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Comment by BashiBazouk | Hacker News Reader

Reddit seems to be dying for me for completely different reasons. Meme dependency for lack of a better word. Not the images with one liners though there are an annoying amount of those as well, but a standardized repetitiveness of responses to any input that tend to linger toward the top of the thread if sorted by best. This is much more prevalent in threads off r/popular or r/all than smaller subreddits, but as an example, any rape or sexual assault story on r/news or r/politics will always have the Brock Turner SEO peppering within the top five threads, sometime multiple. Any Trump thread will have the long, long list of misdeeds with links and then some one liners that the wording has become standardized. This then extends in to related subreddits where the meme pops up when the triggering subject is talked about.

It just becomes so boring and predictable.

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This kind of thing is what kept me off of Reddit all these years. People would say "you just need to find the right subs", but any of the ones in topics I was interested in were all like that, and I was never interested in using Reddit just to use Reddit. Reddit is what Reddit is, and there is no finding "the right sub" if that metaculture is what you don't like about it.

I don't disagree. There's a few subs that are (were) distinctly different, like /r/askhistorians, but most mods don't put in the effort to cultivate a distinct community so it trends towards the metaculture. The few subs that do (did) have their own distinct culture were often pretty great though.

Reddit has been a place for clever people to talk, but as it and its reputation grew, it started to attract not-so-clever people too. Cleverer people don't respond as well to advertising, so if you want to make more money from your users, you want more of the less intelligent ones, and fewer of the more intelligent ones.

The standardised comments you mention are a way for the less intelligent to participate, and the upvotes they attract reflect the numbers of these users. The ones you've mentioned sound like a case of aping one's betters; the ones I see most often are the vacuous 'Putin must be defenestrated' comments that litter the Ukraine war daily threads, and are the worst kind of performative virtue signalling.

Reddit as a loss-making assembly of communities is dying; Reddit as a profitable set of curated feeds, a sort of TikTok that's not just for short video, is rising.

I disagree that intelligent people don't buy things or respond to advertising. I would compromise and say that they respond to different kinds of advertising.

It is very insighful of you to point out that Reddit will be more profitable as a set of curated feeds.

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