Comment by cheeseface
11 hours ago
Agree on how the platform’s have changed.
However, I don’t think Reddit is an exception. Popular is often filled with content that is driven by the feelings of fear and hate. Not something I’d like to continually expose kids or teens to.
I use old.reddit.com but I feel like I have complete control over what I see. It's new posts, I check them and then I leave.
That's what I've lost on Facebook. It forces me to see things its algorithm thinks I like, but more often than not, it's things that make me want to argue. I don't have that on Reddit. Long may it last.
> That's what I've lost on Facebook
As I found out a while ago on HN when I complained an extension I used stopped working, ?sk=h_chr still works to get a sane FB view. No sponsored shit, no algorithmic suggestions, no posts people have reacted to, just chronological posts of people & pages you follow.
I also use old reddit.
That feeling of controlling your feed. It's just a feeling. Carefully calibrated so you feel like you can do something without doing it.
Lately the algorithm for the front page sorted by hot or best has been changed. You'd see mostly threads from subreddit you recently visited. So you no longer have control over what you don't get to see.
I use old.reddit on my desktop, new.reddit on my phone and new.reddit is constantly mashing in posts from a more niche "my-country" sub (eg: not the "main" /r/country) that's often got very baity posts (eg: guised "does anyone else hate immigrants??" posts).
Same account, same behaviour, but the new site is really pushing "gross" stuff at me.
Funny that you use old.reddit.com. I used this too. I could not handle the new reddit - it was useless for me.
What I find particularly bad about Reddit is the platform is specifically designed to amplify group think and silence competing opinions. All it takes is five more downvotes than upvotes and a comment will lose visibility. It can turn subreddits into little bubbles where like-minded people upvote each other and almost never have to see dissenting opinions. That may not be a big deal on a gardening subreddit, but it can be a big problem or even dangerous elsewhere.
> That may not be a big deal on a gardening subreddit,
I had to abandon my last few hobby subreddits because there were a few chronically online people who had to control the conversation in every single post with their opinions. If anyone didn't agree, their comments would mysteriously go to -3 or below within 30 minutes of posting.
It's all little fiefdoms for chronically online people now.
What are your thoughts on lemmy, maybe the hobby can be extremely niche but you can even be the moderator yourself on a lemmy instance and I think that a federated reddit alternative would be nice too!
If I may ask, what are the hobbies that you are talking about?
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Hot take: a voting system (and generally any move toward ranking content rather than displaying it chronologically) will inevitably rot any social media platform. Just a question of time.
When I used 4chan the lack of voting made engaging with the actual substance of a post much easier. This was something observed by many other posters I talked to. This is going to sound wishy-washy, but my theory is that the brain is so attuned to socially trying to figure out the in-group or who is in the wrong that putting a number that signals social agreement on a statement will immediately stimulate the more primal social pathways in your brain before you can even think.
Of course 4chan isn’t a great system for meaningful discussions, the system skews conversations towards outrage and shock. But reddits short, quippy, in-group signaling post style that is encouraged by their voting system seems to be absolute worst way to interact with other people. HN also has this problem to an extent, but it’s properly modded and most people here seem to be not be living through their phones so it isn’t nearly as extreme as reddit (or twitter, I never use twitter but people seem miserable in a similar way to reddit users).
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Reddit mod cabal is destroying the site, has been for years. Not sure what the deal is, especially after IPO.
The worst part is the conspiracy theories are increasingly being confirmed in the Epstein releases which is mind blowing, eg. https://thepostmillennial.com/former-reddit-ceo-says-she-kne...
HN does this too
It depends on lot on the sub and how their moderators police the community, but yeah, I've seen lots of that.
I've been aggressively downvoted before for pointing out facts that people don't want to be true. (And these were not even political discussions!) I don't even bother with putting my opinions online at any rate, both because they don't actually matter to anyone but me, and because I don't get any joy out of defending them against internet randos.
Edit: It depends on the size of the sub as well. I'm a member of a few subs that I can stand because the moderators are good at moderating, and there are enough regular users coming through to counter a small number of very active cranks.
> All it takes is five more downvotes than upvotes and a comment will lose visibility.
That is true here too. And Twitter is the least transparent, with people regularly reporting that posts critical of musk or trump have reduced reach compared to their other posts.
Yes, but HN still has a strong culture of considering both sides, excellent moderation, and some measures to help nudge people in the right direction. For example, right now I can only upvote your comment. I am not given an option to downvote it. That's a good thing!
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I've been on reddit long enough to get sick of the constant reposts. They really should have a filter for that.
I agree completely about Reddit. It's a clickbait factory with a misinformation density that makes my Facebook feed look downright informative.
I was an early Reddit user. It felt like there was a distinct shift when the site went from programming and news topics to being meme-heavy. Then again recently when they started recommending niche subreddits into everyone's feeds so that even the small subreddits couldn't count on being islands of quality.
Now it's just a doomerism factory. The young Redditors I've known feel like they've had their hope about the future hollowed out and crushed. They open the site and consuming a stream of content telling them that everything is awful and will continue to be awful, and anyone who disagrees is shouted down and downvoted. It's a real crabs-in-a-bucket website now.
> It felt like there was a distinct shift
Yeah there definitely was a change in reddit, probably more than once. It changed indeed. To the worse, too.
Smaller subs can still be decent but I agree about popular and larger subs. They’re just brain rot and engagement bait now.
I don't know any more. Even the small subs I previously visited for good content have turned into their own little echo chambers, along with a lot of drive-by posts because small subs get recommended in other people's feeds now.
In some of the hobby subreddits where I had good discussions in the past it's now just one big echo chamber of people parroting the same information around, whether it's true or not. If you want to participate you either need to toe the line of the accepted brands/methods/techniques or keep your mouth shut. Most of us just get tired and give up
Yeah that's really the issue with all social media. If you restrict yourself to just checking what friends post on Facebook, or what people you subscribe to post on YouTube, those platforms are pretty healthy too. It's when you go to the infinite content feed that sites become an issue.