Comment by voz_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by voz_ | Hacker News Reader

Reddit has become absolutely garbage. I gave up my account from ~2008 and not looked back.

- Clearly astroturfed to hell and back by CCP, Iranian trolls, Russian trolls.

- Clearly bloated with viral marketing for various corporations "Look at how quirky my Coke Bottle(tm) is!", "Look at how weirdly my boyfriend eats his Jimmy John's(c) Sandwich!"

- The UX is garbage - you need to use Apollo for iOS or old.reddit.com to make it even halfway viewable without the ad spam, UX antipatterns, hard login required locks, etc.

- Unpaid mods with massive egos either struggling to maintain the quality of their sub (watch r/art become a porn sub) or completely power tripping (try to complain about homelessness in SF in that sub)

- Out of touch management looking to bleed as much money as they can out of the stone, shilling NFTs, Awards, live streaming nonsense, etc while neglecting core features of the site.

- The userbase is at a really annoying intersection of smug and ignorant. Everyone is an armchair general, everyone "well actually"s each other, everyone's an expert. To paraphrase someone... you read people's comments, get irate, argue with them, discuss, etc, then you look at their post history and realize you've been arguing with someone who drinks their own piss.

And to the point in this article:

- Unrestricted use of bots, which makes some whole subreddits just noise, or reposted comments from the last time XYZ was posted.

> astroturfed to hell and back

...which is still less astroturfed than news (of any kind), google results, review sites, and so on. It's one of the only places left on the entire internet where you can find real users talking about real problems with real products.

It's really easy to complain if you don't force yourself to identify a better alternative.

Useful niche sites still exist (like HN, I would argue).

But if you can't find the niche you are looking for... yeah, you are doomed.

This is incredibly dismissive.

That's like saying if your house is on fire and don't have a place to go to you might as well continue hang out while your house burns around you.

Even if you can't provide solutions or alternatives to a problem it's important to acknowledge the problem.

"Knowing where the trap is—that's the first step in evading it."

"Outside the house" is a straightforward better alternative to the inside of a burning house.

> This is incredibly dismissive.

I wish I could make it even more so. Over and over, I have seen people throw away the best solution they had because they ruminated on its shortcomings without actually finding or building something better. Tearing is easy, building is hard. They toss away what they have, the situation fails to fix itself (why would it?) and instead gets even worse.

It's a social media website. There's no cost to the users to switch away, we saw that with the Digg migration. And Reddit has been top dog in this kind of social media for at least a decade, we aren't talking about jumping ship on out of whimsy, maybe it's time for Reddit to die?

Like, honestly, who gives a shit about conde naste's social media site?

What was better than slashdot? HN.

What was better than Digg? Reddit.

What is better than Reddit?

------------------------

Believe me, I really wish you had an answer, but I don't think you do.

HN would be if we could clone @dang 1000 times and make some sub-HNs.

My friends and I have been pretty satisfied with the federated matrix server that I've been running for several years now.

I imagine that the future of social media will look something like that and mastodon.

Small silos of people connected through an adhoc trust network seems to be a pretty good mitigation strategy for the issues of AI generated spam.

we sure don't see any corporate spam in our rooms.

My better alternative is touching grass.

Shoutout to Clearspace (YC23), which I saw posted here and helped me finally break off from Reddit. I'm not entirely free of it yet, but I hardly ever browse it on my phone and the improvement for my mental health has been astronomical.

I noticed getting away from habitually scrolling has taken the shine off browsing the desktop too: Like now I have formed the complete realization that the content on that website just isn't remotely good anymore. There was a time where I could reasonably justify all the cruft and advertising shoveled at you there because of the quality content and discussion, but that's almost completely dwindled away now.

In hindsight, it's like the cool neighborhood bar full of geeks gradually started watering down the beers with urine over the last few years and I just realized the geeks are all gone, the patrons are all just shouting at each other, and the beer is just piss.

The site always had a contrarian edge to it, but the userbase seems completely driven over into a culture of "gotchas" - "well actuallys" as you say. And a decade ago the people making "gotchas" about technology were maybe at least informed in the niche, not fomenting cynically negative conspiracy theories and getting voted to the top of a front page threads. The site is so pessimistic now. I firmly believe habitually browsing reddit will poison your outlook to be more negative and cynical because the community constantly promotes that mindset.

The sad thing is, that for finding actually useful info instead of SEO spam drivel and copy pasted identical articles just phrased slightly differently, adding 'reddit' to google search is still the best way. Speaks loudly about the state of google and the internet.

It's not just Reddit. Over the past 6-12 months I've noticed that most of the places I "consume" at have all gone downhill due the monetization/commercialization by the content creator. I used to spend way too much time on Reddit and Youtube and would use tools like SelfControl and screentime to moderate my usage. I've noticed that recently I don't have to do that anyone. Everything has turned into a money grab and I'm no longer interested in the content. My current reddit routine is scrolling for a couple of minutes, realizing I haven't seen anything interesting and I lose interest and close the app. I have a 15 min screentime timer for reddit and I don't even hit it anymore. The same goes for youtube. There are just a handful of specific youtubers I follow now, the rest I feel like I'm being sold something or is just low quality content created for the sole purpose of inserting ads into.

Some subs are still pretty decent, especially the ones discussing topics that are not adjacent to politics and news.

That said the points you list is why I don't understand how anyone invested money in their IPO. The thing is clearly one scandal away from a meltdown a la Digg.

It's interesting how you're calling out foreign astroturfing, when I see reddit as full of utterly banal, uninteresting, and embarrassingly nationalistic domestic propaganda that often lacks even a shred of self-awareness and self-reflection (and would be downvoted to hell if posted by the 'other' side).

Perhaps that's what the 'marketplace of ideas' is supposed to produce. It's supposed to be a global site for global users to talk to each other, not an echo chamber for us to clap each other on the back[1] as we regurgitate our propaganda.

[1] Top two threads on Reddit right now are about a negative-to-China political cartoon, but I don't imagine that you call people upvoting that out as trolls and astroturfers... Because it aligns with your world view.

The other side doing it is outrageous and tasteless and propaganda, our side doing it is, well, normal. To our sensibilities.

I've had good experiences on more focused subreddits (trades, specific hobbies, etc). Basically anything that's not general or not likely to overlap with overt politics, the quality of discussion/information there is still decent.

> reposted comments from the last time XYZ was posted

This gets me the most, as its fueling all the rest. So many top comments are just bots posting the exact same text as the last time the link was posted, which is done to farm karma for selling to marketers, propagandists, and of course, more spammers, continuing the cycle of garbage.

Agreed. They just closed i.reddit.com, and I've actually stopped browsing reddit. I used to linger after looking something up. Also tangentially -- what is reddit's obsession with Anker products?

People complain about homelessness in the San Francisco sub all the time though? I'll be honest, I hardly go to that sub but whenever I do it seems like there's at least one post about it.

Agree, Reddit is terrible. Heavy handed political bias too.

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