Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge | Hacker News Reader

Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

arstechnica.com

57 pointsrobin_reala100 comments

Not sure if bias but I feel like the quality of content on reddit has gone downhill since the mod purge and the killing of 3rd party apps

You just have to sign-out and look at the homepage to see this. It's all attention grabbing subs like AITAH or "amiugly" or "ratemyface" etc etc etc. All the interesting subs have withered away and died. Take /r/3dprinting for example, there used to be cool new models shared there every single day, now it's just people sharing pictures of benchies, globs of spaghetti and the odd question from someone that hasn't done any research.

It's been that way for a while before the Great Purge; at least a few years. This was a driver behind me unsubscribing from all of my subs and grouping them into multireddits instead and enjoying a blank front page.

It's both. I'd also done the same with multis but kept a "casuals" multi for the defaults + populars, and it had been declining in quality for a while - but it genuinely fell off a sharp cliff with the Great Purge, even my multireddits now feel like the frontpage. Cacophonous shallow dreck.

On one hand you're correct. On the other hand: holy crap I thought all the "roast me" trends were dying down. I check back for one day and there's like 3 new variation of "AmITheAsshole" and "Roastme" each on the front page. Why?

/r/3dprinting dropped substantially in quality when /u/billierubencamgirl left the mod team. They had fought hard against meme posts, "look at my new printer/1st print" posts, and fad print spam. They had also tried very hard to maintain useful documentation for people.

It seems that keeping a subreddit high quality is a difficult and thankless job. You will be seen as the fun police and all your efforts downplayed as unnecessary.

Honestly I find this claim laughable and in my view represents a weak grasp at confirmation bias from the API doomsayers. Still remember seeing discussions here a few months ago where people predicted that the API changes would lead to Reddit being flooded by obvious spam and even child pornography. Well, obviously that didn't happen and the front page of the internet is just filled with low-quality trash like it's always been.

If someone wants to prove this point, support it with data. Otherwise it feels like simple mood affiliation. The UX of the median Redditor has not changed at all.

>If someone wants to prove this point, support it with data.

if you want to provide a criteria sheet for "quality", then sure. But I think we'll spend more time arguing over a definition than me collecting the data.

I'm sure not going to even touch the notion of "flooded by CP". I don't want to know if that has gotten better or worse and there are much higher authorities who won't get arrested trying to audit such claims.

>The UX of the median Redditor has not changed at all.

the median redditor isn't a moderator, and a moderator affects many more people than the median moderator. I feel that's a point constantly missed in this dismissal.

Note that this article isn't surveying users, it's about conversations with moderators, old and new. I do indeed question if the UX for the median moderator has gotten worse.

I haven't noticed anything. I follow some video game and hobby subs through RSS. Everything is pretty much the same.

Definitely a shift towards our base instincts.

Several subs started showing up in r/popular that never did before or as suggested subs.

All along the lines of r/truerateme, r/facerating, r/rateme, r/amiugly, r/OUTFITS, etc. Never recall seeing these before the mod protests but suddenly see them all the time. All very similar in concept: attractive women posting pictures "asking for feedback".

Similar to when you first sign up for TikTok or IG before you start to follow people, the content is mildly sexual in nature.

Several decidedly more right wing subs are being "suggested" to me. One that sticks out is r/canada_sub but there have been others that have a decidedly right lean. (I'm not Canadian)

Several subs that used to show up in r/popular before no longer do or the do so with reduced frequency. r/news, r/worldnews, r/politics. In fact, when the Trump indictment was announced, it was nowhere to be seen on r/popular for several hours while it was the top topic on Lemmy and Mastodon.

I'm not keeping stats on this; just seat of the pants I've noticed a subtle shift in the content.

I’ve also noticed a huge shift in which topics it tries to suggest, but I suspect it’s natural selection rather than intent. It feels like the ‘strike’ allowed subs which didn’t participate to rank higher, and it seems those gains are self-reinforcing (more members/participation lead to greater prominence, which leads to higher placement, which becomes circular).

I don’t like the results, but I’m not convinced it was intentional- more just self-selection between which communities did and didn’t participate.

Could be; but it's interesting that several of the subs like r/amiugly and r/truerateme and such have relatively low sub numbers and I do not recall seeing them at all until just a few weeks back.

most of the game subs are the same and I don't think any really revolted. r/gaming had its jokes but jokes are short-lived. r/games infamously did not, despite the wishes of the user, and despite the fact that they have closed the sub as an April fool's joke.

Anything smaller probably didn't have much effect. Either they gave up when nothing happened, or they were stealth replaced with no news story to report on.

It also doesn't help that wrt games as a medium, you rarely had actual industry veterans as mods. simply "gamers". There wouldn't be as much domain knowledge to lose in such a process since many places are there for news (i.e. reposted regurgitation of game studio PR, reported by sites that were never held as the bastion of quality to begin with).

Well, they're fiddling around with the RSS, so you may get a surprise in a couple months.

Not sure why this was [dead], but I can't delete it now:

Ah yes, the newspeak term "at risk" for describing a community that's better off after delusional fascistic mods we're rightfully removed. It's like an abusive partner that tells their victim how shitty their life would be without them.

Subreddits are not mods' personal fiefdoms. They learned the hard way who actually owns the platform (Reddit Inc.), and who the platform serves (the users).

Honestly not much has changed. Some of the big subs that did their protests had their mods replaced, that's it.

I'm not on any of the big ('default') subs, all the smaller ones I'm on are operating the same as they ever did, with some doing a stupid one day a week protest. That's literally the only change.

I have the same impression. Frankly some of mine have gotten better after the replacement mods have less of a stick up their ass. A couple have even changed posting rules to be less restrictive, like allowing people to talk about ROM sites.

> Frankly some of mine have gotten better after the replacement mods have less of a stick up their ass

Very much this. A few tiny little despots got toppled, and the world goes on.

I fully supported the protests by major subreddits. My problem was that a lot of the smaller subs couldn't see the forest for the trees and, ostensibly for the sake of the survival of Reddit, destroyed themselves. The subreddit that gets five hundred posts per day bounces right back after two days offline. The niche sub that gets about ten posts per day, however, doesn't survive being shut down for two weeks. A lot of the mods seemed to be fine with the destruction of their communities as long as it was them who got to pull the trigger and not the admins.

> A lot of the mods seemed to be fine with the destruction of their communities as long as it was them who got to pull the trigger and not the admins.

Well, yeah. Most reddit mods are in it to some extent for the power, not pure benevolence. This tracks completely.

Cant the community revive itself though?

>even changed posting rules to be less restrictive, like allowing people to talk about ROM sites.

sounds like a rule that will get the sub banned if/when they ever get too much attention. Reddit will definitely side with the corporations is they get enough heat on them.

>A lot of the mods seemed to be fine with the destruction of their communities as long as it was them who got to pull the trigger and not the admins.

I'm sure they weren't fine, but if shutting down for 2 weeks is enough to destroy a community, it shows how much "community" was really there to begin with.

Reddit has gotten very aggressive about pushing random subs onto you. I’ve really come to loathe the phrase “Because you interacted with a similar community”. I have muted so many subs, I’m getting sick of the site.

Must be an app thing. I use https://old.reddit.com and don’t get that.

Agreed.

I use old.reddit.com + umatrix + ublock + custom css with tampermonkey

I now see nothing they want me to see.

I am very happy to leech.

Said as a previous mod who helped grow a sub from <25k users to almost 1 million.

My participation has changed since the API change. I use old.reddit and uBlock Origin as I always have. I limit myself to scanning a few sub-reddits to ensure nothing bad has happened to Bitwarden and Yubikey, I don't log in and certainly don't contribute as I used to. If/when old.reddit stops functioning I'll stop even that low level of participation.

Facebook's recommended images are even worse. [picture of a surveyors dot on the ground] "This dot in a field in Wisconsin is the center of the world. The other points are inaccessible due to water, but this tiny dot is..."

[picture of a dead something with a pig snout completely covered in farmers field mud] "This 30,000 year old cave bear was found with DNA still extractable."

> Facebook's recommended images are even worse.

I did log into Messenger (Lite version if that matters) quite recently - while I'm not using site anymore for more than 10 years or so, I do periodically check if people on my friends list want something. So I started scrolling thru contact list to see who's online and at some point some random people started to appear. Some whom I sent once a message, then even totally random ones I never heard about (perhaps some cross-friends pairing happen) and next, some local celebrities that perhaps I'd like to talk to acc. to fb, and some weird profiles pulled out of nowhere.

I use old.reddit, with ublock origin not just to block ads but to block specific reddit buttons or things they try to introduce, and with res I have my regular subs I visit added as shortcuts in a top bar.

I never see anything I don't want to, and it's very useable this way. I literally never just see the 'reddit homepage', it's always a sub I specifically want to see.

Yeah, this is how I use Reddit too. I see the writing on the wall though. They are coming for our beloved old interface. It won’t be long before we are deplatformed so they can try and monetize the crazy ones who make the journey over to the confusing and ad riddled new interface.

Yeeeeeah. Honestly don't know if I will keep using it if/when they remove old.

Similar here but without any custom blocking. Could you share your filters and which interface elements they target?

Happy to share, but honestly I don't specifically remember what they block, it was just anything that annoyed me. I've had them in place for quite a while and the random IDs don't give any clue, although I did leave comments for some and others are self-explanatory.

Looking at my list I'm unsure why I have some of what I do in there. I guess just experiment and see if anything is improved.

Sorry for the lack of code formatting - didn't want to use a pastebin since it may not persevere.

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Thank you, I appreciate you sharing! Will give them a try.

My pleasure, hope it improves things somewhat :)

If you are using the app, I believe you can get rid of this under settings > username > enable home feed recommendations. Turning it off makes the app way more usable.

I just turned that off. If it works: thank you so very much!

So it's been a week, and I haven't had to mute a random sub in all that time. Seriously, thank you—maybe it would be better for me to stop using Reddit, but if I'm going to be using it, at least it's not constantly throwing crap I don't care about in my face.

I personally stopped visiting Reddit on regular basis after all these actually.

Sort of a side question, but what is the state of the art in open source community hosting? I know a bit about tools like Zulip, but was thinking something more like forums. They feel very dated, which surprises me since Reddit seems a straightforward thing to compete against.

Discourse perhaps? I've seen it in use in a few places; it has a modern look and feel to it at least.

https://discourse.org/

I really dislike this community paradigm. The design, I actually prefer the good old forums like vBulletin or IPB. Discourse is a nice project, but I really don't dig this marriage between forum and Q&A.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy is a social link aggregator very similar to Reddit, powered by fediverse. Think of it like anyone can host an instance for their community, and all instances can interact with each other. For example check out the instance at https://beehaw.org/

I use old.lemmy.world for a Reddit classic experience.

There's also a *monkey script for an old.reddit UI[1] (no affiliation).

1. https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey

Lemmy is fantastic and the devs seem to be actively fixing bugs and introducing new features, but imo they desperately need to build an automoderator.

I've had a Lemmy instance for a niche hobby built and waiting to go live for months now, but I'm not going to subject myself to the headaches of fully manual moderation.

There are a few unofficial repos for Lemmy automod functionality, but last time I checked, they all appeared to be early alpha stage.

It seems like a glaring oversight by the core contributors, and I don't understand how it's not a top priority.

Xenforo is the state of the art in terms of forum software but it's not open source (it requires a rather pricey license fee).

For something on the free end, simple machine forums works on most shared hosts (and in terms of selfhost, it's just a PHP + MySQL stack) and should work for most communities. It doesn't require a lot of technical skill to configure/use, which can make it appealing if you don't want to micromanage mods - they'll be able to figure out the interface themselves.

Discourse is popular in tech communities, but I've always found the software to be rather unwieldy and inefficient. It's a ruby dinosaur with all the limitations and advantages that implies. It's also an application that basically demands the "ownership" of an entire server - the devs are explicitly against running other things on the same server that runs Discourse, which is a dealbreaker if you don't have a good budget.

vBulletin seem to be still alive for old good classic forums. Maybe phpBB as well?

I'm building Shpong[0] with a fellow HNer. It's a publicly accessible Matrix server with reddit-like features. Not quite ready yet, but almost there...

[0] - https://shpong.com/shpong

Why build on Matrix as opposed to Lemmy?

I'm curious about any comparisons you did, or if there were technical concerns with Lemmy or Matrix.

(I hope this question comes across as genuinely curious, I don't mean to snark at your project! I just like reading about decisions to choose one thing vs another)

The primary motivation behind Shpong is to have a FOSS alternative to Discord that's indexed by search engines, not closed off behind auth etc. All the channels can be toggled between chat and discussion view. Things like encrypted DMs or private rooms are also trivial to build on top of Matrix.

I'm just more familiar with the Matrix protocol, having built several projects on it. Activitypub is pretty cool though and I'm working on AP support, so Shpong should be able to interface with Lemmy in the near future!

Very cool, I look forward to using it! Thank you for the reply :)

There's also a high number of quality contributors which just left without any ceremony.

It's the same as Twitter, officially the metrics are saying that it's alright but in reality the quality contributors leaving makes it a repost ghost-town.

Reddit has a massive botting and scamming problem, but they provide almost no meaningful ways for mods to counteract it. It's the same issue that other social media sites like Twitter have. Bots pad their user metrics, so it's in their best interest to look the other way.

This has resulted in a degradation of content quality, especially so in the last three years with the rise of short-form garbage. A loss of mods who had genuine passion for their respective sub-communities will only worsen the problem. I give it a few years before Reddit is dominated by bots talking to one another using ChatGPT-generated swill.

Even worse is Reddit's use of Moderator-Bots that can remove posts for any ridiculous reason they feel like making up, such as 'Self-post too short'.

Reddit jumped the shark long ago with its censoring of posts.

>Yet Reddit removed both moderators from their positions this summer because the mods refused to end r/canning's protest against Reddit and its new API fees; the protest had made the entire subreddit "read only." Now, the ousted mods fear that r/canning could become subject to unsafe advice that goes unnoticed by new moderators. "My biggest fear with all this is that someone will follow an unsafe recipe posted on the sub and get badly sick or killed by it," Dromio05 told me.

bikespokememe.jpg

I totally buy the argument that the protest probably lead to their being some sort of marginal shift from hobbyist moderators to admin-friendly powermods. But to this point:

- This happened to the extent that hobbyist mods rendered their own forums unusable on an indeterminate basis. They chose the hill they died on, and cannot claim they were acting in the interests of their community in doing so.

- Powermods dominated wide swaths of the site prior to the protests and this sort of concern was never raised (there were concerns about powermods, but not powermods vs. hobbyist mods.) So the entire article likely represents an act of concern trolling. The underlying point may still be valid, but its bad-faith motivations deserve to be called out.

>Powermods dominated wide swaths of the site prior to the protests and this sort of concern was never raised

I don't think most powermods really revolted. Many probably have financial motivations to keep running, so they can see inconvvinence as the cost of doing business.

I am very worried about the "hobbyist mods". And yea, they weren't talked about for the same reason you don't talk about stuff you expect is "the ideal". If a mod is kind, has clear rules, and is even a domain expert in some cases, what is there to talk about?

Reddit isn't like HackerNews where they will praise the Dangs of their site everynow and then. Mods are also pseudoanonymous and as such praise is minimized, or reduced to zero. You don't know what you have until it's gone.

>I don't think most powermods really revolted

Well, at least a substantial minority did.

>I am very worried about the "hobbyist mods". And yea, they weren't talked about for the same reason you don't talk about stuff you expect is "the ideal". If a mod is kind, has clear rules, and is even a domain expert in some cases, what is there to talk about?

Actually, this raises a good point. The hobbyist mods who were yeeted were probably disproportionately likely to be the sort of intemperate, authoritarian mods that given Reddit mods a bad name. Additionally, these mods are probably the most likely to see the easing of their authoritarian policies as tantamount to opening the doors to hatred, spam, misinformation, etc. Can their judgment really be trusted?

>The hobbyist mods who were yeeted were probably disproportionately likely to be the sort of intemperate, authoritarian mods that given Reddit mods a bad name.

I don't know how you took my point of "if a mod is kind, has clear rules, and is a domain expert" and spun it around to "these mods lack self control and have bad rules". They were NOT talked about to begin with, that was my entire assertion.

>Can their judgment really be trusted?

I don't know, because I don't know your methodology of moderation. It sounds like you prefer a lasseiz faire approach and only want mods to keep out spam. if you don't want moderators to determine what hate and misinformation is, and are fine with low effort memes being on the front page of a sub, the current approach is ideal for you.

But, the kinds of subreddits being interviewed here were not those kinds of meme subreddits. They clearly cared about the content presented and wanted some level of quality in posts and comments.

- canning has a bit over 100k subscribers

- ender3 is 200k subs and I don't even think it's the largest 3d printer sub on Reddit

- homeautomation is the largest of the 3 mentioned with 2m subs

2/3 of these can "easily" be replaced with a different sub with looser rules if you feel strongly against their moderation style. Is it wrong for them want to maintain that level of quality?

Regardless, even a 2M sub isn't holding a candle to what actual powermods are controlling. They aren't too relevant to the discussion the author brings up.

It's like the owners and managers of Reddit have no idea how Reddit operates. "Mods? Who needs mods? Or users? That's not what our company is about. And what is a "subreddit?"".

Did anybody expect Reddit to become a better place after all what happened a couple of weeks ago?

I was never a big Reddit user, but I'm sure as hell not going to be one in the future.

I was a big reddit user, with 2 small subreddits I started and managed, and I abandoned things and havent gone back.

Losing the addiction has been healthy. Going back is laughable.

I’m not sure if this is a downside yet, but I know even less of what’s going on in the world since July, having bailed on Twitter and FB years earlier and having made a conscious decision to stop purposefully consuming “news” a few years ago.

Reddit was the only site I would scroll by world events to learn of their happening. (clearly I’m still here, but it’s a bit more niche)

An RSS feed for you: https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=when:24h+allinurl:apnew...

Has there ever been an online community that improves over time? At best it seems they grow, then they’re doomed to either maintain at a certain level (like HN), or slowly slump into the melt and burn away.

What happened "a couple of weeks ago"?

Reddit started charging huge money for API access. Thing is, reddits leadership are wildly incompetent and those APIs were relied upon by the mods to actually handle the vast oceans of posts that go on each day.

Its left the mods with greatly increased workload as they now need to use the crappy tools Reddit gives them, and for some communities like the folks on /r/blind the site is totally unusable.

Most subreddits have ended the protests, and those that don't have had their mod teams forceably replaced, usually be people who are more interested in being mods than actually moderating.

Reddit had hundreds, if not a thousand people willing to work for free managing their site for them and they still screwed it up, just unbelievable stuff.

Perhaps that's a good thing in some ways. The communities with only a very light-touch moderation to get rid of spam are often the most enjoyable, where you can speak relatively freely without the looming threat of some overbearing mod censoring and banning you because they don't like your opinion.

API access is still free for moderation and accessibility tools. It’s just third party clients with high API usage that were effectively killed with the pricing change.

For non-commercial accessibility tools. Because Reddit doesn’t know how to fix accessibility in their own app. A shitshow, either way you look at it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/14n9426/accessibil...

The last time the mods on /r/blind asked for a demo with screen curtain on, they were met with silence.

disappointing but not unexpected. These are just other "irrelevant power users" to reddit, but for the sake of pretending to care they at least try to keep up the appearance of caring.

And for those who go "the average redditor doesn't care": well, here is another example of "power user" you may not have considered. They certainly are the minority, can't disagree with that.

The problem is that knowing the rug can be yanked out anytime, the desire of people who helped write and maintain the tools to do so has somewhat fallen to zero.

That was a couple of months ago now. I left the site due to that, and just wondered if something else happened after.

I agree with your sentiment, but I do wonder what could replace reddit. It's true that the larger subreddits have been pretty terrible for years. However, reddit has often been the _only_ good source for useful and true user-sourced information. What vacuum should I buy? How can I get some old PS2 game to run on my steam deck? Can I disable the telematics system on a Toyota Tacoma? etc.

It's easy to see this sort of access to information disappearing, and it's also easy to imagine that even if it didn't die now, it would soon be destroyed by large-scale usage of AI. I think the internet very briefly put a lot of power in the hands of users, but the pendulum is swinging back hard.

I completely agree and it often baffles me the lack of nuance I see here on HN. “Reddit became crap”. No it didn’t. Maybe it’s less appealing and valuable than in the past, but it certainly still is a goldmine in more niche subreddits. Or simply to have a laugh at r/funny.

There's goldmine of information on 4chan's niche boards as well. But people referring to "4chan" the website tend to talk about the wide strokes of communities.

It's the same with reddit. Sure, I do appreciate some small gaming communities that I can't find anywhere else, but it's not what the site cares about, nor what many people see when they go to reddit.com. You need to search for those communities,and they aren't guaranteed to be good. Or active for that matter.

What we're seeing is the downsides of centralizing. Replacing Reddit would require putting everything in one place again, and would likely lead to the same result down the road.

There are still active forums for most topics, and site search works just as well. What changes is a return to the old world where you can't put in one site to get it all anymore.

>What changes is a return to the old world where you can't put in one site to get it all anymore.

I personally desire that. You'd think all these fallouts of various social media would be a grim reminder of that cost of convenience, but alas.

So inevitably, people who like reddit want another reddit, and they will fall back into the same pitfalls if/when a better replacement comes.

This isn't "a couple of weeks ago" issue. The enshittification most likely begin when they rolled this modern design and used variety of darkpatterns on existing users to trick them to move into updated interface. This was all done to attract younger audience who has short attention spawn and who doesn't mind ads and sponsored content served via this bulky interface that keeps you interacting with site under dozens of "load more" elements.

Tho, perhaps the slow decay of site started even earlier with arrival of Ellen Pao; content already was spiraling down at that time

I don't think there's any hope for reddit; I expect that site will be even more sanitized to the point no "unsafe" content will be allowed to be posted. There are subs around that already are being used as platform for spreading PR of companies, which have nothing in common with these exotic truly run by ordinary people small communities.

Are we witnessing yet-another platform making solid steps towards extinction?

I would not say so. Just getting worst and less used. But, it is very far from extinction.

Digg is 'still around', too.

Perhaps, but it needs a proper competitor before it truly fades to irrelevancy.

Maybe it doesn't need a competitor but something that supersedes its design while staying inside the community of communities structure. Most Reddit clones do nothing better than Reddit, they just attempt to painstakingly emulate it. Karma is gamed too easily. Why hasn't someone tried to rank content by a mix of votes and quality indicators (grammar checks, NLP sentiment, engagement)? Innovation usually disrupts.

If the moderators of canning cared so much about their community they wouldn't have closed it I guess.

The problem is that Reddit's own features for moderators are abysmal. I don't know what Reddit's 2.000 employees are doing all day, but people have lamented that for years now without much significant change - and then Reddit just shut down the public API, which made moderation work muuuch more difficult.

If they don't want to moderate for whatever reason (including shortcomings in the moderation tools) that's ok - I also don't want to moderate.

What you can't do is close the community. If you care about it it makes more sense to have the usual spam here and there than to completely block every discussion. That's low and petty.

Reddit already closes unmoderated subs specifically so they won't fill up with spam, so what's the difference?

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