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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

The day I realized reddit wasn't the same anymore, was when I made a jest about Youtube commenters only posting unintelligible comments in the main /r/reddit.com subreddit.

I got tons downvotes and a confused reply saying "is there something wrong with youtube that I dont get?"

Then I realized the people commenting on Reddit were the same ones posting the comments on Youtube.

They weren't even aware of the stigma of Youtubes comments, which shows the cultural shift on Reddit from tech-savvy to mainstream.

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I stopped reading Reddit at the beginning of last year: there was a clear shift in demographic that wasn't something I found to be positive. The preference had seemed to become for short, trite, flippant comments that would illicit a slew of puns. Increasingly the richness of content of submissions had dried up. Of course I was told by my friends that I should just read subreddits and ignore the garbage. But even then, the culture had changed. So ultimately it wasn't for me. Needless to say, I'm hardly a loss to Reddit's bottom-line in the scheme of things and they're probably better off in the mainstream in that regard.

I stopped reading reddit long before you stopped. Quite a bit later, I slowly came back by being very selective about my subreddits. I think others might have done the same, because I've definitely been able to create a reddit very much like I remember it long before it got so popular. (Good god, does this post make me sound like an uber-hipster, or what!)

But you're right about the subreddits, and this is one of the more important features which manages to keep acquainted users from leaving the site, even if they are tired of the now 4chan-esque frontpage.

I remember first starting to read reddit probably about a year or so before digg v4. Originally I thought the site style was boring, but I kept coming back because there was always fresh content.

I noticed that after digg v4 things started to downhill. in the last few months it has gotten dramatically worse.

unfunny memes get beaten to death. Rage comics, etc. Two years ago there wasn't that crap. I feel like memes are taking over, and regular comments and submissions are forced into banality when they would be better without the old, beaten-to-death meme.

there's still a lot of good stuff but there's now a sea of horrible content to sift through.

And just to add to that, I feel like the subreddit mechanism is a horribly fragmented and inefficient way of maintaining quality; even as an experienced user I had trouble finding the richness of quality I was looking for.

Back in the day reddit's frontpage was filled with day-to-day reports from the Ron Paul campaign, middlebrow atheist ranting and breathless reports of "police brutality". And it only went down hill since then.

I'd like to think it went mainstream. You can still find those same discussions, but they've gone to the subreddits (which was a fantastic idea, by the way).

Maybe HN should do something similar.

Possible opportunity: a YouTube with smarter comments. Perhaps just embed the YouTube videos, but have a longer, better-threaded, better-ranked comment area. And some gate on registrations, like the Quora test. Hmm, maybe:

YouTubeVideosWithCommentsByQuoraUsers.com

I'd be very interested to see this comment thread. I've never, ever seen anyone defend YouTube, let alone YouTube style comments. Further, if you're in an at-all-trafficked subreddit, poor spelling, poor grammar and outright rudeness is fairly well discouraged.

perhaps this is it?

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/jcv2h/rolling_st...

Indeed, this comment in particular was the top reply that had 12+ upvoted before later being downvoted.

"Are you trying to be clever, are you a dumb ass or something else? Is this some funny youtube shit that is above my understanding?"

The exaggerated lack of intelligence in my original comment was really obvious. The fact that people didn't get the joke was what was concerning.

I might be missing something, but it looks like you missed the parent commenter's joke.

I'm having a hard time seeing anything of interest in the whole thread, funny or otherwise. Who are these people who see a comment with 600 upmods or 80 downmods and think, "Yeah, I better add my vote to that gross consensus."

Jokes don't have to be funny to be recognized as jokes.

Wow. I wonder if HN will follow this trend too. Reddit was nothing like this just 2 years ago.

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