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Comment by poulpy123 | Hacker News Reader

It did not kill twitter then, it will not kill Reddit now

Reddit is doing a good job of killing itself. Ive been a reddit user for at least 15 years and I have watch it turn from a smart, bright and informative community to a over confidently stupid cargo cultish, narcissistic dumpster fire. I rarely visit it anymore because it s just awful.

I browse it on Teddit, which I suspect won't be for too much longer. Reddit took their success and got complacent with VC money, and the end users have to pay for it in the form of erratic policy change.

Since most Reddit communities are opt-in this is mostly a question of smelling shit everywhere you go: time to check your shoe.

I checked my shoe and it seems like I stepped in some reddit and it smells like you.

You clearly haven't spent much time on reddit or you are part of the problem, but unless you are in a super niche subreddit with 5 people there is no escape. "tourist" like to go to subs (like the tech subs for example) they know nothing about and with great confidence spew out snarky, condescending bullshit. It's no longer about sharing and debating information it is about being "right" even if they are incorrect. Maybe I have just grown up and moved on to more mature communities where these problems don't exist

Reddit was always this, you were just out of the know when you were underneath somebody else's shoe. There's a reason why all the communities Redditors reposted from grew to vehemently hate the site and its community.

But, that being said, I really have to agree that it has degraded. The last time (years ago now) I asked a question on a tech related subreddit, almost all of the answers I got were upvote farming in some way.

Some were commenting for the sake of commenting even if it didn't answer the question. Some were telling me outright lies and stories that were not possible with with both what I and they were describing. This attitude was always prevalent, but its spread to every part of the site except for the smallest and most policed communities, at which point you may as well just stop using it and speak to your friends.

Apparently a lot of us have shoe issue then. The average quality of Reddit is quite low. It’s upvoting/downvoting at its worst. I regularly go through phases where I question the value HN brings to me and that’s despite it having far better moderation. Reddit is a lost cause.

To be fair, since Reddit wants to go all in on "growth & engagement" as opposed to a sustainable, paid model where users pay for the service, there is always going to be a faint smell of shit (in the form of spam, dark patterns and optimizing for trashy clickbait instead of longform, thoughtful discussions) no matter where you go.

Pithy, but moronic. I fail to see how a community being opt-in supposedly prevents any of the things the original commenter listed.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/23/4021380/falcon-for-androi...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/08/new-a...

so they leveleraged third party clients when they were unknown and suddenly they want those same apps to play by their rules and some years down the line completely pull the plug when their work is done. nice

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