These are some thoughts I had about Reddit's downvoting structure, especially seeing how the energy of Youtube, Instagram and Facebook seem to have shifted since they each did versions of limiting downvoting ability on comments and posts. This obviously is just an opinion, and it seems others have referenced this in past posts here but I wanted to put it into words from my own perspective.

It seems that the interface of Reddit, and in particular the downvoting ability, is designed to create echo chambers that impede authentic honest dialogue.

The reason the site permits this is because it generates more traffic and is more profitable. Living in an echo chamber is generally more pleasing, at least for people not consciously thinking about how the internet is a feedback loop.

If part of Reddit's aim can be said to foster open constructive dialogue, then this certainly hurts that goal because it so heavily disincentivizes dissent. This is especially dangerous as often times the most popular opinion is based on timing, not validity.

This is not Reddit's fault. As a corporation, Advance Publications' (Reddit’s parent company) first duty is to its shareholders. It legally cannot change the design until traffic (ie. advertising) or brand value are impacted, presumably by users getting tired of the negativity and choosing alternative discussion forums. Presumably thats what happened on some level at the other sites I mentioned.

Similar to McDonalds using the pandemic as an excuse to remove salads from its menu, Reddit is not obligated to have the most healthy discussion forum. In fact, if productive healthy dialogue reduces traffic, Reddit is obligated to prevent that from happening.

The website is legally bound to choose the interface that is the most addictive.

Edit: The fact that this post was downvoted into obscurity ironically forebodes that Reddit will go the way of Stormfront and why the left failed to connect with voters this time around.

Even if it's as small as something like eating their food without knowing, its always 'Rethink the relationship, OP' or "If it were me, I would dump him" like what is this. Even if the other person was doing it maliciously, can you not just have a serious chat with them and perhaps not break up over chicken bake? Seriously, this stuff is so petty and would almost never fly in real world scenarios. Abuse (Genuine abuse like hitting, touching without consent and Gaslighting) is such a watered down word that when I see the word abuse on reddit its just somebody yelling at someone else. Obviously thats not a great word, but are there not better words for something like that rather than such a strong, emotion elliciting one? Overall, redditors are so quick to recommend cutting off instead of actually trying to get through to the person in question.

If a question has been answered in a megathread, it can't be found through searching. This means that people have to ask questions again and again, instead of one post with an answer that everyone can refer to. This is inefficient and annoying to both askers and answerers. Am I the only one who sees this as a problem?

We're seeing a significant uptick in questions about why Reddit has a given political lean, or about why certain subs support one political idea or other. This is not a political debate sub; there are plenty of those to post in if that's the goal. Extending at least through the US election, all such posts will be removed.

If it's a really burning question, there have been many of these types of posts; feel free to search the subreddit.

Fellow Redditors,

We had a good discussion about this in Lounge but decided to move it here and get some inputs.

Recently I saw an post that claim that these with higher streak will contribute more karma to posts they upvote. (One of originating post Which might be the source of Rumor - or actually a param in the magic sauce).

I sort of salute to this. While partially it goes spins arounds engagement - this could potentially in huge improve quality given that streak, apart from being a "showcase" now actually do put more value to an opinion of long term reddit family member compared to a "common joe", who heard about reddit yesterday, and most often than not - out of personal frustration, poor understanding of content, or simply "because he can" burry the content by downvoting.

Don't get me wrong I am talking about people who were not with us for years through good bad and ugly, rather newcomers with the "culture" which is everything but not the spirit of reddit.

While streak is one of the way to address this, putting more weight to accounts with higher streak - it's still far from perfect. I am sure there would be bots out there who would randomly build hard streak - which is even more dangerous considering there are even upvote / downvote marketplaces.

On the other hand, there are members who contributed a ton but can't afford to checkup everyday making this model unfair to them.

How would you regulate karma in "ideal world", in a way that veterans get's their votes weight more, followed by quality contributors. That would, sort of do a lot of "self moderation".

It's really a shame to see there are even services online that provide "buy downvotes / upvotes" depending if one wants to build up their karma or ruin someone else, essentially making good building up quality contributors building up quality content for years disappear if they don't like them, while building their accounts overnight and acting like a sheriffs.

Here's the take. We are all very aware Reddit is a social network light years ahead compared to others if we analyze quality. Compare it with TikTok for example and see how it looks when "democracy" chose what's hot or not. More or less, other social medias suffers the same issue. Empirically, it supports the hypothesis the "magic sauce" is considering not only upvotes / downvotes - but who is giving them.

Point of the post is to eventually collect some good ideas that could (or not) be presented to admins, or in general hear your take on this. Being that a speculation - or even better, unfold the supportive or counterclaims evidences for/against the hypothesis.

We put a pause in premium forum related to a matter till we get more "evidences" of the phenomena to gather breather opinion and ideally some evidences so we can take it from there.

Stage is all yours. Many of us are interested Interested in your take on this.

Important note: This is not about how you get karma, this is how your account influence karma of others when you upvote / downvote their posts based on your contribution and other parameters. (To name some but not necessary all , Streak, Achievements, age, contributions, karma etc...)

S.

This is getting wild. Especially when I think of subs like suicidal watch or other subs that deal with sensitive matters.. I feel sad for people who are struggling and are now being exploited for data.

Some people may also lean towards really bad places only by scrolling and seing the influx of bots posting dark shit just for engagement.

What Reddit think is gonna happen next when people realize that and become disgusted by it?

What is their long term plan?

They are selling our data to google and then what? They will send the plateform to die?

I've been here 18 years and I would love to look far back and review it all, but not by spending a week clicking "more". How about a "sort by old" for comments by profile?

Why does the feed just become good and suddenly turn to junk?

I know we should all just delete it. But over the last couple weeks I actually said to someone, damn, reddit feed is actually good again! New interesting relevant things, etc.

Within two days of that, my feed suddenly gets repopulated with every sub on the planet that I have no interest in, including almost all of the ones I’ve clicked “don’t show me this”.

To me it looks like it was repopulated so I can scroll more and thus view 6x more ads. Probably they need to hit certain ad revenue metrics soon. I did not change any settings.

I don’t want to scroll endlessly and wade through the dumbest irrelevant stuff on the planet. So I go through the work of taking off all the posts from random cities and subjects I’m never interested in, just to reset the feed.

In response, now all I get is 4-day old shit I’ve seen a million times, repeat posts, nothing interesting, etc. So then the option is to still scroll endlessly to find anything interesting. It feels like a punishment for not accepting abuse of my feed. What gives?

I've belonged to two subreddits that invited me, both seemingly at random. The first one turned out to be just people sharing about their lives. I remember one person was really into his warhammer figurines, another person posted their art. It was supremely wholesome. There were a few rules, the most important of which is that you had to post at least once a week or you would be dropped and replaced with someone else. It was a small group--maybe fifty people. I found it a really nice change from the total anonymity of reddit AND because, unlike Reddit's interest-based subreddits, I had nothing immediately in common with the other group members.

So I don't have any theory, just questions:

• What are these groups called?
• What are the various ways people are invited?
• What are the different ways to run these groups?
• Has anyone done any research on them?
• Are there any groups you can just volunteer to join?
• Are these groups trending up or down?

https://old.reddit.com/r/help/comments/1gae6uo/update_enabling_easier_access_to_your_content_on/

This is going to be a game-changer for many people who've wanted the ability to access everything they've ever written or shared on reddit but couldn't do so due to the 1,000 comment/post limit that has existed on reddit since forever. (For those who are unaware, when you visit any reddit profile (including your own), reddit only displays up to a thousand posts and a thousand comments on profiles no matter how many entries actually existed in those categories. So, if you'd written 5,000 comments, you'd only see the newest 1,000 on your profile).

A workaround (for those who were aware of it) was to change the sorting on their profiles (e.g., from "new" to "controversial", or "top"), and those different lists of items indeed returned some results that weren't found in the profile's default sorting; but for prolific commenters and/or posters, a lot of content was still left out on the profile page if those entries didn't fall under the sorting categories available and if they also fell beyond the 1,000 capped limit.

Over 12 years ago, there was a post about the limit of 1,000 entries on profiles on this very sub in which the OP and others expressed an interest in being able to see and/or download all their content: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/10t98v/ever_wondered_the_data_liberation_policy_of_reddit/.

^That thread taught me about how the limitation of reddit's lists made content invisible even to those who created it (unless they were aware of other methods to access it) - so, it's amazing to me that after all this time, we're finally going to have an official solution to this. (Note: according to the admin in the linked post, this will be in effect in the next week).

This is a HUGE 'win' for everyone who wants easy access to their long-forgotten or difficult-to-access content – and it may also create issues for prolific commenters who may not want some of their previously invisible, older content to suddenly become accessible to all on their profile pages. (Many of you are aware that there was always a way to dig into the long-ago, seemingly buried depths of reddit profiles, but the average redditor seems unaware of the tools or ability to do so).

Just wanted to know what the rest of you think of this upcoming change.

What makes Reddit addictive? I think part of it is that there's a learning curve to it, and it's rewarding once you figure out how to make posts that get traction.

Facebook is easy: Post a picture of a cute baby or animal and you'll get likes and maybe a couple comments.

But on Reddit, you're basically anonymous, and you're competing against a bunch of other New posts. You have to find subreddits you like, hang out there to become part of the community, and then, when you post, you may get some comments and upvotes, or you may not.

I'm not going to lie, I find myself typing old.reddit.com in my browser window frequently. My eyes immediately go up to the top right, to see if I have any notifications. Did someone comment on my post? Did I read the room correctly? Did my joke land?

Of the posts I make on reddit, I'd say probably half get no or only a few comments. And then there's a chunk that don't go over well, and just get negative comments.

Posts that actually get upvoted and get comments and discussion, maybe 25%? But when it happens, it's kind of a rush, and sort of addictive.

Once in a great while, you have a post that for whatever reason, hits the front page, and gets thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments. That's fun for a day or two.

Now, I'm not trying to hoard imaginary internet points or anything. Why do I post on reddit? Honestly, because I'm a bit lonely. I work a desk job at a computer, and during my down time, I want human interaction. To some degree, reddit can provide that, whether it's a subreddit based around a sports team, a city, a hobby, etc...

I don't know exactly what point I'm trying to make here... I guess it's that: while Reddit is getting worse in a lot of ways, the other social media sites (esp Twitter/X and Facebook in my opinion) are getting worse even faster, and so, Reddit seems to be in a good place. It's a pretty engaging site, at least for me.

Have any of you noticed that posts you make seem to have very few upvotes compared to the number of replies?

If you look at my account, some of the more recent posts have over a dozen comments, often either neutral or approving in tone, yet the post has half or less the number of upvotes.

I first interpreted this to mean that upvotes were being subtracted by downvotes, which confused me due to the aforementioned reason. But now I am not so sure if the downvotes negate upvotes. Perhaps users who reply simply aren't upvoting, instead? This seems unlikely, too, given that the overwhelming majority of users (oftentimes thousands will view the post if the analytics are to be trusted) do not interact with the post at all, and I would think that if one were to go through the effort of commenting, then they would likely up or downvote the post as well.

Have you noticed this in your or other user's posts? What is your explanation?

Every time I see my streak, I think: "Damn, it's that high? I should delete the app for a bit..."

Reddit is an indulgence and I chastise myself for spending too much time here.

Does anybody actually try to maximize their streak and then shares it with their friends?

I'm a researcher aiming to get a benchmark of people's opinions on different topics across Reddit and measure how they change over time. I'm curious about finding places where encountering differing opinions is likely.

Just scrolling through the comment sections of e.g.  politics and news, I'm noticing that there isn't much back-and-forth. Most comment threads are opinion-homogenous: that is, the top-level comment states an opinion on a subject, and almost all replies to that comment agree. Disagreements to the top-level comment don't seem to get a lot of engagement, and have often been downvoted so much that they don't appear in most user's feeds.

Is this a safe assumption to make? Is there any data out there about this?

Thanks

I hate this algorithm change. It appears to push far more controversial content onto people's home feeds as a means to increase engagement. Controversiality is measured based on the ratio of upvotes to downvotes.

What Reddit doesn't realize is that any marginalized or minority related content absorbs more predjudice based downvotes by default, thus that content is more controversial by default.

By pushing more controversial posts wide as a means to chase higher engagement, Reddit has inadvertantly increased the likelihood that members of minority populations are made victims to bullying and hatred they otherwise would not have had to suffer. They have made safe spaces less safe.

I mod a mid-size city sub. There was a post that contained some LGBT related content that the new algorithm decided to start pushing to nonsubscriber's home feeds. There were plenty of posts with far more upvotes the algorithm could have chosen.

The resulting influx of homophobia and transphobia--to my normally tolerant sub--was severe enough to warrant roughly 30 bans, which is more than I've ever issued in a year. The post required my constant attention for two days.

There were also nearly a dozen instances of report abuse (users reporting things for false reasons to grief and bully the OP). It was reported for being hateful, for being porn, for having sexual content involving minors, for self harm, and more, all of which was just made up bullshit meant to cause harm to the OP who had done nothing more than make a completely benign post. (And has Reddit just stopped taking action with regard to report abuse? It's been over two weeks now, and I've received no response.)

I've been modding the same sub for 13 years. I've spent all of that time cultivating a place that is assuredly safe and tolerant. Now, in addition to a subscriber having had to endure such vitriol, my sub's reputation has been compromised. And, the level of hate? I've never seen anything like it on there. It was disgusting; it was disturbing.

At the expense of some potential growth to my sub, I have turned off Discovery > Get recommended to individual redditors. It may be working to prevent threads in my sub from being advertised, or the post may have just run its course. I don't know :c [Italicized text in this paragraph edited for clarification.]

I hate the direction this place is going. Is there anything else I can do to ensure this doesn't happen again? I already had subreddit karma minimums for posts and may implement them for comments as well. But more broadly, is this just gonna be how it goes moving forward? Reddit pitting us against one another to increase revenue?

^Edited ^for ^clarity.

Right now, 4 out of the top 10 posts on my Home feed have zero upvotes. That's 4 posts that people have decided are too shit to warrant even the mildest of praise yet for some reason they're appearing at the top of my feed.

Why is Reddit doing this? For engagement of course! When your only metric is engagement it doesn't matter whether the content is good or bad so long as it gets you to comment. A cool piece of artwork based on a show you love by a talented artist is all well and good, but will that engage you as much as a troll post designed to ragebait you into typing out a furiously worded indignant response, or a silly, oft-asked question that you can't help but reply to with a condescending remark?

And so, just as Reddit used to be a place that would aggregate the most interesting, funny or otherwise noteworthy content into a single feed for your enjoyment, it is now a site that is just as happy to make you irritated or angry with the state of the world by intentionally showing you content that is designed to piss you off. My Home feed used to be filled with stuff that I like and now it's turning into a feed of stuff that I hate. Thanks, Reddit.

I feel like I see way more comments and posts advocating against drinking alcohol, using drugs, having casual sex, and so on. Not saying there is anything bad with abstaining from these, but it feels very detached from actual attitudes I see in the real world. And it feels like a new phenomenon on here? It seems more focused on risk-aversion than values but the values play into it as well.

I've been using https://www.reddit.com/r/all/ since 2009. But it seems I might finally have to go to https://old.reddit.com/r/all/

For example: https://imgur.com/a/1CL46Ig

I have to click into the article to find out if it's an original Pizzacakecomic or not. Just kind of surprised me. The username that posted the article usually was an integral part of the ui. I guess reddit changed their priorities on that. Anyone know when this happened and why?

The subreddit /r/absolutelynotme_irl is dead. Flooded by karmafarming spambots and lack of moderation.

From what I know, it was a subreddit created in response to /r/me_irl becoming more positive. People would use this subreddit to post images they could not relate to at all, often done in a self-deprecating manner. For example, posting a comic about someone having a lot of fun hobbies when you yourself lack any interest.

Lately, most posts are from 1-4 weeks old bots, and there's no moderation. The bots post extremely generic "funny images", probably all stolen from /r/me_irl, that have nothing to do with the subreddit theme. As with most subreddits, those voting on these posts only upvote the images because they enjoy them, not because it fits the theme. This has caused some images to reach the front page with some 20k upvotes several times.

I'm quite bummed out about it. It's a subreddit I appreciated a lot for being a last refuge of the real OG snarky and self-deprecating feel of me_irl. Alas, you can go see for yourself right now in hot or new, all the accounts are bots, and none of the posts fit.

Edit: just saw /r/2meirl4meirl and /r/TooMeIrlForMeIrl/ on the frontpage, I had forgotten about those similar subs, but these are more "this is way too real". Hopefully these don't befall the same fate.

i am embarrassed that it took from 1998 to now for me to try this.

if you are engaged in a pointless flame war, go to the persons profile and find something you genuinely like about them. artwork, capability for compassion, a love for animals, a talent. maybe the redditor is pretty or has a nice deck they built. Find something. It will disarm you first.

Then throw a complete wrench in the conversation with a compliment. Most people are not going to know what to do with that. I just discovered this and will be using it as much as possible. Both flame wars i tried it on stopped cold.

it also made me feel better about the entire exchange to be honest. Try it. Let me know what happens.

So I've been blocking tons of "spambots" for a while now. Basically if a post lands on my front page and the user has a million or more post karma I just block them. This has done wonders to help clean up my front page.

That being said, it's reached a point where I can see a thread title, watch the video being posted and know instantly 8/10 times if that person is just a karma whore.

https://www.reddit.com/r/toptalent/comments/1fv50eo/simon_boesdals_understanding_of_physics_shown_off/

Here's one I spotted 5 minutes ago. Literally within 4 seconds I was like "this is a 'spambot/karma whore'. I check the account, yup; 3+ million.

I think in this case, the title was not consistent with the content. The guy is not some physics major he's a dude who practiced and trained his body for years.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TerrifyingAsFuck/comments/1ftmhck/the_most_terrified_youll_ever_see_a_male_lion/

Here's another a couple days ago. I think the hyperbole in the title must have been a give away, the soundtrack too.

Another one;
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1fph6dh/hotel_guest_throws_object_at_hotel_employee/

I guess the soundtrack tipped me off? I don't know, but within seconds I guessed they were one of these ppl. Just under a mil in Karma.

Here's another;
https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1fkzu1s/this_man_has_made_friends_with_a_fish_small_mouth/

I honestly have no idea why I suspected this user instantly, but I did and I was right.

Another;
https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1fcqmgj/a_girl_has_incredible_ball_handling_skills/

I think the tone of the song gave it away, along with the bait title. I don't know for sure.

A couple more;

https://www.reddit.com/r/HumansBeingBros/comments/1fcf6zj/cars_driving_slow_and_shielding_biker_from_being/

https://www.reddit.com/r/HumansBeingBros/comments/1ff4b5t/neighbour_comforts_woman_after_finding_out_her/

This is not me cherry picking posts, I saved these cause I knew I wanted to post here and try to understand what gives them away. There is SOME indicator, or more likely a few different sets of multi indicators. I just can't identify what those all may be. These are all also the first time I've seen these particular videos, so it's not like I recognize it from a dozen other subs. I actually would have put money on all of these that the user had a mil+ karma like within SECONDS of viewing the content.

I don't pay attention to usernames really, so that's not the pattern I picked up on. Looking at these, they have a certain style of music in common, bait like titles, narration. Though I still don't think any of those things in particular were what made them click for me.

Like has anybody else noticed they can pick out the "karma collectors" within seconds of a post? I'm not clairvoyant so there is something distinct here that identifies these accounts, but beyond what I've mentioned about music and titles I am very curious how the hell I can know almost every time, if some random shit post was made in 'good faith' or posted for the sake of sweeping up karma.

Has anybody put real thought into this and come up with a list of attributes you can expect from a mil+ karma accounts? It's to the point I could put money down on a posters karma before I see if just by a single post they make and be right far more times than I am wrong.

I'm picking up on some kinda pattern, and I'm sure y'all do to.

What makes them so obvious?

I almost exclusively used this shortcut, it was really helpful w/ browser auto complete. I'd just type pro and programming.reddit.com would autocomplete for example. Not sure where to have a conversation about it, hope this is the right subreddit. Sorry in advance if not.

Edit: After writing this, I feel like maybe it's too obvious... but I thought it was interesting to tie it back to something all forms of media are facing.

tl;dr: Social media has always been about users creating content for the platform. That's part of the reason why it's been free. But what happens when the social platform doesn't need new content anymore? Will there be a time when we're effectively locked out of contributing?

I've been thinking a little bit recently about how a backlog of accessible media interferes with our ability to consume new media. For instance, the back catalog of rock and pop from the 70's onward has gone UP in value. A new artist has to compete with the best artists of the past 60 years: Billy Joel, Queen, Nirvana, Led Zeppelin, etc. (yes, I'm white) New genres open up a little space for new artists, but it's an increasingly shrinking space. Even relatively modern genres like hip hop (yes, I'm old) have its old-time heavy hitters taking up space on today's playslists.

Ok, so back to reddit.

I see an increasing number of reposts on my cat subs. The percentage of reposts will increase as more bots flood the platform, but more significantly, as the library of images becomes larger and larger, the ability of redittors to recognize and downvote reposts will become minimal. And like a new band having to compete with Queen, a new image posted by a cat fancier will have to compete with the best of cat pictures the internet has had to offer for the past 20 years. A user will post an image or two, get no response (all the love being given to reposts), get discouraged, and not post again.

I think image subs of specific topics are particularly susceptible to this. A cat photo is a cat photo is a cat photo. There's no ongoing discussion that would date an image of a cat (though sometimes seeing a TRS-80 in the background gives an indication). History memes are also timeless.

And more reposts means a greater ability to reposts high-value comments, so even the comment section might become competitive with the past.

Text-only subs will probably be fine, since they really demand discussion and participation by OP, and they do have an evolution of topics--something that was interesting in 2022 might not be relevant in 2024. And maybe smaller subs on specific topics won't have enough training material for an AI to be convincing...

I joined Reddit some time around 2019, I think? It’s been so long that I actually don’t remember exactly when I joined. I never expect any form of social media or forum to stay exactly the same as when I initially joined it, but I can’t help but feel that as a whole, Reddit has gotten so much worse over the years. Every time I come on here, I feel myself wanting to come back on less and less and less…Which really isn’t helpful because the website can and will be useful if I have a genuine question about something or I’m looking for something and I know I won’t be able to get answers anywhere else.

I would say my main complaint is how nasty/defensive people have gotten over the years. I used to be able to ask a question and have one or two people respond in a very polite, concise, and friendly manner. The average interaction on here was an enjoyable interaction, and definitely better than the average interaction I would have on somewhere like Twitter, for example. I always liked that Reddit was a very large, often helpful forum that had fairly quick response times compared to an older, more specific niche forum for something like farming or somewhere more generalized and unfriendly like Instagram, the aforementioned Twitter, or even Tumblr (though I have to admit that at this point Tumblr seems to have the friendliest userbase when it comes to social platforms).

However, over the past year or two, I’ve noticed a lot more people getting downvoted for seemingly innocuous comments/posts or getting dogpiled on for asking “stupid” questions. I put stupid in quotation marks because I join a lot of subs that are about identifying things like fungi, gems/rocks, plants, insects, etc. and the truth is, a lot of people are clueless about anything they’re not super interested in. People seem to have this weird expectation that if you’re commenting on their forum, you must know everything they know and if you don’t it’s a capital offense and your head’s coming off. It’s worse when I can tell it’s somebody who’s not going to be used to the nastiness for a variety of reasons (too young to understand the Internet can be incredibly mean and cruel, too old to understand half of what the interwebs people in the phone are saying, neurodivergent, mentally ill and not in a good place). Very rarely is it somebody who’s actually doing something stupid and seems to be smugly aware about it and enjoying the negative reactions they’re getting in response. I can think of exactly one example for that I’ve seen in recent times.

I thought it was more understood that you should never assume that a person knows what you know. A rule I thought more people lived by is “your life experience is the exception, not the standard“. I can understand being sick and tired of people with clearly malicious intentions trying to start flamewars, trolling, derailing conversations, etc. but you don’t know that until you’ve seen more than one response. What’s the point of coming out with so much hostility from the first comment when you don’t even know if the person’s asking in good faith or not?

To make things worse, I’m autistic and I was mostly raised on the Internet so I tend to be very bad at reading social cues regardless of if they’re online or not, and I occasionally read things as aggressive when it wasn’t, responded aggressively, and then the other person was confused/got justifiably upset at what they saw as unwarranted aggression… So even when I feel like people are being particularly backhanded, I never want to say anything because I’m always worried about being wrong about them being aggressive and not reading the tone properly.

It’s become very frustrating that a once respectful and informative website has become such a pain to use. I’m tired of feeling stupid for asking questions that are apparently dumb to everyone but me, I’m tired of getting rude responses and being downvoted to hell and back when I’m just trying to figure something out (especially when I tried to google it and got nothing of use), and the whole drama with a certain founder a few years ago sure as hell didn’t help things. I know that 9 times out of 10 facing attitude with attitude isn’t going to solve anything, but at the same time it’s extremely frustrating asking questions about something and either being ignored due to an inactive subreddit or shat on in response.

There was also an incident I’m not going to describe in detail for the sake of not wanting to relive it because it was incredibly harming to my psyche, but I honestly do question how much moderation goes on in terms of helping people who have mental health issues. TL;DR, I opened up an old wound I shouldn’t have regarding something in my childhood and in response had strangers trying to pry into my personal life and giving me very rash, unsolicited advice/horrifically nasty comments that led to me unlocking a new low in my mental health I never quite recovered from fully. I absolutely blame part of this on me for being foolish enough to talk about it online, but I also blame that specific subreddit for having a userbase that very clearly encourages worsening the mental health of people prone to things like psychosis and schizophrenia.

I’m not saying things like expressing paranoia or certain thoughts that would land you in the funny farm if said to a mental health professional should be immediately removed/censored or anything like that, I’m just saying that the way social media platforms — especially Reddit and that specific subreddit — handle people goading on those not of sound mind into making decisions that they should not be making at all whatsoever is disappointing and irresponsible. I’m sure that there are other subreddits with similar problems, but thankfully that’s the only really negative experience that I can remember having with a subreddit as a whole as opposed to singular users picking a fight over something dumb that I won’t remember in three years. The obvious solution would be to hire real people as moderators who can determine when a situation has gone too far (probably easier if there were people looking out for it and reporting it to said mods) and the person who made the post is being manipulated/toyed with, but that seems to be something companies are allergic to nowadays.

I don’t know. Every time it seems like a social media platform or forum just can’t get any worse, it somehow does. The state of the Internet is something deeply saddening to me as somebody who grew up on it and watched it degrade from a place that was fairly free, fun, and enjoyable to…Well, not that. I guess Reddit is a more prominent symptom of that than other websites since it was always friendlier than other websites.

For as long as I can remember, what posts showed up in your feed was based on a combination of how old it is and its upvote count relative to the size of its subreddit. However, recently I've been seeing a ton of posts at 0 (or negative) upvotes but a bunch of comments. Did Reddit change it so that it's purely engagement-based, thereby promoting more posts that just get people mad? I suppose that's how most other social media does it, but by God does it make a worse user experience.

All too often people claim that the site is dying which causes certain individuals to become highly defensive and point out that Reddit has been here for a while and actually has more activity and users than ever before or something along those lines.

Yes, if you're looking at it from a purely traffic standpoint, you can make the case that it's not dying. But I think people are getting at something else-namely that there's been a marked drop in quality of posts over the years. I have felt this myself.

Now don't get me wrong, Reddit has always had a bad reputation but many years ago there was at least a sense that you could still have a blast in this place. I don't think that's actually possible anymore for anyone who values quality over quantity. It is no longer a place to have enjoyable conversations. More importantly, I don't think this state of affairs is actually ever going to improve.

For there to be positive changes, there needs to be a bottom-up demand for them. That demand is lacking. When someone promotes a common sense suggestion such as disabling or at least limiting downvotes, people come out with their pitch forks. I'm assured by Redditors that the excessive amount of downvoting here is necessary to filter out bad posts, yet the number one complaint is still that there are too many bots and low effort posts.

Evidently, it doesn't work. Rather than filtering out the garbage, people only use the downvote button as a weapon against thoughtful but even slightly differing views. This creates an extremely toxic situation where people who are capable of making quality posts are afraid to do so because even a slight deviation from the orthodoxy of any given sub can cause them to be downvoted en-masse.

There are other issues that are a bane on site quality but this post is already getting long, so I will end by more or less saying that people should brace for things to actually get worse instead of clinging to false hope that somehow everything will work out if X or Y change occurs(which is what a lot of users are doing). That's all.

This is one of the more tame theories on here. But, I am an avid reader, and follow multiple book subreddits. They are constantly spammed with the same few questions: “What’s the best book you’ve ever read?” “What’s the best audiobook ever?” “What recent book have you just absolutely loved, and couldn’t put down?”

I’m not angry at those posts, because I love the discussion, and it often gives me suggestions for my next read. However, I’ve noticed that there is a couple of suggestions that are ALWAYS one of the top two or three suggestions. Here is where my inflated opinion of my own tastes comes into play. One of the books, (not saying which, because I don’t want to invite hate, but you could probably figure it out by my comment history) is a terrible, terrible book in my opinion. Yet, every time, it’s one of the top comments with extremely similar wording from the poster. My theory is that the posters are actually financially invested in the promotion and success of this book. Because (again, stupidly believing I have better tastes) I just cannot believe that anyone loves this certain book, especially since that author has written even better books in the past.

TLDR: I believe that a very social media savvy book agent/publisher has astroturfed Reddit in order to drive sales for certain books/authors.