A slow spiral into irrelevance because of lots of small bad decisions. At one point, Reddit felt like a lone champion of free speech and conversation in a sea of buzzfeeds.
I think they've moderated the website into ruin. They've put a lot of energy into silencing certain kinds of voices/opinions while promoting others. What's left is a very liberal echo chamber. All of the seemingly worst ideas from the left are stated as fact and voicing a dissenting opinion can quite literally get you banned.
r/antiwork and r/latestagecapitalism are the most egregious examples of this that I can think of. But the attitudes held there have leaked into 99% of the other subreddits to some degree.
For the record, I lean left. But it really sucks to no longer have a town hall where both sides of the aisle can discuss things as adults.
If there's one takeaway, I think it's some flavor of: Don't overmoderate/show favoritism. You can't have yin without yang, or salt without pepper.
What made Reddit awesome was the discourse. Maybe they never realized that this was the secret sauce. That is, the clashing of ideas. And so they didn't cultivate that. Today, outside of a handful of niche/hobby subreddits, it no longer has anything close to educated discussions.
I still read it most days (through Apollo) but when/if this kicks in, that’s the end of it for me.
Now everything is highly politicized with a hard split across two camps where before I barely could detect the very concept of a camp at all.
There's no detectable reasonable right-wing online, it always escalates into 4chan. Hence, the "civil" people clean the place, and you'll have centrists and moderate-left remaining. Give it time and far-left will dominate as moderates silence themselves out of fear.
It's so weird to me that they've let the mods go absolutely bonkers. I've gotten banned from so many subreddits simply for having a different opinion.
This is already happening across the board.
Reddit has subreddits on the right and left that will ban you for disagreeing, or even for having made a comment in a subreddit they don't like. That was theoretically always possible, but at some point people decided such a policy was a good idea.
I personally think a misstep of reddit's has been relying so much on volunteer moderators. Why are people willing to put in so many unpaid hours of labor? Apparently, the answer is sometimes because they have a political cause they want to promote.
I think moderation on Reddit had the effect of cleaning out centrists as well, since it was a comment that got you banned from reddit and not your political position (e.g. a post which was positive towards a trump policy would get you caught up in the post-2016 moderation sweep).
You can see the effect on Indians. Quora was popular with Indians because it was intellectual and centrist in the western political spectrum, from a culture that has the right-wing as being Hindu-leaning and the left-wing as being Muslim-leaning. Indians are absent from Reddit comparatively.
It's a low brow dismissal, I know, but between the posts and the comments, Reddit has gone to total shit. Also to note that the average age has remained the same, so it's really hard to talk about anything serious when the majority are 18 yo US middle class white males.
And the only rebuttal I hear is "oh, I'm on /r/askhistorians and it's good here." The exception that proves the rule.
May it all come crashing down so we can build something anew. They're just rearranging the chairs on the Titanic at this point.
Outside the US the subreddits seem to be much older as well, not sure about the situation in the US itself.
I chuckle sometimes to recall the popularity of the “forwardsfromgrandma” subreddit many years back, because the top of /r/all often looks almost exactly like it now.
I'm probably just showing my age, but one reason I could never get into Reddit is it always felt to me like teenagers rehashing the same old debates I had as a teenager on usenet/IRC/whatever. It was never the platform, or anything wrong with the users themselves. It's just that I aged out of the "spend all day arguing with random people on the internet about things" demographic. (Instead, I spend all day arguing with old friends on the internet about things).
substack is where all the online right wingers who aren't unhinged reside imo
I greatly appreciate the rules here that we should read and interpret in good faith - and the fact that it's enforced.
Perhaps that's a longer topic not really relevant here.
No wonder, seeing what the political news are there at the last 3 years.
A friend of mine is moving to Canada, another to Germany, both went to Reddit to ask for help, and what they got back was anti-immigration tropes of all kind (from "go away you cheap labour, you are stealing our jobs" to "go away you rich tech worker, you are gentrifying my town").
While social media are generally cesspools of psychological deragement, racism and xenophobia, I keep hearing people complaining about some undefined left wing bias because the occasional weirdo with pink hair complains about capitalism or fascism in r/weirdoswithpinkhair or r/randosthatcomplainaboutcapitalism.
It's pretty funny how these two quotes express similar sentiment (NIMBYism, in-group protectionism, deep-seated fear of disruption) yet are often placed on opposite ends of the spectrum (anti-gentrification vs. anti-immigration).
There are political undertones in nearly every subreddit. But depending on which sub you are visiting, you can be downvoted or even banned for not having the "accepted" viewpoint. There's no place to have balanced discussion anymore, and that's one of the things that used to make reddit enjoyable.
Creating more siloed echo chambers isn't a fix, it's the problem.
I've literally never seen this, but I regularly see upperclass people misrepresent themselves as middleclass.