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Comment by never_a-pickle | Hacker News Reader

Reddit results are not organic at all but maybe appears to be on the surface.

Subs have their own "reddit" brands in accordance to the topic. They also have their own "reddit" opinions shared among almost every sub with enough people in it for justify propaganda.

I already did my own informal research on this - reddit has transitioned into consumption. I went sub by sub for thousands of posts, even a few years ago, and found that at least 75% of the selection of hobby subs I chose were related to the consumption of products within that hobby, not the active participation and knowledge translation within that hobby. You'd think camping subs would be talking about camping? Sure, see the sidebar for basic info. However, what you'll really see is 80 of the top 100 posts of the day will be pictures of various products within different backgrounds/settings.

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> Subs have their own "reddit" brands in accordance to the topic. They also have their own "reddit" opinions shared among almost every sub with enough people in it for justify propaganda.

Which is actually the cool thing about Reddit, because you can just create your own subreddit about a topic and set the rules as you see fit. Don't like that camping pics have products in the background? Alright, set a rule for your new sub that says no products in pics, and then rule your kingdom with an iron fist.

Heck, that could be the whole point of your sub. /r/campingProductFree or something.

This used to work well but moderators have "professionalized" and nowadays will viciously stamp out any kind of separarism.

Creating a forum has never been hard. Attracting people is.

I would imagine this would get worse as money corrupts reddit the same way money corrupted google.

Whomever moderates /r/camping probably isnt doing it for free.

> This used to work well but moderators have "professionalized" and nowadays will viciously stamp out any kind of separarism.

How would they go about doing that? I see new, competing subreddits being created all the time. Like, what could a mod do to stop me if I wanted to create a new competing sub?

Censor posts even mentioning it in competing subs they moderate?

Maybe i wasnt clear about that.

Even if everybody from an existing subreddit would move to a better one they wont if they dont hear about it.

> They also have their own "reddit" opinions shared among almost every sub with enough people in it for justify propaganda.

This has been a problem I've observed when using reddit to choose products. If a bunch of people are going to get together to talk about X, they are going to be way more into X than most people. When I was choosing a mesh network system the conclusion I got from reddit was that spending less than $600-$800 and having a system without a wired backbone would make my internet unusable. It was extremely difficult to find a "good enough for typical users" recommendation since none of the posters were typical users.

My hot take is that this represents actual human behavior, like in a human Sturgeon's law sense. 90% of campers are going to camp less than X times a year. (X == 3? IDK. some low number) They're going to go to Reddit and look for "best tent" and then go to REI and buy it and feel great. That's all they need.

10% of campers are going to camp > 10 times a year and have nuanced opinions about tents. Occasionally, these campers will post their lengthy tent opinions on Reddit, but mostly they'll stay quiet because they already know what the best tent for their own uses is and don't need to deliberate on it.

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