analogous to the overall decline in the site. More bots, less actual discussion.
- Agreed on your point about it not just being one particular sub.
  It seemed that the comment sections on most subs just devolved to lame jokes that got repeated, or spiraled into into arguments. There were obvious exceptions, but as a whole this was my experience.
  
  The entire reason I started using RES was to filter out any comment that had the words "and my axe", "this guy's dead wife", "fun at parties", "poop knife", etc.
  
  This too, hugely. I went back to reddit today for a bit and the comments in askreddit were brief, some only one word as an initial reply to the post, or just jokes. I'm all for jokes but it really stood out how reddit has slowly evolved and I really was a boiled frog who didn't notice til I came to Lemmy and it was actual(!) discussions(!) again.

/r/menslib
It became a god damn misogynist shit show.
- It's very hard finding men's spaces that don't quickly devolve into anti-feminism and general misogyny.
  
  Why does anyone need a 'men's space'? I'm a man but I just would not be interested in that specifically. This is the Internet and there's a space for everything specifically. Sounds like a 'men's space' or a 'women's space' are bound to be filled with intolerance for the other genders.
- It made me so sad. I really enjoyed it early on because they had some real critical self reflection.
- How?

Controversial opinion maybe, but /r/AskReddit, when they introduced the rule that you couldn't put a story in the question. I absolutely LOVED reading whatever wild story someone had that prompted the question, and then reading the thread only if the story was interesting. Then they didn't want that to be the point of the sub and that ruined the magic for me. So I left.
/r/PointlessStories filled that niche though, and it never decreased in quality.
- That is how 90% of the posts in the sub ended up being the same couple questions repeated ad infinitum.
- Was thinking between AskReddit and ama
- Is that what happened? I knew something had changed but I didn't realize it I guess. It went from being a really fun sub to being so boring and the same shit every day.
  
  Yep, I said I thought it might be a controversial opinion because several months after the change I posted something saying "I hate this new rule, what do you think?" (since the mods had said that they'd solicit feedback after a while with the new rule & I never saw an actual feedback-seeking post) and got super downvoted. So I thought I was in the minority on this one.

r/antiwork before say 2020 and even worse after the Fox thing, a lot of trolls came in once it got big and where before it was fun discussions on anarchist antiwork theory that coined the name, with some venting and support or discussing how a different society might look like.
Then it became the usual political battleground like many big subs, all about who to vote for in the US and a repost place for latestagecapitalism, then all the text quitting or firing screenshots and tipping battles for some reason, which I‘d also not seen before then. Oh and all the nationalist humble bragging which seemed condescending to me as EU person towards the US people and at the same time dismissive of issues in the EU too. I guess it could be summed up with: it felt more hostile to me.
- Always liked r/workreform better. Even the name sounds less like "we are lazy shits" and more like the actual point of thoes subs.
  
  Ok cool, I liked antiwork better, because in the beginning it wasn‘t about "lets just reform it a little bit", that is just what it turned into cause I guess most people can‘t see anything between being forced to labor and not moving at all aka lazy shits.
  Abolition of work is an interesting text which imagines something else entirely, a world in which the absence of money and hierarchy could lead to replacing all work with a voluntary and playful version of it, where people may still choose to spend their time doing various activities mainly for the community and the results of their labor vs just getting someone or themselves more money. Similar to how most firefighting places and other charitable organisations or open source projects are already run, despite all capitalist logic saying we shouldn‘t give our labor for free.
  That‘s what it was about before it got snuffed out and turned into a harmless "lets change nothing on the hierarchy but maybe unionise to get more money and vote for little bit better" movement anyway. It‘s not like I think I can convince you or anyone anymore, so have your work reform and your politicians and fight the good fight for workers, you‘re certainly not alone with it, most everyone seems to enjoy all these conflicts to get wrapped up in just fine. I even support it to an extent, I‘m in the union too out of practicality.
  I just enjoyed having a space where I could talk about this theory and the hypothetical world I would enjoy instead and am lamenting it‘s loss, that‘s all.
- What happened to antiwork was fantastic. It was created by someone who was lazy and did not wanted to work. Then it got co-opted by people who wanted to work. Finally he was kicked as a mod for sticking to the name and spirit of his sub. He had his cosy sub and he was invaded by workers.
  How can you seriously claim to be pro-work but follow the banner of someone who claimed long ago to be antiwork? Why were they all shocked? Just read the sign, antiwork, it's the name!! Don't you listen to the people you chose to follow?
  watches the TV -- "Ho no, our leader is antiwork!"
  Just create your own thing.
  
  I already elaborated enough on this from my own perspective, so instead I‘ll use this next laziness dig to conform to this view of me and lazily quote something random I like:
  This struggle, for a world of free association and play, has been placed under the banner of antiwork and anarchy. Personally, I’m fond of post-work, because I think it better encapsulates my desire to both oppose and propose, to move against and beyond this detour, this phase of destruction called work, but the term antiwork does what it needs to do too. There have been attempts to co-opt and defang this liberatory project, but despite the recent online drama, this struggle is older than the Internet, and it will continue unabated, because I believe the impulse to be free is one of the defining attributes of the human experience, and this system is fundamentally unfree. Once liberated from the shackles of employment, people will be free to sloth and to slack, but also to do and to act. Humans are verbing creatures. We should fight for a world where we can verb to fulfil our needs and express ourselves instead of line pockets and destroy the Earth. All power to all the people.
  Peace.

As a data junkie I loved r/dataisbeautiful at first, but it definitely became painful. It got to the point I couldn’t looks at the charts and graphs.
- This is quite literally the only post that ever needed to be made
- I remember seeing a literally default excel chart as one of the top posts. And it wasn't upvoted in an ironic way.

/r/mapporn is another one that has gone down the spiral, it has a lot of the same problems as /r/dataisbeautiful.
I think the one that frustrated me the most was /r/datairl, where about half the people in there take the sub's name literally for some reason and think it's for actual data in real life, and not a data version of /r/meirl

r/meditation. I went there for mindfulness techniques (am atheist) and guided recommendations. This past year it started to evolve into a strange mix of gatekeeping and outright fighting. Drama and argumentative attitudes in a meditation sub...

I agree that r/dataisbeautiful turned out to be very political. What I saw was that the community was rather united in its political stance and if someone made a post that was out of line with the community's ideology they got roasted. The reaction was rarely about how the information could have been portrayed more intuitively, or how the data could have been stronger. Those reactions were for posts that were in line. Others were downright attacked. It certainly wasn't about making data beautiful
- A common sight in hyperpoliticized world.

I have a different perspective because I actually became active on Reddit for a particular lapidary marketplace - not r/gemstones. but I saw r/gemstones go from a sub extolling the science and beauty of gemstones to a marketplace full of shady dealers trying to disguise their hawking of badly cut stones with sketchy origins. posts that often had to be removed by the mods when the OP wouldn't take no for an answer.

That's how most subs end up. They have a great idea but eventually you've posted all the cool things. Now, you don't really have anything cool to post that's on topic and the sub goes downhill. Seen it happen so many times

Maybe /r/malefashionadvice?
I feel like the early days were more, "I'm a normal guy trying to learn how to dress better." I learned a lot and it improved my wardrobe/ability to dress a bit better. But it felt like it became...something else? Like it was overrun by the kind of people who would unironically buy $100 plain white t-shirts--that sort of thing.
- I worked in men's fashion for almost a decade, and can safely say that sub was hot garbage full of lousy and unhelpful advice from people with such bad taste that I'm not convinced it isn't a troll sub.
  
  At some point in the last few years, it felt like it had become a caricature of itself. Hard to explain, but it felt like every user was the guy that was going to bring back capes.
  
  It's a fashion forum on a site where the stereotypical user is a fedora wearing neckbeard, plus after a point it starts to become self-selecting. Kind of like every EDC post having a knife and flashlight, when the normal person's "every day carry" is just "wallet, keys, phone".

Everything at reddit devolved into pushing political ideals. That's what happens when nobody can respect that others are allowed to have different opinions.
- man why is kbin being swamped with nazis and "im a centrist but..." people all of a sudden, it's getting really annoying
  
  So 'people who respect other people's opinions' are nazis?
  EDIT: The amount of stuff you have to assume, lie about, and make-up is astounding. I pity you. You're making up your own enemy and that's very sad. I hope one day you can have a productive discussion without villifying anyone who dares simply say they have a different opinion than you.
  It's clear that you don't even understand the 'paradox of intolerance' that you like to misquote.
  
  He never mentioned nazis?
- nobody can respect that others are allowed to have different opinions.
  It's the paradox of tolerance social contract. I will respect their right to an opinion as long as they uphold that contract. Unfortunately, many don't.
  
  Stop misusing the 'parodox of tolerance' if you haven't actually studied it. It doesn't mean what 99% of people on reddit/lemmy think it means.
  I've seen more people shut down anyone who disagrees with them (both here and on rddit) than I have people 'not uphold the social contract'. Yes, there are trolls, but there are way more people who say 'shut up nazi!' at the first sign of even a slightly different opinion.

r/MadeMeSmile devolved into constant reposts and increasing animal abuse. The number of times I would have to report posts for unsafe shit or animal cruelty was really getting to me to me at the end there.
It was by no means the only sub that went in that direction. As others have pointed out, all of Reddit was going down the crapper but that sub for me epitomised how shit Reddit became - repost bots, comment bots, karma farming, fake content that was dangerous or abusive... it had it all.

There was a point where Ama was big enough to attract some interesting people but Reddit was still small enough that it wasn't just media circuit. Then it just became another polished, one sided, commercial, media trained nonsense

Youtubehaiku made me laugh and cry almost every post. Then it went big and tiktok, vine took that nieche spot so it went downhill. Still thoes apps doesnt do it as good as that sub did. Youtubehaiku is still one of the most subbed inactive subs. It nailed my mixed sense of humor and weirdness, loved it.

/nextfuckinglevel is so annoying when it gets to /all. Usually it's some trivial activity that is executed well or someone just doing their job. Nothing "next level" about it at all.
Also any of the large subs that get flooded with fucking TikTok videos. In the beginning everybody pointed out the shitty songs or fake laugh tracks etc, now it seems everyone just gave up and accepted it.
- That was an interesting downfall to witness that taught me a lot about how Reddit really operates. I'm the beginning, it was actually a quality alternative to the generic front page repost subs like /damnthatsinteresting.
  Then the instant it hit 1 million subscribers, the whole mod team changed, people like Turtle suddenly appeared in the name of "helping out with a sub that grew too fast for existing mods," and within a few days it was just another trash repost sun.

r/DataIsBeautiful, RIP. It was one of several -- actually, MANY -- subreddits that astounded me at first but quickly became a bore, as the quality of the posts collapsed like me without my walker. Something about the upvote/downvote system seems to encourage crap, or maybe (my increasing suspicion) the people on Reddit are now outnumbered by the bots.

/maybemaybemaybe
Originally it was a sub that had content where something hung in the balance and you weren’t sure what the outcome was going to be, sort of like nononoyes or whatever.
It turned into tiktok/scripted videos with a scripted outcome. Garbage.
/BIFL (buy it for life)
This one struggled for a while. At first it was artisanal created stuff that was low-run, high-cost, “hipster” stuff. Like hand-made boots, hand forged knives, hand-stitched leather goods like satchels. Then it was Darn Tough Socks. Lots of socks. Fjallraven. Jansport backpacks. Then people began to debate what could be BIFL because a lot of people wanted to post long-lasting electronics, but the rebuttal was always that electronics get outdated or unsupported. While these last two things were being debated, old shit that people found in their parent’s or grandma’s attic began to appear. 1970s electric carving knives. 1895 singer sewing machines. 1970s electric drills. Shit nobody had used in decades, used rarely, or couldn’t be bought anymore.
I left at that point.

r/conspiracy, it always had it fair share of nutjobs but it also had some awesome posts every once in a while in which someone would take a theory and break it down in points with good sources. The comments been even better, the top comment almost always was. Point 3, 4 and 7 have been disproven here, here and here, but 5 and 6 are solid further info here.
Over the years those high quality posts became less frequent and after the ban of td it fully turned into a right wing misinformation campaign with topics like the paradise papers completely ignored.
- Same for me. Pizzagate made me uneasy, but the way it changed after td was banned was enough for me to unsub and never go back.
- Reddit just seems like all of the subs have some kind of nefarious political agenda to them, one way or another.
  r/conspiracy is right wing r/politics is left wing r/publicfreakouts is left wing r/actualpublicfreakouts is right wing
  It’s just absolutely ridiculous and seems 100% designed to be that way. The whole thing just feels so fake
  
  Reddit has clearly gone the route of TikTok and Facebook: engagement user experience
  It’s no mystery why Reddit feels so negative these days

r/oddlysatisfying. I remember when it was actually things that were satisfying. Animations were common, and they were really good. At the end, it was just another dump for stuff that barely fit the sub.

My favourite subreddit used to be /r/mildlyinteresting, then came /r/interestingasfuck and /r/damnthatsinteresting and I honestly can't tell the difference between them any more.
- Each has become a testbench to make karma in the other two.

It was /r/TIHI for me. It started out with genuinely bizarre and borderline disturbing things being posted, and devolved into half-baked memes and shitposts.

Meirl really degenerated over the years. It went from being specifically "selfies of the soul" to being just a generic meme sub

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