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Comment by trendia | Hacker News Reader

> albeit often a wretched hive of scum and villainy depending on subreddit…

I'm more concerned about the opposite effect -- that the default subreddits have become pointless and boring, focusing mostly on "funny" images and cat gifs. Gone are the interesting askreddit threads or useful world news commentary, replaced with content designed to keep you browsing and staying on the site longer.

At the same time, I think the useful content often falls victim to Gell-Mann amnesia, giving votes to anyone who sounds like an expert. It's hard to identify when someone is really an expert or whether they're merely writing like one... The worst I saw was an explanation of laminar and turbulent flow that was 100% wrong, but highly upvoted until a few hours later people pointed out why it was wrong

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If you haven't seen yet, reddit itself is also tilting heavily towards prioritizing funny/quick content (even more than it did before) as well. The new desktop redesign that's in progress has infinite scroll, auto-expanded images and auto-playing gifs/videos, and so on. They also added a new default frontpage sort (that you can't change) that tries to hide any posts you've seen before every time you load it, which kind of destroys the ability to have an ongoing discussion thread.

The whole redesign has been painful. At first I liked it, but some of the things you've mentioned here as well as the lagginess of the site have really soured me on Reddit.

> Gone are the interesting askreddit threads or useful world news commentary, replaced with content designed to keep you browsing and staying on the site longer.

I'd totally forgotten how that era felt. Thanks for reminding me!

I make a point of actively curating my subscriptions–it's easy to get lulled into thinking the whole site is garbage when it's really just a few noisy subreddits. As any subreddit with a clear topic grows large, there needs to be strict moderation or it will devolve into crowd-pleasing gifs/memes/jokes, upvoted by people who aren't engaged in the original topic, in which case I'll unsubscribe.

I find that even a highly curated subreddit subscription adds little value to my life. A subreddit often looks appealing at first, but after a few weeks I notice a pattern in the submissions, and I notice the echo chamber in the comment section. Reddit has become an okay place to occasionally visit and explore, but it's not a daily read for me anymore.

Reddit no longer has default subreddits. New accounts show /r/popular and have no subscriptions.

/r/popular is /r/all but with some more controversial/niche subreddits filtered out.

I'm talking about whatever shows up when I go to reddit.com without an account (which is all of the time)

I think you also get /r/popular. They essentially switched from a whitelist model to a blacklist model.

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