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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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