In 2005, Reddit was just a vision in the minds of two college students. Fast forward to 2024, and it stands as a publicly-traded company with a $9.5 billion market cap.

I have always been a huge Reddit fan (aren’t we all?) - even after 19 years in the game, it feels fresh unlike the other social media platforms out there.

So I wanted to study what made Reddit so different from the others? How did it all start?

And believe me when I say their journey is full of ups and downs - the founders got rejected from YCombinator, sold the business, quit the business, came back, left again, fired CEOs, went public - roller coaster vibes.

If there's one idea that stood out to me is that both Alexis & Steve embody the idea of resilience- despite all the setbacks and the extremely slow growth, Reddit is still super relevant.

While Instagram, TikTok, Facebook have become polarized with algorithmically generated content & biased demographics, (while nowhere close to being perfect), Reddit is a breath of fresh air.

I wrote about this at length here if you want to take a look.

https://www.commandbar.com/blog/reddits-origin-story/

Let me know what you all think. Hope you find it interesting! :)

I've been on this site for a good enough length of time to know it feels very different suddenly. There was always reposting and botspam, but now I scroll through the popular feed and am bombarded with very low effort posts that consist of a screenshot of a tweet or similar info-graphic accomponied with incredibly surface level discource in the comments section. Everyone is in agreement and shares the exact same opinion, that opinion usually being counter to what I think of as typical on this site. Also usually these post are of the "point and laugh at others belifes" style and not very constructive of anyone belife

First off, I dont think that people having different opinions from what I expect is weird or that there have not always been communities on reddit that exist in defiance of the norm. By all accounts, having people with differing opinions existing in the same space is a healthy and good thing. That being said I feel like im losing my mind. Maybe I'ts because AI is the buzzword of the last two years and the internet feels like it is changing very quickly under the hood without looking all that different on the surface. Recently I've started to take the idea of an online "psyop" as something much more plausible, but not in the traditional consperiatorial sense of something you might find being discussed on a QAnon board.

What drives me nuts now and makes me second guess every peice of written content my eyes wander upon on the internet these days is the idea that an online "psyop" would be a relativley cheap and trivial task for a tech savy individual. Like an online super megaphone with the ability to generate thousands of realistic feeling opinions and reactions all seeded from thier own. Like astro-turffing on steroids, in a place where you could always sense when those campaigns felt uncanny. I'm begening to feel more isolated on the internet then ever before. To me it is not even a question. This absolutely is happening and probably not guided by an individual or a single corporation or even a single governement, but multiples of all of those things all at once everywhere for every agenda possible.

Recently my friends have began repeating some of the online rehtoric that I've become so weary of back to me in our conversations. I don't think I'm smart enough to differentiate from what is real and what is not for much longer and part of me thinks I must lock in my beliefs now so that I know they are mostly my own. In my opinion social media was largely a mistake and generally had massive negative affects on peoples mental health. Now like the roots of sapling tree generative AI tools will grow into the cracks formed by social media in peoples minds and slowly but mearsilesly break them as it grows into a mighty oak.

Are your comments even real? Will we all become online schizophrenics?

I've noticed that Reddit seems to hold up less robustly in shoddy, but still somewhat functioning network situations compared to sites like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc. It also seems like there's no rhyme or reason for when it just poops out and can't load your profile or decides you can't comment, even when other sites do just fine with whatever WiFi you're on. Lot's of weird discrepancies in functionality between mobile and desktop too. I just wonder if maybe the software just isn't as good quality on the backend compared to most competitors.

Hello, everyone. I've been wanting to get this out of my system for a while. Let me explain:

I'm an active member of the subreddit r/whowouldwin, and have been for a long time. I really enjoy the whole battleboarding hobby and it's community for a while, but now, something is wrong. r/whowouldwin itself used to have many active online members ranging from over 1,000 people to 2,000 a year, and now it's only 300 to 400 people online in recent months. It all started a couple of weeks ago, when the media company known as Rooster Teeth, which is owned by Warner Bros., and mostly known for it's most popular show, Death Battle, an online webseries featuring various fictional characters from pop culture battling against each other to the death, was announced to be shutting down after 21 years of service, and in the process, it took a massive hit to r/whowouldwin itself, making it's active online userbase drop significantly from over the thousands to the 300 to 400 range, since that community is associated with the Death Battle webseries, it took a big shot at that community, hurting it massively, since they usually make meta posts of reviews of certain Death Battle episodes, and is closely associated with it, as it's a battleboarding community. That's a very bad thing, but that's not the only problem it has.

Ever since Rooster Teeth had shut down, and the Death Battle webseries itself was temporary put in limbo/on hiatus, there have been many rule violating posts on r/whowouldwin that clearly shouldn't be there, such as posts showing a political agenda, ones only made for jokes or memes, ones having disallowed combatants and modifiers, and so on (such as posts featuring IRL figures such as the US military and politicians, having many "You vs" and "me vs" posts, posts that are not fully described or overly broad, ect.) and there are many posts that are downvoted, which discourages people from participating in a certain conversation, and burying points people don't like. I reported over thousands of accounts that made these kinds of posts, but there are more of those every day, and I can't keep this up alone. I tried contacting the moderators of r/whowouldwin, but they didn't seem to take it seriously.

I made a post expressing my concerns here, but I don't think it actually helps in the situation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/whowouldwin/comments/1bc6tbm/meta_im_very_concerned_about_the_future_of_this/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I'm here today to answer the ultimate question: what happened? Why is this happening to one of my favorite communities? Is there anything we can do to fix it? Is there some way to fix all this nonsense and return it to normal?

Thanks for your time, everyone. I hope I can get the answer I need, and there's a way for this situation to be solved.

I've noticed a marked change in my homepage within the last year. My homepage used to have a far more varied representation of the subreddits I'd subscribed to. However, it seems like the algorithm has changed and has become far more sensitive to user engagement: subs that you engage with (vote, comment, etc.) show up with more frequency on your homepage, while those you engage with less don't appear as often.

This seems reasonable in theory, but in actual practice, my homepage now is dominated by the same five or six subreddits. I've been wondering why the site has been so boring of late and it's because I'm just getting the same monotonous succession of subs every time I visit my homepage. It becomes more difficult to correct for this, as subreddits fall out of your feed and appear less frequently, thus causing you to engage with them less, causing them to appear less frequently in your feed, and on and on...

I recently realized, I've literally forgotten some of my favorite subreddits even existed because they simply haven't showed up in my feed for months. I've noticed that some of those subs appear to be less active now than they were a year ago, and other subreddits have exploded in popularity. r/notinteresting seems to have shot up in popularity in the last year, but /r/Awwducational seems to be less active than a year ago. The former has come to dominate my homepage while the later, which used to show up fairly frequently, now seems to have disappeared from my feed.

I theorize that this may be putting smaller, fledgling subreddits at a disadvantage because there will necessarily be fewer and less frequent posts the smaller a subreddit is, thus there's less to engage with, thus preventing lthem from showing up on people's homepages. I don't have any actual data on this, but it subjectively seems to me that many subreddits that used to be fairly active no longer get as much activity. Has anyone noticed the same?

Edit: It seems it's not just smaller subs. r/Awwducational has 5 million subscribers, but there are currently only 25 people viewing it. r/AbruptChaos used to show up in my feed regularly with posts upvoted in the tens of thousands, but now most posts barely get a few hundred upvotes.

I've been trying to figure out what about Reddit makes me post more consciously. This is both a positive and negative factor. I try to make meaningful posts and replies. The problem I'm facing, compared to other social media like YouTube comments and Instagram comments, is that I tend to write out posts and comments to only end up deleting them. I feel like I spend more time (too much) proofreading and revising Reddit comments too.

My theory is that the idea of downvotes and rude comments affect how one posts. It's not about the karma going down but the fact that people took time out of their day to leave a negative response. Reddit then auto hides negatively voted comments. All that time writing out that comment goes to waste.

I feel like I have more to say, but I'm wasting too much time rewriting the paragraph. I guess I'll add more if I have time.

Probably this is a me issue, but I want to ask you guys if this happens at all.

I first joined the site sometime in 2015/2016 and used it on and off since. What I can recall from the first two years is that while the site was toxic, it was a bit easier to use and less stressful. What changed? I think having a conservation is much more difficult now because of the comprehension issues of the average user nowadays. I see arguments daily which could easily have been averted if one or both of the people had correctly interpreted the words of the other user. That's the frustrating part-people aren't even debating ideas anymore. The phenomenon can be blamed by the rise of three distinct but overlapping categories of people:

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1. People who don't speak English as a first language. Obviously this group is not really to blame, no one can fault them for not having been brought up speaking a language. It's understandable that their grasp on English figures of speech, sarcasm, or grammar is not great. However, it does make it harder to communicate ideas effectively when there's a linguistic or cultural barrier as everyone knows.
2. Teenagers. Teens aren't known for their patience or reading comprehension skills. Our abysmal education system here in the United States most certainly hasn't helped in this regard. This is relevant because it's quite clear that the userbase is younger now than it was when I first started using the site. Teenagers are more online than they ever have been and many of them naturally flock to this site.
3. Perpetually offended weirdos. We all know the kind of people I'm talking about. These people have essentially built their lives around distorting the words of their opponents so much or trying to glean something offensive out of anything they hear that it's essentially the only way they know how to interact with people. They're so used to doing it they might not even realize they're doing it by now. They were always around but they've increased in number massively over the last couple of years.

I noticed the quality of the discussions decrease over time so much that I'm honestly worried it's going to become largely unusable within the next few years. Reddit never had a particularly great reputation but it's gotten to the point where it's become a no-go for a lot of people,.

So to adapt, I suggest a new rule of thumb. Think about how many words you would need to explain something to a person in real life. Try to use at a minimum two, or ideally three times as many words to convey the same idea to people on Reddit. Be ultra-specific about everything even if you don't think you need to. State your intentions VERY clearly. Go easy on the sarcasm. This can reduce how many arguments you get into as well as reduce the amount of unnecessary downvotes you receive(assuming you care about votes anyway).

A few weeks ago I made a post on here claiming that Reddit is a good example of what happens when smart people don't act smart, i.e. they let their biases get in the way of clear judgment. I want to apologize to anyone who I argued with on that thread because after weeks of further observation and dealing with total dimwits I can say that I was categorically and laughably wrong.

What's really telling is that whatever you say is liable to be misinterpreted. Don't bother letting people extrapolate, you need to spell it out as if they're literal toddlers. That can't be explained solely by political biases, that's actually a sign of low intelligence.

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Full disclosure, I am a NSFW caption creator. In that space of Reddit, there's very few actual OC creators and so many times posts are crossposted into multiple different NSFW caption subreddits as they fit into different niches.

Up until a few days ago when Reddit rolled out new mod tools including "Enhanced Spam Filters," I was able to crosspost to 5-6 subreddits with no issues. I was also able to comment and participate in subreddits like r/PornID despite having lower comment karma. Now, after the new filter tools have rolled out, I've found that my posts get removed after posting to 1-2 subreddits (including my own.)

The removal message quotes that the post has been removed by "Reddit's Filters." That would indicate to me that the moderators of those communities are not even getting the chance to review that content.

The second issue has been automated comment removal. In r/PornID, I tend to make a post and then comment on three to five more as I'm very good at sourcing content due to my line of work lol. After commenting, I realized that most posts on that subreddit are now showing multiple comments that are no longer appearing on the content, including mine. I checked my account in incognito mode to see if I was shadowbanned. I wasn't, but every one of my comments in the subreddit were removed, just minutes after I made them.

The only conclusion I can really draw from this are that the new spam filters have become much, much stricter, maybe even taking comment karma into account when removing posts or comments. I'm probably wrong, but I was wondering if anyone else has ran into this?

Just look through the posts right now and check the accounts of the OPs. 80% of them - literally 8/10 of them at the time of writing - are clearly bot accounts that have been bought off a previous user, scrubbed of all content and re-activated within the last 24 hours or so. The top comments for each submission are all bots too just regurgitating top comments from the last time it was posted.

I know we've all been seeing more bots recently but is this the first sub to be pretty much entirely taken over by bot accounts? What even is the end goal for bots? Can they be sold on to someone else or are they used for viral marketing or what?

What's the big idea!......about this intensely upvoted subreddit? Was Cyberpunk this bad? Have I just been away from reddit so long that I'm not used to it? Sure Reddit loves games and will talk about all the huge releases, but this game is all I'm seeing on the front page. Bots?

I had this happen to a co-mod on old Reddit and new Reddit there was for a time no indication that they were permanently banned

I was looking through very old messages of comment removals and bans (mostly temp. bans) I issued in a sub and I estimate about 1/2 to 3/4 of these people are now permanently suspended. The rest have a uncanny tendency of having no new comments since June 2022 to Dec 2022

I’m not going to disclose which community this is, but let’s just say it’s a hobby where people showcase a specific irl talent of theirs via pictures. Now I’m not trying to be cruel when i say this but why is it that sometimes I’ll notice people who look like they just began partaking of this hobby last week or like a child did it will get hundreds and hundreds and sometimen’s even thousands of upvotes, whereas skilled “craftsmen” if you will (and I’m not just talking about myself; I’ve noticed this with many many other posters to this sub who are genuinely skilled and well practiced at this craft as well) will sometimes get really measly numbers? other Than obvious things like time of day posting for the majority in the US/Canada which I’ve controlled for. What is it?

It needs to be said, for as much as redditors see themselves as superior to 4channers, or Twitter users, or TikTokers, or Facebook users, or any other group the Reddit crowd sees themselves as superior, this site, out of any social media I have ever used, has the most pronounced tendency towards group think, narrative manipulation by interested parties, dunning-kruger tier confidence in things people are deeply ignorant about, and a tendency towards thought terminating cliches.

Of all internet populations I've encountered this one, by far, is the most susceptible to manipulation and most resistant to independent thought. Redditors often fancy themselves free thinkers, it could not be further from the truth. I would say the voting system is designed to make it much harder to be a free thinker on this site, and it both appeals to the easily led and encourages people being easily led. Just look at how over the course of 10 years redditors went from championing free speech to becoming rabid supporters of censorship not only on this site but targeted censorship all throughout the internet. In just 10 years the userbase went from vehemently anti-war to disturbingly bloodthirsty and jingoistic. For evidence for how easily manipulable the voting system makes the people here, the narratives on this site can turn on a dime.

Reddit is in many ways the worst of the social medias, for all the endless flaws of other sites, none others have the specific toxic voting system particular to Reddit that encourages group think and heavily discourages ever daring to go against the popular circlejerks, none of the pseudo-anonymous model specific to Reddit where votes are also tied to an account, forcing the account to simultaneously maintain an identity while also remaining anonymous, and of course votes are entirely hidden making this site even easier to manipulate.

Honestly Reddit genuinely feels like it was designed specifically to make it easy to promote propaganda to people.

I’m getting the feeling that they’re all karma-farming bots using GPT to make up stories. Either that or people who post there all have insane relationships.

Has that sub become more critical of Israel after the WCK attacks? Or am I just not looking hard enough?

How did it happen? Did the sub flip or are they being overwhelmed by people who were always critical of Israel?

I hate typing out and entire well thought post, which obeys subreddit rules, only for it to be immediately removed by some automated system over a rule that clearly exists but is not made explicit. Why can subreddits have rules that aren't made clear? For one, I have low karma because someone uses bots to automatically downvote every comment (but not post) that I make. And I do some occasional shitposting. Even on an alt account where I didn't do any of this, my posts would be randomly removed for whatever reason. I tried to post like 5 times once on r/explainlikeimfive and the bot told me to reword it each time. I gave up.

What's up with these low-quality posts that are just some generic image with a general question like "What is your favorite ... boss?"?Every second post on gaming subreddit is like this. Here are some examples:

• Which FromSoftware game began your Soulsborne journey? And where are you now? - This guy has multiple of these posts with 1k+ karma
• You are about to be executed, which one of the Mercs Would You Choose To Do The Job?
• What's the oldest physical game that you still have since you got it?

These are just some random examples I got from scrolling my homepage, but you can visit any gaming subreddit and see that every second post is like this. Low effort posts with some generic question. I think the goal is to farm engagement by asking these stupid questions, because people love responding to shit like this. The posters that do this usually have multiple of these karma farming posts. It's literally farming karma to resell the account. 1+ year ago this type of shit would never have been upvoted, this is a recent trend.

Starting to realize no matter what sub I end up joining, there tends to be this natural up votes of a 'narrative' people like to push. If you're against that, you get swarmed and bullied, until your opinions are seen as wrong.

I usually sub to gaming subs, but you can't add your perspective on a game without going to a 'low sodium' version of it.

Like right now BG3 fans are pushing for everyone to conform to a 'Dark Urge' playstyle. It's seen as the 'best' way to play the game only on that sub, but there's been release of stats that completely go against that statement. If you say anything that goes against it downvotes get rained upon you.

Same with Bethesda 'fans' saying that Bethesda doesn't make good games anymore. You can't say they do, or else you'll be drowned out by the 'fans' pushing you to view only one way.

I don't know why Reddit is like this, but pack mentality has been shown to affect communities.

I feel bad that I joined reddit quite late (2019), but I enjoyed my time in here. But one thing I won't get is narwhal bacon. Reddit neckbeard/fedora atheists are still relevant, yet I haven't anyone talking about narwhal bacons

So reddit veterans, could you explain me a little about the narwhal bacon in reddit and when it stopped being relevant?

Every post gets a stickied top comment to a story from the website howandwhys.com, the story is always unrelated to post itself.

Recent example: https://old.reddit.com/r/StrangeEarth/comments/1bv8tkn/this_is_the_last_photo_of_nicholas_mevoli_he/

Is this okay within Reddits own rules?

The top moderator does not seem to be involved, mostly posting in /r/conspiracy, the stickied comments are all from mod number 2 from the top

On the app it's only showing two comments now and I have to click 'load more comments' which takes so long to show the rest.

When I'm on my laptop and I have a notification and I click on it the page won't load so I have to manually find the post and my comment to reply.

I keep thinking it's my internet or phone data but I swap between the two and it makes no difference.

Has anyone else had these issues? If not I'll take this post down because possibly something happened to my app and browser which is causing these issues and I'm the only one experiencing them

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I noticed that my karma went up from 8k-something to 12.4k overnight with the increase appearing to be exclusive to my comment karma.

I did not access my account during this period and received no replies or significant number of upvotes, if any. I found this a bit interesting and looked around a little for any explanation but couldn't find anything satisfactory.

However, I did end up discovering this subreddit and figured it'd be an interesting thing to theorize about, so please tell me if you know the reason for this or have any theory about it.

I haven't got access to any, this is very strange they usually do one every year right?

EDIT: it’s r/counter and it’s terrible

I made this account without having to confirm an email. In fact, this is probably the hundredth or so account I've made. When they get banned I just make another, I've lost count.

Anyways when it asks me to input the email, I always input some random unused email @gmail.com. I assume they get a confirmation, but it's unnecessary to ever do that before using the account.

So if Reddit claims to have 70 million active users, hundreds of them are me. And surely I'm not the only one unwilling to provide an email, so the real user count number is likely far lower. Probably sought to artificially inflate their userbase ahead of the IPO pump & dump.

Controversial take but hear me out.

Out of all the social media platforms I've used, Reddit is the least toxic and abusive. That isn't saying much, but it is one of the few places where actual discussion can be held and content doesn't immediately devolve into virtue signaling, profilicity and egoism.

What makes Reddit toxic is mostly the fact it's populated by humans. Us humans are stupid, cruel, egotistical, tribalistic, self justifying monsters that are occasionally capable of rational thought. The truth is any platform that gives everyone an equal voice and a chance to interact is going to devolve into the same petulant self righteous bullying, tribalism and performative pseudo-intellectualism that is seen everywhere on Reddit.

The truth is social media as a concept doesn't work. Plato was right. The right to discuss must be earned and giving everyone an equal voice is an inherently flawed idea.