I stopped using Reddit around the time of the API fiasco. But it was already terrible back then - I was using it out of habit. The astroturfing is rife, it's insane. I feel a deep sense of sadness that the internet that I grew up on where I would learn and discover amazing and interesting people and things every day has just disappeared. I used to think it was absolutely magical. Now it's just boring.
It doesn't have to be bots or astroturf either, you get a bunch of ideologically-leaning mods to ban anyone they disagree with, make them control a bunch of subreddits (potentially), some subs will even ban you for posting in other subs
Reddit as a whole isn't interested in fairness, it's quite clear the direction they took as a site
I'm unsure how to understand your comment because both things exist on Reddit:
1. subreddits where sane things are removed and their posters are banned in order to astroturf a moderator's insane opinions as normal
2. subreddits where insane things are removed and their posters are banned, as they should be, but the banned posters (who can be very numerous!) try very hard to make it out like it's situation 1.
I was quite surprised when a bunch of years ago a unidentified aerial phenomena was sighted around Rio de Janeiro recorded and witnessed by hundreds, the military following and shooting it down, and every dedicated subreddit deleted every submission.
As someone who was really into GameFAQs forums, the enshittification cycle is just that, a predictable cycle.
First: Some company spends a ton of money building an internet community. Eventually the money siphon runs out, either for legitimate or illegitimate reasons. Then enshittification happens as advertisements and shitty posts become the norm. Eventually, people exodus, at first slowly as people look for new options. And then very rapidly as...
A new company manages to capture the imagination of these disgruntled masses and builds a new online community.
We are currently in the late stages of Reddit's enshittification cycle. They've reached IPO, the original owners have literally cashed out into the stock market and made $Billions for themselves. Their heart isn't in Reddit anymore. The time for replacement shopping has begun.
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Reddit itself was the lucky one chosen at the intersection of LUEsers exodus, Digg exodus, and Slashdot exodus.
Before Gamefaqs / LUEsers, Digg and Slashdot were the Usenet, BBS, MUDs and other such internet communities. Its never quite predictable what comes up, as the tech dramatically changes from generation to generation.
Slashdot lasted maybe 10 years (though still limps on). Digg lasted about 4 years before it started shedding users at alarming rates (and 6 years before it killed itself).
But after 20 years, Reddit still is still gaining users; It's not dying yet.
Reddit has changed so much over time. Reddit of 2006 was very different to reddit of 2008, and reddit of 2013 was very different again. By 2019, it's more or less managed to reinvent itself as an App, trading blows with Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok, almost unrecognisable.
I'm sure many people will put peak-reddit around 2019, but for me, Reddit of roughly 2011 was my favourite, and it's only been down hill from there.
I don't think Reddit can re-invent itself again, only continue to get worse. But I suspect it will still be around in 10 years.
It was quite interesting that Reddit had its own unique culture during the rage comics and narwhal era. At that time, you knew you were on Reddit and not some other site. Whereas now, it's pretty homogeneous with every other site.
I agree with you about Reddit being around in 10 years - because I don't see its users having any reason to suddenly depart, given every other large community is largely similar.
>ad its own unique culture during the rage comics and narwhal era. At that time, you knew you were on Reddit and not some other site. Whereas now, it's pretty homogeneous with every other site.
I disagree completely. You got the same thing at the same time on 4chan and other places as well.
I think it was less each place having a distinct & unique culture and more the overall culture of the internet was a huge fence between places of business/serious stuff and then the larger messy, funny, sad, sometimes offensive chaos of (mostly geeky or techy type people) side of the fence where Internet culture thrived - it wasn't a place of business, just a place to have fun and not everyone was there.
Because money, that wall has been broken down _from_ the business side of the Internet and business has leeched into almost every corner of our green space - all of that internet culture, funny cat videos, funny meme comics is all very profitable - especially if it's pushed and manicured for the masses using evil social media tactics.
That's the key, I think; the internet and all its culture has become INRT, as a stock that mostly only goes up, feeding on itself in the same way that Disney now only make live-action remakes.
Wow 2019! Haha, yeah it went downhill way way earlier for me. The digg users joining changed the site for sure but when ever "famous" novelty accounts stopped being a big thing and the first rounds of subreddit banning it started to suck. I would have assumed for most peak reddit was around whenever there was the huge rally in DC. Perhaps there are lots more users now but the quality is awful, it used to be so easy to get multiple experts on anything to answer your questions.
> it used to be so easy to get multiple experts on anything to answer your questions.
It’s still possible to get useful answers on niche topics, but you will also get flooded with questionable sub-specific dogma, and god forbid your question is the tiniest bit obvious/unnecessary (according to the “experts” of course, never mind that it clearly wasn’t obvious to the asker)
I call that the stackoverflow effect, where once a topical community reaches a certain information density anything that does not go neatly on the very top of the current pile is mercilessly destroyed.
It's akin to the concept of "climbing a ladder to the top and then pulling the ladder up behind you", and imho it's the alarm bell that indicates that a community has died, even if the community itself does not know it yet.
Stack Overflow itself is also being more overtly destroyed by the corporation that owns it. Did you know they de-attributed Luigi Mangione's posts in blatant violation of their license agreement to his content?
I think it's just called the passing of time. Our bodies build up senescent cells. Our personalities do it as we move through being new adults in the world to old people shouting at clouds. You have something new and novel and empty and you add two pieces of knowledge/whatever and wow this is lively useful discussion. Over time you have 20,000 bits of knowledge/songs in the genre/etc and those two new bits aren't that exciting, get lost in the noise, get canceled by what came before.
In theory, yes, but there's also an insularization, where the older posters who got there first and accumulated clout inside of the group now actively prevent new users from participating until they have completely consumed the knowledge of the group, and even then they might still be excluded just for having an account that isn't old enough or that hasn't generated enough value to the group.
It would be like having to read and parse every book in the Library in order to get feedback on your short story, and half the time the reviewers will just throw your story in the trash before even reading the cover.
I'm basing my "still growing" assessment off google trends, nobody thinks to bot that. The trends for Slashdot and Digg [0] more or less match up with when they died. While reddit [1] is still growing (at least up until 3 months ago, but that's most likely noise). You really have to zoom into the right date range to not have Reddit dwarf Slashdot/Digg [2].
The new users aren't exactly high quality, but they seem to exist. Or at least advertisers think they exist.... shrug.
For some other fun trends, checkout Facebook which has been clearly declining since 2012, or Instagram which appears to have been declining since 2023... not entirely sure why.
To be fair, adding "reddit" to your search query has been one of the few ways to get away from the SEO garbage to the point where it's become a thing. So I'm not sure how effective Google trends is as a measurement.
I know Reddit has become infested with junk recently, but it just shows how bad the broader-internet has become that I'd rather search in Reddit than walk in that swamp.
chatgptbots really saved that metric. the new scams putting the old scams on life support . maybe the next big thing can keep the llm-multimarketscheme alive. Forever growth by forever bigger scams.
Nah, this is just time passing. Us early internet users are just getting older and discovering the passage of time.
Ever find a great new restaurant? Small, quirky, but good? Things pick up, it grows, maybe moves to a new location. Everything's shiny and great. It's busy and feels fun to know about? Then over time it becomes less fun. The staff aren't working at some cool new place, but just working the same job over and over and you can tell. The newness wears off, and things start to just wear. A couple years later you reconnect with someone you haven't seen in a while and they recommend the place. You haven't been there forever. You go and it's a ghost of what it was. That wasn't enshitification, just the passing of time.
Enjoy the cool moments/places/songs/movies for what they are, don't expect them to be some sort of constant in life. 'music sucks now, movies suck now, XYZ niche thing fandom loves sucks now'. Nah. It's the same that it's ever been. But time has passed yet you want that moment of discovering XYZ to go for ever because it was so good, but it can't. Time won't allow that.
Wow, a GameFAQs reference. I remember hanging on Z-Tack and some other Atari 2600 message board with silly fake ranks and weird harmless shenanigans I can't even clearly recall. Then there was Magician Type 0, DSL forums, and Outboards, and "Ace" something, and darkpage.net, all clones of the Gamefaqs message board design in variations of PHP and ASP.net. It's how I got into programming. And here we are.
The sad part to me is that there's not many online communities left that focus on helping sharing their knowledge with newcomers. I'm excluding discord doxxing generation communities here, because they are really unhelpful for newbies and the opposite of a safe learning environment for kids.
When I built my first website, xhtmlforum and selfhtml forum was amazing as it was a wiki combined with a community around it. The same for pentesting and learning how to solve CTFs. The same for electronics and how to build, etch, and debug motherboards for 6502/i386/etc. I could go on and on forever, but I loved the web for what it was: It always had an answer for anything that I could ever imagine, with other people wanting to build the same cool things, together, as a community.
And that spirit is kind of gone now. Now the statistical majority(?) wants to get famous and rich and be instagram and tiktok idols, without building something to get there. The quick buck has the priority now, and there's maybe some dozens of youtubers left that want to make knowledge on a beginner level accessible, which I have huge respect for. But video content is temporary, especially on platforms with shitty discovery methods like Youtube.
But the wikis and communities? Haha, good luck finding posts from pre 2010 with google. They've all been wiped out.
Just last week I wanted to explain to some junior dev what XHTML1.1 strict and the idea of separation of concerns was about when we still cared about accessibility. Google gave me 2 useful blog posts post-2017, 2 youtube videos of someone raging about it and favoring web components. And that was it. I was flabbergasted how much knowledge is lost.
There is no point in learning new ideas and concepts if you forgot how we got there, because we'll end up in an endless loop of repeating ourself. And I think the worst nightmare of 1984 has come true already. Google already controls the present, and the web archive might be nice but is absolutely useless as a search engine.
I wanted to start a pentest/CTF community because that's what I care most about nowadays. But turns out there's not many web forum software that's left and not enshittified yet that came after the PHP age. Now I'm writing my own markdown based forum software, with a webasm frontend for it and the idea to make all posts storable/shareable as markdown threads.
I don't want knowledge to get lost again in databases.
>> many web forum software that's left and not enshittified yet that came after the PHP age
I am a part of a community that is run on a slightly modded FluxBB. It has more comments per hour than hacker news. Maybe even 10 times more. And new threads are started almost daily. I think this particular forum is almost ten years old?
We did change platforms, but this was more then 7 years ago for sure.
And the code base isn't maintained, since moderators aren't very tech savvy.
That's to say: php forums are pretty robust, don't discount them! You can always migrate, if something better will come up. Older versions are just as good, as the enshittified ones.
It's highly specific to the country (and also to the social media where the community was once established), so I doubt it is relevant to you.
But think fandom non-english space with historical empathizes on female and lgbt members under antilgbt government.
Any social media on this particular language that wants to grow large will swiftly remove half of the discussions we can have there. Keeping separate from opinionated socially-aligned people is also a plus
I think the enshittification will continue no matter what. Amazon Prime Video used to be ad-free for paying users, until they made it "some ads" unless you paid for a higher tier.
There is no amount of money that you can pay a modern corporation that will satisfy it. It perpetually wants one more dollar from you.
This works for things you are actively interested in, but old Reddit was cool in that random things would pop up with posts from experts related to the topic. You could get exposed to all kinds of interesting stuff outside your normal focus. And for your focus it was amazing. Not just the same 30 regular contributors in the small walled gardens we now inhabit/self curate.
I enjoy making music. I've started commenting on peoples youtube/soundcloud. And I've made a small circle of people to talk with, but it's so far removed from what Reddit used to provide before it became a 'content feed'.
