Comments on: Is reddit finally dying?

By: John Chuey

John Chuey — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 12:16:40 +0000

I use to have a Reddit account when it was the new fresh thing in 2015 and 2016 to see what the hype was about. It looked much like a good aggregate when it was more about people voting things up to decide what would be on the front page. But when they started to ban subreddits that were controversial and also began to do cross forum bannings that was the beginning of the end for that site. Along with the Admins choosing what would be on the front page than the people themselves in 2017. Which they made a tacit admission to. This was the exact year I left the site because it became wall to wall propaganda. That’s when it became social engineering much like when Twitter started to do the same thing by telling the masses what to be angry about and just showing politics 24/7 to people who joined the site for communities and content creation. The userbase degenerated into a purity spiral due to the lack of understanding it was pure propaganda and banned everyone that was not on their line of thinking or even questioned anything. Most of the users left for greener pastures or quit social media altogether due to agenda pushing.

Overall I think it took awhile for Reddit only because anger generates so much engagement and these social media big tech giants rely on controversy to keep the userbase posting high for advertising and stocks. Over time I think this has effected relationships and harmed society overall and it has run it’s course. I have been hearing less about Reddit at the end of last year and much less so this year. Overall I am glad and I say good riddance to places like Twitter and especially Reddit that have devolved from their original intentions to what it is today.

By: TP

TP — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 18:02:18 +0000

Yes. After a decade I would say they are dying. FP hardly moves like it used to. Less subs. Less AmAs. FP feels like an advertisement most of the time.

Then their ban policy; if you talk bad about a movie or something and it rubs their mods the wrong way, or is misinterpreted, you get a global site ban. This means that talking about movies can get you banned from talking about… recipes or something. Not a good look or move for a site that is homogenizing what is left of the wild west internet.

By: tenox

tenox — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 01:52:01 +0000

In reply to Anon. Sounds exactly right. I banned reddit from my life for rule violations. I have zero tolerance policy for censorship.

By: Anon

Anon — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 12:43:44 +0000

Reddit is banning itself into oblivion.

By: neozeed

neozeed — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 10:31:18 +0000

In reply to Malcolm.

Yeah I guess that’s the thing by being so polarizing and ban heavy you can’t have any real discourse so it’s basically made reddit a site to exchange cat pictures.

I wasn’t expecting all that much about link386 as it’s an incredibly fringe thing in 1992, let alone 2021! but looking at /r/os2 and the buildup and post warpstock and yeah you can see it’s really not the place.

Speaking of OS/2 odd they disabled comments on the warpstock video.

By: Malcolm

Malcolm — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 19:35:35 +0000

For what it’s worth, Reddit always seemed like a low quality discourse site to me. It’s true that it had the lowest barriers to entry, since anyone could get an account and then jump into any domain in which they had an interest, but it seemed like most participants had an interest but not a great deal of domain knowledge.

Lobste.rs took the opposite extreme with the invite-only join. This wasn’t a big problem for me; I found out about the site when somebody linked to my blog, and after jumping on IRC, showing I was the blog author and had some level of technical depth, I had an account. While this path may be lower volume, it also leads to higher quality, so it’s a more effective mechanism of providing articles and conversations that are actually worth reading. It’s since become my main go-to for technology news.

The stranger thing about it is a fairly strict “no politics, no tech business” stance which is visibly different to Slashdot or ycombinator-sponsored news.

It may be that reddit is losing appeal due to its low quality conversations. But it might also be that something like link386 is just too technically involved for that audience, and if you posted Win95 running on a Nokia, the results would be different. Fwiw, I posted a link to your link386 post to /r/os2, but there’s only 288 people in that sub, so it’s not the type of thing that will yield tons of traffic.

By: neozeed

neozeed — Sat, 05 Jun 2021 15:49:36 +0000

In reply to Brian L.. Thanks, much appreciated! Looking back I can't believe I've been doing this for so long!

By: Brian L.

Brian L. — Sat, 05 Jun 2021 15:48:08 +0000

Reading you from Feedly every time you post, been with you since forever. Probably discovered you originally from OS/2 Museum or binging some kind of random legacy OS problem. Love your work and will keep reading as long as you feel like writing!