The product has gone downhill ever since.
Comment search is nice because it enables users to find interesting content directly in the good niche subreddits.
Maybe - since you have a decade of material to draw from - you could offer a counter-example? I think that would be more conducive to discussion than "don't make such comments."
Do you see how silly this is yet? The comment you are defending is - logically - about as valid as not saying anything at all, which is exactly what they told the OP to do.
/r/DarkNetMarkets. Just for discussing DNMs, AFAIK.
/r/shoplifting
/r/stealing
/r/beertrade: for trading beers
/r/gundeals for a bit. Several other gun buying subs are still banned.
/r/fakeid
/r/scotchswap: for trading Scotches
/r/cigarmarket
There's more, too.
The rest of those are just banning discussions of illegal activity. Seems like a reasonable policy to me.
And it's not like there aren't thousands of other subs that discuss illegal activity. They haven't banned all the drug subs, or the hacking subs, etc. Pretty much any illegal activity you can still find subs for it. /r/streetracing, /r/piracy, etc.
FTFY
https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitPoliticsSays/comments/9m30os/rc...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitPoliticsSays/comments/bmtdqb/ch...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitPoliticsSays/comments/c66x0w/1_...
And the_donald literally disallowed submissions for months before being banned. When reddit has a sub in their sights, they will find a reason.
/r/mgtow
Wait, huh???
r/startrek, without the underscore, is the official Star Trek community. r/star_trek is an alternative community created because r/startrek is very hostile to anyone who doesn't just slobber over anything Star Trek.
So people would join the alternative community and bring up why they got banned on the official one, or how people were being ridiculous in general on the official one.
But I don't buy that there was any meaningful amount of brigading that was happening. I think the official community, being its pious self, didn't like that people were exposing the mods for being arbitrary and condescending, or that anyone was exposing the likely possibility that they were highly controlled by ViacomCBS.
When it got locked, for all intents and purposes it was banned, if not temporarily.
X: They keep banning my favorite subreddits
Y: Like /r/programming?
X: No, not that one
Y: /r/movies?
X: No
Y: /r/lego?
X: No
Y: /r/nfl?
X: No
Y: Well, which ones?
X: /r/letsmockminoritiesanddisabledpeople
For instance, reddit has a raging hardon for Sinophobia, but Asians in general aren't treated as a protected human class. Incredibly vile, vitriolic content and comments get huge acclaim as long as you frame anything Asian as being tacitly un-American.
Look through the Olympic speed skater threads, or the recent "the result of Chinese lock down policies" video that's just a compilation of Asian people committing suicide, totally unrelated to lock downs.
I get nobody wants to feel like they're surrounded by closet xenophobes and ethnopurists, but all it takes is seeing the collective blind-spot in "remember Russian people are innocent, it's just Putin we hate!" versus "makes sense, Chinese are all freedomless brainwashed moral aliens" to drive home how rotten it is.
This is just one example. Terrible behavior by megamods going unacknowledged and unaddressed weakens the platform, and reddit stoking the tribalism that makes people feel like they're safe and powerful there lends itself to harmful extremism. It's like nationalism is okay as long as it's not white nationalism.
> It's like nationalism is okay as long as it's not white nationalism.
I think the issue is because "white" isn't really a race, nobody is trying to cancel someone proud of their Polish heritage. Black ended up becoming a de-facto race to deal with the descendants of slaves who had their ancestry erased so they're not really comparable. I can only speak to the US but "white nationalism" (hell even "American nationalism") just became the rallying cry for white supremacists. Which sucks for anyone who was benignly proud to be an American but this is just the reality we have to deal with. It's political suicide to run on "I'm racist and proud" anymore so we're surrounded by dogwhistles and people organizing under informal banners and "you know what I mean wink" type policy.
That's pretty much gone in the comments section on r/politics.
The vitriol directed against Russians is often over the top now.
As someone who remembers the hatred towards Russians by the American Right during the 80s that is fairly disturbing to me.
Of course the Hacker News threads which try to play down the consequences of a nuclear exchange with Russia are probably worse.
I don't feel that this makes reddit a great news source or anything - but it does make it palatable entertainment.
Another is subreddit search engines like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22823109
I dug in there one time and found a fascinating obituary for a user on a subreddit for people living with addiction -- full of some touchingly personal and weirdly public stories. Following the user's profile from there taught me about the wild world of the "opiate roll call" subreddit (a thinly veiled Craigslist for drugs) which was at the time flourishing. Fascinating stuff.
These days that awards are free, that's just a list of popular things, not a list of cool things. The major subreddits can have a selfie posted that gets a dozen awards.
The largest shift in the site was something 12-14 years ago when they redesigned the site to have thumbnails.
This brought people to the site for images instead of content. That was absolutely the original torpedo.
It made the site much more popular, but the quality tanked fast, and has continued since due to having to cater to the lowest common denominator of millions of people.
the_donald brought a lot of a younger users and white supremacists. I haven't seen a DNC-related reddit conspiracy before though. Certainly no noticeable shift that night.
The whole thing was just internal internet geek culture drama.
What? You haven't noticed social media marketing on reddit?
At the very least, there's a distinct lack of self awareness of how small your one opinion is, to the sea of overall opinions. "Has gotten worse" vs "I've grown to like it less" are very different statements; one externalizes the decline, eschews your role and responsibility for your own opinion, and the other owns up to the reality that something my be worse "for you" while getting better for many, many others.
However I think that no matter what they (reddit) would have had their hand forced eventually. The site has grown massively since 2015.
and (imo) if they were really wanting to fix this trick they would have just made it so something that was ever stickied couldn't show up on /r/all. Instead they did what (to me) was basically a complete change of their algorithm with very slow changes to placement.
Indeed.
It's especially visible when the effect temporarily abates. After Trump's 2016 election win, for a day or two, it was possible to post something non-leftist to /r/politics without having it be mercilessly downvoted; as if the shills were awaiting orders.
In the months leading up to the DNC primary, reddit was a battleground between Correct the Record[1] and /r/The_Donald. After the primary, it felt like every post on left-wing subs was inline with the narratives that CTR had been pushing for months. Before the primary, there was quite a bit of resistance to CTR, even from the left-wingers. That evaporated over a single night.