Ask HN: Is Reddit Becoming Dumber? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Reddit Becoming Dumber?

50 pointsMahn57 comments

I realize that asking this probably makes me sound like an asshole, but bear with me for a second. When I joined Reddit, circa 2012, it had its shared of misinformed, poorly researched comments/posts like every other internet community, but as long as you stuck to niche subreddits it was mostly downvoted and contained.

As the years pass and I pick up new niche interests, my instinct is to turn to Reddit to find like minded individuals, but more and more increasingly I find that misinformed and poorly researched content is becoming the default and taking over the more quality content.

Is this everyone else's experience with Reddit lately as well or I'm just becoming more of an asshole as I age? Genuinely curious what others think.

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I think it's regression to the mean. When reddit was relatively small it was possible for them to have a group that was, on some dimensions, above average. As reddit becomes larger and larger those dimensions return to the population mean. That feels like, and is, a decline in quality.

Reddit has an inherent problem in that the only people who are moderators are the people with the time and inclination to be moderators. These people tend, to borrow the previous language, to be below average in certain dimensions.

Reddit naturally incentives low effort content. A thoughtful essay that takes thirty minutes to read will fall off the new or hot pages simply because the people who see and read it are still busy reading as the submission decays. A funny meme that can be consumed at a glance will get quick upvotes and enter a positive feedback loop where more people see it, more votes, more people see it, etc.

Finally, reddit's developers seem to have no idea what they are trying to do. I mean "developers" in a broad sense encompassing the entire company developing the product. They reproduce useless and obnoxious features, clutter their UI, degrade the core user experience and so on - chasing engagement metrics. Perhaps these, um, improvements, appeal to a certain audience, but my intuition is that audience repels a different sort of audience.

In short, I do think reddit has gone downhill and is accelerating. My account there is 12 years old but I stopped using it regularly 4 or 5 years ago.

>Reddit naturally incentives low effort content.

This is true, and applies to pretty much the entire web at this point. Back when it was people blogging, and getting replies on other blogs, there was time to sit and ponder, and edit things, even after posting them, before they were read.

We all want that feedback to know we've been heard, and our time spent writing and editing wasn't a total waste. The walled gardens optimized on filling that void, and turned it up to 11. They did it via algorithm and structure of computer mediated spaces, all optimized by corporations that MUST seek profit, by law.

I'm thankful every day for Dang, and this little peaceful contemplative space. I try... not always successfully, to accept when I've disturbed the peace and gotten the odd downvote by the community here.

What's dang?

"Reddit has an inherent problem in that the only people who are moderators are the people with the time and inclination to be moderators. These people tend, to borrow the previous language, to be below average in certain dimensions."

People often say that HN is as good as it because of dang. So perhaps there's a lot of correlation between community quality and moderator quality, and how good moderators don't just happen... you have to filter and hire them to some extent.

I have a feeling the entire internet became dumber. I miss the early 2000s days when it was still considered somewhat nerdy.

That may be because back in the 90s it took some skill to get online and participate in any way with others.

I definitely miss the way people would freely help further technical facets as new technologies came about.

The phrase "Eternal September" was coined on usenet once ISPs opened the floodgates of users to what was once a small community. The "September" referring to the yearly influx of new freshmen gaining access via universities.

Average computer illiteracy across the entire internet population is down. I never got to experience the era of bulletin services, RSS feeds, emailing your friends, IRC.

Where's the tech bro internet? Where's the cool internet with the learning curve? Where am I??

Tech bro internet is all in the metaverse. The entry fee is 3 NFTs.

I'd rather leave the internet

s/internet/people

(not even sure if this is the right code, which illustrates my point I guess)

I think people overall got smarter. It's just that the really smart people know exactly how to split the dumb people against the not as dumb people. intelligence doesn't necessarily affect your ability to fall into tribalism, it just changes the weak points.

Yes, I think so in the sense that it peaked several years ago. For awhile it was getting smarter because so many niche communities were being created and good information was being shared freely, which attracted more expertise. More companies were also interested in using subreddits as their community software or support forum which endorsed sections of it for specialized knowledge. Those trends have peaked and companies are more likely to set up a Discord and create nice documentation as static sites have become easier to generate and GitHub mindshare has grown.

Everything is politics now, every single sub. No exception. That's my biggest problem. And no it wasn't always like this

Certain topics seem to be irresistible flamebait, instantly poisoning any online discussion. Without effective moderation they become superweapons for trolls, and bombs that anyone can accidentally or intentionally set off.

Upvote/downvote wars are also ugly.

(And it's not just reddit; I used to enjoy ars technica before its comment section degenerated into flame and downvote wars.)

HN is one of the few exceptions where touching one of these electric rails even in passing doesn't seem to destroy everything good, but it still isn't immune to upvote/downvote wars.

Although HN has had its share of heated discussion, I think it’s especially prone to discussions derailing due to pedantry. It’s a curious, technical crowd and people in general like being right.

I think both sites have groupthink dynamics to a point that isn’t pretty, HN markedly less so but it’s still present. This is likely a byproduct of downvoting having such an outsized effect on comment visibility.

Yep, not true at all. My solution has been to just stick to smaller/niche subreddits that appeal to my interests but stay rather small. And I can (anecdotally) say that the majority of them are apolitical.

I just deleted my account over the current reddit situation with everything being about the war. It is important, but I have enough information overload as is without having to sift through 1000 russia/ukraine memes. Reddit calls itself "the front page of the internet" and the front page is very much political.

"but there is currently very little activity there for some of my interests."

my interest is mostly media and even before this past week it feels like every subs got polarized over the years. Anime subs drawing lines over what kinds of characters and genres you can talk about, gaming subs banning discussion of certain games over staff politics of a multi-thousand employee company, art subs devolving into arguments over nude figures (art subs, where you submit typical artistic exercises and expressions which include figure drawing). And you can make an entire essay about how r/movies has shifted over COVID.

They come from a good place, but they do not at all come from a realistic or reasonable one. And some are just outright toxic. Maybe if I could stick to something super niche like woodworking I'd be fine, but man has media as a whole just gone into overdrive where everything is political.

What are you talking about? No, not every sub is politics, what do you mean?

I'd say almost every sub is, especially big ones. Especially the default ones. I've even been preemptively banned from some subs for even being in other subs. Some subs admittedly are pretty good about prohibiting politics, but that's the exception rather than the norm.

Local subs are extremely political. I quit bothering as every post is about something the governor did that literally doesn't affect the city or anyone in it.

You had everything from (hardcore fetish) porn to hobby subreddits shutdown over the admins not banning "right wing covid disinformation" subs. I agree that not all subreddits involve politics (some even have rules against political posts) but the problem is that it's so widespread that even your niche craft subreddit can have a mod that thinks anyone cares about his opinion/online slacktivism.

The problem isn't their message or political stance, it's more than they usually bring absolutely nothing to the table and absolutely no one asked for political theory classes from the internet equivalent of an unpaid internet janitor/average random subreddit user.

It used to be mostly confined to the default subs but i guess reddit grew so much (and with most of the new users using the default subs first) that the end result was inevitable

Subs that celebrate other forms of tribalism seem to avoid politics pretty well.

Places where you see everyone rally around comments like "save that for r/politics. this is where we come to talk about how much the EAGLES suck, not the president."

From my experience it just ends up in different politics. For sports subs, it just takes some player being suspended over something said on twitter and suddenly it feels like r/poltics once again. And that seems to happen more and more often.

I'm not sure whether it was due to changes in the algorithm, but at some point the logged-out front page that most people see became easily 50% outrage porn - a picture of a truck parking in two parking spaces, shaky video of someone being racist in public, most recently message conversations from horrible bosses.

When someone eventually makes an account and delves into the more niche subreddits, that's the culture that they're expecting and as more do it, it starts to change the culture of the niche subreddits as well.

Ironically the secret to reddit's success was that it was just left alone with very few changes for so long. The front page was already a dumpster fire at that stage, but a dumpster fire mostly contained to the top 20 subreddits. Now that it's more clever about pulling in posts from more niche subreddits that are doing well, or based on geolocation, it pulls people into the subreddits more which accelerates the Eternal September effect.

I wonder how much of Reddit is just controlled accounts and bots talking to each other. Most of Reddit now just feels like curated political content.

>I wonder how much of Reddit is just controlled accounts and bots talking to each other.

Well..

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/

I stopped using Reddit years ago when I noticed nearly every thread, no matter how insightful, devolved into huck huck cynical bantering. I even had more than a year of Reddit Gold, but even the gold forums got pretty banal. I suppose the fake snobbery was good silly fun, but it didn't make the rest of the Reddit experience any better.

It's actually what brought me to HN.

2012? Reddit was already well past its prime before you joined. When everyone at Reddit was posting rage comics 24/7 (before 2012), I thought it couldn't get any worse, but it did.

There are still some subreddits that are worth reading though. The trick is to focus on subjects that aren't interesting to people who are poorly educated or under the age of 25 (e.g., programming languages that are rarely used by junior programmers and, preferably, rarely used in industry).

Yea, the super technical or philisophical subs tend to be some of the more laid back communities where it doesn't feel like you're being yelled down for having any semblance of counterargument to the circlerk.

It's too bad that sometimes I just wanna have a semi-coherent talk about a game or movie or tv show and that just doesn't happen on Reddit anymore. Either it's an inactive sub and you get 0-1 responses to a prompt, or it's a very active sub and suddenly you're being accused of being a shill or a troll or sockpuppet or any other kind of false flag because you dare have an opinion.

No, it’s nostalgia. There’s a natural tendency to see things this way. You may be smarter and more experienced as you get older, but that doesn’t mean Reddit gets dumber.

That’s probably also true, doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.

It's been over-corporatized in an attempt for respectability, with the goal of finally making money. That's something that happens in waves, and eventually you're left with nothing of what you started with. Reddit has reacted to every media panic with waves of new censorship and subreddit bans. You can only do that so many times before you've actually handed your site over to people who 1) either never participated in or enjoyed any of the now banned activity or places, and 2) people who were attracted by a site that was wiped clean, and were disgusted by the site during the period of its greatest growth, creativity, and influence.

People blame it on Eternal September, but it's really handing a new site, barely resembling the old site, to Eternal September and banning the old site.

What reddit is trying to do is to build an entirely new business with new customers, while retconning the brand that it built while becoming a household name. It's rational; there's no reason why reddit should be valued any higher than a 4chan, and they're looking for one.

>there's no reason why reddit should be valued any higher than a 4chan, and they're looking for one.

Part ways better PR (4chan rarely had "ban waves", and by design of the site and the community it's harder to make those stick). Part ways different focus; Reddit focused on regurgitating content, not the community. That came a few years later. Curation is always a valuable asset on the internet and the voting mechanic worked well enough in the beginning to curate pretty much any given topic.

Once that was set in stone, it was a seemless shift to target their growing audience with all kinds of ads and other engagement. 4chan remained more or less the same (focusing on image macros and community) while Reddit pursued to pretend to be facebook with it's newer features. The question that remains is will there be enough creators to keep the site in tow once the frustrated "old guard" inevitably leaves.

More people are using Reddit and the average person is pretty dumb, so makes sense no?

Yes, new generation of people online, older generation aged out. It's not you, reddit changed.

It's time to move on and look back at your decade of use and ask what you really missed out in terms of community involvement and how the web has changed. Forums are dead. :(

>It's time to move on and look back at your decade of use and ask what you really missed out in terms of community involvement and how the web has changed. Forums are dead

I just wanted to enjoy some media puns without devolving into some banter of pedantry, political escalations out of nowhere (I like show -> I support [bad thing in one moment of one episode of show] and I am a bad person for it. What?), or well, no response at all because it seems there's little/no response on older forums.

Really does suck. Reddit isn't really for discussions anymore, and most media stuff I can find seems to have moved towards discord servers, which is horrible for long form discussion. I like the concept of nested discussion so I can just minimize that moment when two people argue for 50 comments, but I miss pretty much everything else about the old gamefaqs days, for instance. People can still be pricks but it didn't seem like the entire thread of EVERY post was being prickly.

I think so, yes. Even in niche subreddits (arch linux, say) if you ask a question, you'll only get stock answers, as if the other person had done a quick web search, picked the top result from google, and pasted it in.

I just checked the subscriber count of r/archlinux, out of curiosity. With over 200,000 users, I'm not sure it can be considered "niche".

The quality of submissions is also abysmal—for every interesting or thoughtful post I see, there are dozens of really basic troubleshooting questions. And I mean really basic stuff. You can only give thoughtful answers to "how do I connect to WiFi/install GPU drivers?" for so long. At some point you start copy/pasting links or just ignoring those threads.

It ain't much better over here buddy.

I've been reading all of your comments and there's one theme I think we're neglecting to discuss, engagement is down too. Because of it's growing popularity and the limited amount of screen real estate, the ranking algorithm has to be a lot more discriminatory. This ends up meaning that any given user posts mostly low performing posts which discourages quality. It's like YouTube, soon "redditors" will be equivalent to "YouTubers".. or maybe "tiktokers"?

It’s a lot bigger now and therefore has the same problems any big online community has (bad signal to noise ratio). I think this is made worse through the upvote system, but that’s purely my anecdotal take. The niche communities continue to be pretty good. I use askliterarystudies pretty often and get high-quality info.

In my experience even the most niche online communities begin to seem “dumb” after you’ve spent significant time on them, as the once-novel information gets rehashed endlessly.

The biggest loss will be the interesting subreddits like that one. Reddit killed off forums and became the empire that has had its dominion over most of the niche interests. Unfortunately, as Reddit has been growing bigger and bigger and tries harder to cater to the lowest common denominator, the rot seems to be trickling down to even the niche subs. For programming and the like, there’s HN. But for much of anything else, the alternatives are long dead.

The real question is not whether Reddit is rotting, but of where to go after it?

I think there’s a few newer factors at play over the last year or two in addition to the usual problems (anecdotal of course).

* Unless incredibly niche, subreddits reach that poor quality threshold so fast now.

* Marketing firms have learned how to use reddit with a huge amount of thinly veiled advertising, SEO Spam, Karma farming and bot presence.

* Discord, slack hacker news etc. seem to have eaten away at some topics, programming community engagement for example feels like it’s dropped off a cliff.

Downvoting creates echo chambers where you can't disagree or even share an unpopular opinion. A lot of low effort or borderline spam content too. i never really liked reddit, it was a place to waste time. It is hard to get a well rounded opinion of anything from it. One idea seems to always dominate a subreddit and you must conform.

I think it has gotten worse lately. Lower quality comments and discussion, rehased jokes, unfunny attempts to troll or be edgy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Doesn't help that the recent redesign explicitly encourages that.

Reddit is bigger, and most communities get fall off as they get bigger. The solution is to find smaller subreddits, and to contribute the content you want to see.

Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives out good".

AnimalMuppet's Law: "Bad users drive out good". (Within an online community.)

I've always have had a hard time with the Reddit comments. Misinformed is a given since we are all ready to give out our opinions at will. Right or wrong is unimportant to whomever posts as long as they post what they think. That's all over social media. I don't like it but it's part of the social media environment. But the real pain to me is the never ending wisecracks. Everyone wants to be funny. When the comments get polluted with that then they are pretty useless. Reddit comments are just full of it.

I don't think it's gotten any worse. It's just part of the make up of the community. It's DNA.

Some of us thought of HN as a 'new, improved Reddit with smart people' when we came about 10 years back.

Sad to say, like all Empires do, all social media websites are born, grow in prestige and then decline away into garbage. Look at enough social media websites and you will be able to find them at all stages of the progression spectrum.

It got noticeably more hostile in March 2020, when COVID diverted lots of new social interaction from in-person to online. This was the Eternal September moment for me personally.

Starting in January I was spending a lot of time on the internet for personal reasons and the transition in March was very clear to me.

Reddit goes through periodic user purges - although they do occasionally get a true positive when they do, for the most part they just end up purging the users who are capable of critical thinking, hence the current critical mass of folks who only know how to go with the flow.

> As the years pass and I pick up new niche interests, my instinct is to turn to Reddit to find like minded individuals, but more and more increasingly I find that misinformed and poorly researched content is becoming the default and taking over the more quality content.

I think this is becoming the default for the internet/society in general. Rather than it being a Reddit problem, it’s simply manifesting on Reddit, as it is most other popular websites.

Recently? I would say no.

IMO reddit reached peak dumb a few years back and has floated there since. I'd imagine this is its final resting place.

since they removed the downvote counter, wasteland.

Yes

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