Comment by muppetman
1 year ago
Exactly. Even the reddit blackouts etc did nothing really - sure a few people left in a huff and all that jazz, but Reddit is still trucking along happily. The only time I've seen the "eff it, we're leaving!" thing actually work was with Digg v4.
I have seen a considerable degrading of quality on reddit since the blackouts. I use reddit for quality subject discussion in topics ranging from pressure cooking to circuit design but I also use it for general crappy banter and time wasting, and the people who would contribute useful content in the former have decreased in number while the latter have increased making the signal to noise much worse.
It doesn't help that they have started placing content from more obscure subreddits onto people's front pages seemingly randomly, so people wander into places and have no idea what the culture is they are contributing to and add content which is wildly out of place.
To get subject matter discussion which is reasonable I have been wandering back to bespoke forums, which isn't necessarily bad, but they still have a lot of issues. A lot of other content has moved to discord, but I won't get into how I feel about that.
Nah, the blackouts definitely hurt Reddit. Deleted posts are the norm now. This was not the case before the API changes.
Fair point, I have myself noticed a lot more deleted posts. I doubt their bottom line has hurt much though.
Deleted and overwritten posts were a thing for long before the api change.
"A thing" is substantially different from what they claimed, that it's now the norm.
1 reply →
yes, but they are every other post you find on google now.
i certainly didn't help; i used shreddit to overwrite then delete my posts.
Although, I'm surprised how often I'm seeing the key comments I was searching for deleted. I haven't been keeping stats, but maybe around half the time.
Some Reddit metrics might've hardly noticed the blips, but if they had metrics for early-Reddit qualities, such as for smart (or clever) comments, helpful information, humor, or goodwill... I suspect those would be bad. Where they're not bad might be non-frontpage subs that are still cruising along with their earlier communities. But those communities started in earlier Reddit, and I suspect that today would not have started there.
> metrics for early-Reddit qualities
Those had already tanked before any API changes.
Tumblr with their NSFW removal change as well.