Reddit got big enough that the competition died off. When Digg took a nosedive there were plenty of other places with some community people could move to. Even BB forums were still a thing back then. Now pretty much everything that isn't extremely niche, and even many things that are, have been soaked up by Reddit.
Agreed. Over the past 2 years so many subreddits have devolved into what can be best described as doom scrolling ragebait, which is what reddit wants because it keeps eyeballs going for advertisers.
My city's subreddit when from "here's what's cool, going on, or new" to constant political posts. I'm Canadian and it's all but been determined that political forces are using AI posting to complain and point all problems at the current government (it's not clear who is doing it, whether far-right, foreign, or the opposition itself) on all Canadian focused subreddits.
There's also some curious stories about how a lot of the very good moderators of some of the larger ones like r/Canada, their provincial/city/regional counterparts, etc were all pushed out via various means.
I was talking to some reddit mods on a big subreddit and apparently it was to do with the free API being turned off, and a lot of moderation tools consequently stopping working. After that the subreddit took a nosedive because they couldn't control the flood of bots and bad actors.
It's important to note that reddit has embraced bots since the very beginning, with the founders using them to inflate activity. As more and more bots flood the platform, they continue to displace and drive away real humans.
My country's subreddit had a pretty big chunk of the country reading it, and it feels like the courts section of a newspaper gets posted to it every day, which I wonder how much that contributes to people's perception of the crime rate being worse than reality.
The major subreddits are almost entirely bots as well. Try posting anything authentic and you'll be banned, regardless of how old your account is or how human you appear to be. It's entirely controlled, fake discussion pretending to be authentic due to the legacy of the site. The concept of moderators being volunteers from the community died off a long time ago, and there are zero safeguards to ensure they aren't captured entities from some organization or NGO; in fact, the architecture of the site itself doesn't even view this threat as a threat.
Remember, once considered a conspiracy theory, Ghlisane Maxwell was a powermod.
Maybe I've aged out of it or something but the userbase has gotten so much more annoying (and was already annoying when I finally started using it around 2010) over the last several years, that I've almost entirely quit it. I used to mod large subs, I started a company with a group of guys I met on Reddit (and we still have our own group chat), and its just completely lost all appeal to me. It's like every user is the annoying college freshman that thinks they're an expert on all things because of half a semester of intro physics.
> lately Reddit has been feeling really like dead Internet though.
Saccharined killed. You used to be able to make some really vitriolic comments on most subs just for the lulz and only get downvoted to hell and back. But nowadays if you're not following the doxa you get perma-banned from some sub first then next day perma-banned from reddit itself. And if you comment on one of the main subs you go directly to reddit permaban.
I quoted Islamic religious leaders views on homosexuality during the height of "Free Palastine" and got a 3 day site wide ban for spreading hate and a permaban from r/worldnews.
The API change went into effect soon after and that was it for me. It was time to go anyway. Had been on the site for 12 years, never a ban or anything, but in the last year received 5-6 other sub level bans.
Yes, people seem to have misunderstandings about the uncompromising conservative views that underpin the Palestinian state.
Should Israel carpet bomb Palestine and everyone in it? No.
Should the world still tolerate states built on a foundation of homophobia, misogyny, and brain washing? Also no.
If it was up to me I'd disperse the entire population of Israel/Palestine, and then sink the whole land mass into the Mediterranean. Religious zealots fucking everything up for everyone because they genuinely think that their Santa Clause is real.
Honestly the amount of vitriolic comments has increased, and that seems to be more part of the problem than what you've presented here.
Sure, most of them are still downvoted to shit, and it's not clear how many are trolls vs true believers, but I do think it encourages the true believers that their views are more widespread.
reddit is a really weird website these days. the main subs push misinformation / ai generated garbage. the same posts are on every sub. the self post subs are almost 100% ai written. the comments which historically have been sometimes useful just feel hollow
Shifting baselines in action. 2021-22 reddit was/is terrible. It had already accepted the massive injections of venture capital and turned into facebook for all the refugees in the second half of the 2010s. Things like corporations (and for-profit human persons) posting to their own account pages instead of subreddits, the terrible redesigns, constant top-down moderation instead of letting subreddits be like forums, etc, etc.
Reddit normal is 2008-2013. This kind of normal still exists on usenet, if you seek it.
I remember that period as the one where non-nude sexual images of children was a huge problem on reddit, but it wasn't specifically against the rules. The admins were doing things like working closely with, even giving out a mod of the year award to, violenacrez, the guy who created and maintained r/jailbait and r/creepshots¹ as well as dozens of similar subs. The material itself was bad enough but it was extremely obvious to everyone that these subs were being used for people to meet and DM each other CSAM.
And then of course that period basically ended with gamergate, for whom reddit was one of the central venues to choose targets and organize harassment campaigns from. Also not against the rules at the time, since the harassment happened elsewhere and was only coordinated on reddit.
Reddit has always sucked.
¹ Both explicitly intended for sharing sexual & sexualized photos of minors
Normal reddit died when Carmen Ortiz drove Aaron Swartz to suicide over persecuting him like a terrorist for downloading a few thousand public domain scholarly articles. (Which Meta and others now do with proprietary, copyrighted material at a volume 1 million times more.)
