Does anybody feel like the quality of reddit has already dropped massively?
Does anybody feel like the quality of reddit has already dropped massively?
I see a lot of comments from bootlickers on how the protests are dumb and stupid and dont work and engagement metrics are still holding but the quality of posts and comments has noticeably depreciated imo. So much so that whenever I visit the site Im actually shocked at how bad it is.
I’ve stayed off it since the blackout started, but I did visit a sub yesterday that I used to read regularly about a topic I haven’t seen covered here. I left after a few minutes because it really seemed like no one there had anything intelligent or interesting to say, but maybe I’ve forgotten just how much crap I used to scroll through before landing on something decent. Either way, I’m OK with not going back.
The quality has been declining for years now. This last thing has only made it worse, but you're likely now noticing how bad it is because you spend less time on it.
The protest won't work. It's failed in crippling reddit. Reddit will keep going, but as a shadow of its former self, with increasingly shallow discussions and increasingly crappy/old/unoriginal comment.
We'd need an objective way to measure lameness and then review a large set of posts (on a particular sub?) from a couple of months ago vs now. Criteria have to be pre-determined to avoid the post hoc fallacy.
Average words or characters per comment? Number of insults directed at other commenters (measured by someone blinded to which group they came from)? Number of "controversial" comments judged by large numbers of up and downvoted?
I dunno. I'm not doing it. Not a social scientist. Just suggesting an interesting experiment.
A lot of small, shitty subs are popping up on r/all lately, I've noticed. I used to doomscroll and only notice I'd been too far when I started seeing stuff from subs I'd never seen before, like r/artefactporn, r/justguysbeingdudes, or that weird Talylor Swift circlejerk sub. That was usually around pages 7-9, somewhere in there. That was the sign that I'd been scrolling for too long, and probably ought to either touch grass, or at least refresh the page.
Right now, for me, all three of those subs are on the first page of r/all, along with other subs I've never seen (or rarely seen) before the bottom of the barrel, like r/newsofthestupid and r/rabbits. The one from r/rabbits is on the bottom of the front page with less than 1500 upvotes.
I know this has always been an issue for the nearly 12 years I’ve used reddit, but I’ve seen a lot more of the smug redditor comments than normal that remind me of this guy’s skits. Usually I’d only see larger instances of smug know-it-alls when someone brings up religion (since some reddit atheists can’t help themselves), but I’ve personally been seeing more smartass remarks on the weirdest of things.
Has anyone else noticed that as well?
Wouldn't know, I don't even check it anymore.
I see the drop in quality over there as the more technical (the best?) people migrate to the Fediverse. As others have noted, I'm not looking forward to all Redditors coming here and dropping the quality.
Old timers like me remember the quality of Usenet prior to ISPs making it available during the Eternal September. Before then, people on Usenet were largely college students or higher. Quality on Usenet really declined when it opened up to the masses, especially after AOL made Usenet available to its subscribers.
Could be that the posts were always that bad, but now your perception is being colored by the current events. It's certainly possible that a lot of the better contributors have left, though, or at least are less active.
Yeah, ive visited a couple times out of morbid curiousity and its all just lowquality posts, nsfw/jon oliver, and people aggressively licking spez's boots while saying "but uhh fuck spez tho" with his boot in their mouth. Gonna use power delete suite here tonight just in case the api changes disable it, and use fdroids stealth reddit scraper to view the few small subs i actually care about still
I've found that the quality of Reddit comments has degraded over the past few years, with lame jokes and low-effort regurtitated talking points getting upvoted to the top of most threads. Which is fine. I'm full of lame jokes. But it's just not what I'm (mostly) interested in.
KBin, Lemmy, et al. seem to be better but also suffer from a lack of any commentary, interesting or otherwise. I expect that'll get better as more people engage over here.
On the other hand, I haven't been back to Reddit much since the great unleavening.
It sort of feels that way. I honestly can't tell whether I'm just filled with whatever the internet site equivelent is for "New Relationship Energy" or whether this place is better. It seems better.
I think part of it is the fediverse has so much potential to get better while reddit seems to have been gradually introducing more and more things I don't like.
I came to Reddit in 2019, it felt nice then (avoided anything but tech discussions, though). Since 2020 it has been consistently getting worse, maybe before that too.
Anyway, centralization is bad. I'm not coming back.
I think Reddit quality has been declining for some time.
There are two factors at work I believe. One, once something goes mainstream, you get a much broader set of the population on the platform, and much like real life, the idiots seem to be louder. More importantly though, updates to the platform deprioritized serious conversation in favor of mindless scrolling. Look at the new website, or at the official app. They are not conducive to in-depth conversation. They keep trying to distract you with posts from other communities that you don't even subscribe to, the goal is obviously to get you to keep clicking clicking clicking rather than spending a bunch of time on one page composing a well thought out reply.
And that shows. Really high quality in-depth conversations on issues of importance used to be far more common for me on Reddit. Today they are much less frequent, fewer people seem interested in real discussion or debate. And there's much more of the attitude of 'you disagree with me there for you're wrong fuck you'.
I think the recent protest and beginning of migration are going to make that even more prevalent. I think many of the smarter people who enjoy in-depth discussion and post quality comments are going to migrate to Lemmy or Kbin leaving Reddit full of idiots. I think that will actually be good for Reddit as a company, at least in the short-term, because idiots don't use ad blockers and they install the official app without thinking. It is of course killing their golden goose, but their actions suggest they have decided they prefer to do without that goose's continued services.
I started to slowly realize this with the blackout. I tried using twitter and Deviant Art more, and found them to be a lot better since I could see more cool fan art.
While I still like my reddit home feed, popular and all just suck. Its mostly all rage posts made to generate outrage. I see so much negative stuff from /r/Antiwork or /r/Politics. I signed up for cat photos. I’m not here to listen to how our world is so garbage for the 100th time.
I'd have to look there to know 🤷
TBH, the only times I've visited since this whole thing began have been from Google searches. I miss a couple of subs, but I think Lemmy/Kbin will fill that void in due time.
I've been observing the creation, expansion, and slow heat death of Reddit for a long time now (had accounts there since it opened). I think that Reddit's decisions here accelerated a decline in content quantity and quality, but the trend had been happening for a while.
I think that the biggest issue behind this decline is infrastructure based. Reddit was designed around the basic concept that the desire to post and contribute to the discussion would be reward enough to drive participation. Karma is the point system for this participation, a number that only speaks to popularity, not the quality of a post or a contributor. When the community was small, this non-specific variable served the purpose of identifying content trends, but karma is very poor at describing WHY a post or comment is popular. Eventually, instead of karma being an indicator that someone had contributed to conversation, it's only meaningful metric became one of popularity or notoriety.
This meant that where once Reddit had been a haven for enabling discussion on any topic, it became a shouting match between who could get the most upvotes. This cultural shift became very apparent after the Digg exodus, and the trend accelerated as other social media copied Reddit's voting and karma system. Of course, Reddit began feeding off of their content, which was also popularity driven, and once the content algorithms started coming into play in the mid-2010s, it created a feedback loop of popularity driven schlock that drove most real discussion to fringes of the site.
We've recently seen this dynamic start to even affect Google, whose search results are getting hammered due to Reddit's blackouts, and whose search results have been significantly dropping in quality over the last few years.
As for myself, I still browse certain reddits that I haven't found equivalents for in the Fediverse, but it's pretty clear to me that Reddit's not really a positive place for contributors - whether they be moderators or posters. To some extent, I'll miss the reach of Reddit's audience, but lets face it, most of that audience is just shitposters and bots.
Will the same trend happen in the Fediverse? Possibly, but I think there's more potential here for positive change than there ever will be in a company led by the likes of Huffman, or for that matter any company or centralized authority. Besides, it took about 15 years for Reddit to condense from being a cool place full of new ideas to the condensed black hole of regurgitated shitposting it's become. I think the Fediverse has a bit more potential longevity than that.
I popped over there after my suspension expired, and... yeah? A little bit. I don't know if that boils down to my resentment for Lemur Boy or if it just started to suck after we all left. The whole thing feels insincere, corporate. The heart's not there.
Depends on the community. Many of the subreddits I've been in are going strong - or have gotten better since the blackout.
Quality was dropping a ton anyway, but god damn I miss the sports subs.
Even /r/baseball can garner 75-125 comments on some minor post.
Sports always seem like the hardest categories to get content/comments with when it comes to places like these. I remember reddit a decade+ ago and how it seemed like those NFL and NBA subs took a long time to get traction.
It's the toughest part about adopting kbin and Lemmy for me. But fuck it, I like new shit so I might as well try
I've cut back almost all my content generation for reddit, so no more posting, adding comments or even upvoting / downvoting.
Reddit has effectively said we're a bunch of leaches so that's how I'm treating them now, give me your content, I'm giving you nothing in return.
I'm definitely feeling a shift in the quality of content getting produced.
@yunggwailo IMO it’s bad on big subs but for niche subs that can’t/won’t move to the Fediverse it’s the same. It’s incredibly frustrating because there’s almost nowhere else to have a decent conversation about these topics in a non-discord, forum-like fashion.
It's been like that for a while, I think we just got used to it.
It has been said from the very beginning: First the quality will drop, then the user numbers.
Those who are talking shit right now didn’t listen then, they won’t now. It’s a lost cause.
Yes, big time. It feels almost as if half of the comments are bots, propping up spez and crapping on the mods who supported the blackout. Unfortunately, there are still a few subreddits that have no equivalent here just yet and I end up having to revisit reddit to get the info I need on an ongoing basis. I started two communities (Signal Messenger and Amex) here myself in an effort to help with transition but so far there hasn't been much happening on that front. I even went as far as messaging the mods on the /r/ equivalents but none of them wanted to move over, or even give it a shot as a subscriber. Nevertheless, I am not giving up and still feel there is growth to be had. Perhaps once the apps die off on reddit, we will see additional users transitioning.
I just checked. They are pushing more ads from what I've seen and now there's ad for every several posts. At least for myself this has never happened before, not sure if it is different for people in other regions with higher traffic to Reddit. It's obnoxious.
Like 75% of the subs I actually go to (and not just see on the frontpage or all) are still dark. So I have very very little reason to go back.
No idea TBH, I quit using it.
I still enjoy /r/cfb and /r/collegebaseball
Otherwise, it seems the entire site has devolved into nothing but new bot accounts posting from the big book of repetitive karma gaining questions on /r/AskReddit. Seems everything else is a ghost town.
I'm having this feeling way before the whole API story came out. At least the bigger subreddits were getting repetitive and boring, take AskReddit for example, in the past years you had the same 3 questions about dating, celebrities and what to do with with $ 1 million and every combination of that.
Some subreddits staid engaging and diverse, but most are just repetitive echo chambers.
The occasional time I get on there, yes. It's a bunch of reposts. There's no substance what so ever and there seems to be a lot of arguing in the comments.
@yunggwailo That's good to hear. I nuked my accounts and haven't been back to that particular dumpster fire.
I don't know, because I'm normally here rather than there, but you could test and find out. Take some screenshots before and after and do a double-blind test to see if you can tell.
Who checks reddit anymore? I don't check the site at all. even if they did let third party apps back u/spez could always go back on his word. lemmy and the #fediverse where here to catch us when we became stranded!
reddit has been going down hill for over a decade at this point. if something better was a available it would have died a long time ago