I think it's regression to the mean. When reddit was relatively small it was possible for them to have a group that was, on some dimensions, above average. As reddit becomes larger and larger those dimensions return to the population mean. That feels like, and is, a decline in quality.

Reddit has an inherent problem in that the only people who are moderators are the people with the time and inclination to be moderators. These people tend, to borrow the previous language, to be below average in certain dimensions.

Reddit naturally incentives low effort content. A thoughtful essay that takes thirty minutes to read will fall off the new or hot pages simply because the people who see and read it are still busy reading as the submission decays. A funny meme that can be consumed at a glance will get quick upvotes and enter a positive feedback loop where more people see it, more votes, more people see it, etc.

Finally, reddit's developers seem to have no idea what they are trying to do. I mean "developers" in a broad sense encompassing the entire company developing the product. They reproduce useless and obnoxious features, clutter their UI, degrade the core user experience and so on - chasing engagement metrics. Perhaps these, um, improvements, appeal to a certain audience, but my intuition is that audience repels a different sort of audience.

In short, I do think reddit has gone downhill and is accelerating. My account there is 12 years old but I stopped using it regularly 4 or 5 years ago.

I have a feeling the entire internet became dumber. I miss the early 2000s days when it was still considered somewhat nerdy.

Yes, I think so in the sense that it peaked several years ago. For awhile it was getting smarter because so many niche communities were being created and good information was being shared freely, which attracted more expertise. More companies were also interested in using subreddits as their community software or support forum which endorsed sections of it for specialized knowledge. Those trends have peaked and companies are more likely to set up a Discord and create nice documentation as static sites have become easier to generate and GitHub mindshare has grown.

Everything is politics now, every single sub. No exception. That's my biggest problem. And no it wasn't always like this

I'm not sure whether it was due to changes in the algorithm, but at some point the logged-out front page that most people see became easily 50% outrage porn - a picture of a truck parking in two parking spaces, shaky video of someone being racist in public, most recently message conversations from horrible bosses.

When someone eventually makes an account and delves into the more niche subreddits, that's the culture that they're expecting and as more do it, it starts to change the culture of the niche subreddits as well.

Ironically the secret to reddit's success was that it was just left alone with very few changes for so long. The front page was already a dumpster fire at that stage, but a dumpster fire mostly contained to the top 20 subreddits. Now that it's more clever about pulling in posts from more niche subreddits that are doing well, or based on geolocation, it pulls people into the subreddits more which accelerates the Eternal September effect.

I wonder how much of Reddit is just controlled accounts and bots talking to each other. Most of Reddit now just feels like curated political content.

I stopped using Reddit years ago when I noticed nearly every thread, no matter how insightful, devolved into huck huck cynical bantering. I even had more than a year of Reddit Gold, but even the gold forums got pretty banal. I suppose the fake snobbery was good silly fun, but it didn't make the rest of the Reddit experience any better.

It's actually what brought me to HN.

2012? Reddit was already well past its prime before you joined. When everyone at Reddit was posting rage comics 24/7 (before 2012), I thought it couldn't get any worse, but it did.

There are still some subreddits that are worth reading though. The trick is to focus on subjects that aren't interesting to people who are poorly educated or under the age of 25 (e.g., programming languages that are rarely used by junior programmers and, preferably, rarely used in industry).

No, it’s nostalgia. There’s a natural tendency to see things this way. You may be smarter and more experienced as you get older, but that doesn’t mean Reddit gets dumber.

It's been over-corporatized in an attempt for respectability, with the goal of finally making money. That's something that happens in waves, and eventually you're left with nothing of what you started with. Reddit has reacted to every media panic with waves of new censorship and subreddit bans. You can only do that so many times before you've actually handed your site over to people who 1) either never participated in or enjoyed any of the now banned activity or places, and 2) people who were attracted by a site that was wiped clean, and were disgusted by the site during the period of its greatest growth, creativity, and influence.

People blame it on Eternal September, but it's really handing a new site, barely resembling the old site, to Eternal September and banning the old site.

What reddit is trying to do is to build an entirely new business with new customers, while retconning the brand that it built while becoming a household name. It's rational; there's no reason why reddit should be valued any higher than a 4chan, and they're looking for one.

More people are using Reddit and the average person is pretty dumb, so makes sense no?

Yes, new generation of people online, older generation aged out. It's not you, reddit changed.

It's time to move on and look back at your decade of use and ask what you really missed out in terms of community involvement and how the web has changed. Forums are dead. :(

I think so, yes. Even in niche subreddits (arch linux, say) if you ask a question, you'll only get stock answers, as if the other person had done a quick web search, picked the top result from google, and pasted it in.

It ain't much better over here buddy.

I've been reading all of your comments and there's one theme I think we're neglecting to discuss, engagement is down too. Because of it's growing popularity and the limited amount of screen real estate, the ranking algorithm has to be a lot more discriminatory. This ends up meaning that any given user posts mostly low performing posts which discourages quality. It's like YouTube, soon "redditors" will be equivalent to "YouTubers".. or maybe "tiktokers"?

It’s a lot bigger now and therefore has the same problems any big online community has (bad signal to noise ratio). I think this is made worse through the upvote system, but that’s purely my anecdotal take. The niche communities continue to be pretty good. I use askliterarystudies pretty often and get high-quality info.

In my experience even the most niche online communities begin to seem “dumb” after you’ve spent significant time on them, as the once-novel information gets rehashed endlessly.

I think there’s a few newer factors at play over the last year or two in addition to the usual problems (anecdotal of course).

* Unless incredibly niche, subreddits reach that poor quality threshold so fast now.

* Marketing firms have learned how to use reddit with a huge amount of thinly veiled advertising, SEO Spam, Karma farming and bot presence.

* Discord, slack hacker news etc. seem to have eaten away at some topics, programming community engagement for example feels like it’s dropped off a cliff.

Downvoting creates echo chambers where you can't disagree or even share an unpopular opinion. A lot of low effort or borderline spam content too. i never really liked reddit, it was a place to waste time. It is hard to get a well rounded opinion of anything from it. One idea seems to always dominate a subreddit and you must conform.

I think it has gotten worse lately. Lower quality comments and discussion, rehased jokes, unfunny attempts to troll or be edgy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Reddit is bigger, and most communities get fall off as they get bigger. The solution is to find smaller subreddits, and to contribute the content you want to see.

Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives out good".

AnimalMuppet's Law: "Bad users drive out good". (Within an online community.)

I've always have had a hard time with the Reddit comments. Misinformed is a given since we are all ready to give out our opinions at will. Right or wrong is unimportant to whomever posts as long as they post what they think. That's all over social media. I don't like it but it's part of the social media environment. But the real pain to me is the never ending wisecracks. Everyone wants to be funny. When the comments get polluted with that then they are pretty useless. Reddit comments are just full of it.

I don't think it's gotten any worse. It's just part of the make up of the community. It's DNA.

Some of us thought of HN as a 'new, improved Reddit with smart people' when we came about 10 years back.

Sad to say, like all Empires do, all social media websites are born, grow in prestige and then decline away into garbage. Look at enough social media websites and you will be able to find them at all stages of the progression spectrum.

It got noticeably more hostile in March 2020, when COVID diverted lots of new social interaction from in-person to online. This was the Eternal September moment for me personally.

Starting in January I was spending a lot of time on the internet for personal reasons and the transition in March was very clear to me.

Reddit goes through periodic user purges - although they do occasionally get a true positive when they do, for the most part they just end up purging the users who are capable of critical thinking, hence the current critical mass of folks who only know how to go with the flow.

> As the years pass and I pick up new niche interests, my instinct is to turn to Reddit to find like minded individuals, but more and more increasingly I find that misinformed and poorly researched content is becoming the default and taking over the more quality content.

I think this is becoming the default for the internet/society in general. Rather than it being a Reddit problem, it’s simply manifesting on Reddit, as it is most other popular websites.

Recently? I would say no.

IMO reddit reached peak dumb a few years back and has floated there since. I'd imagine this is its final resting place.

since they removed the downvote counter, wasteland.

Yes

Yes