Spammers have been heavily targeting reddit for years and site:reddit.com is still useful.
Why Google have not bought reddit, I don't know (beyond moderation issues, but AMZN made it work with twitch).
Why Google have not bought reddit, I don't know (beyond moderation issues, but AMZN made it work with twitch).
My guess is that too many people at Google are on Reddit and didn’t want to see it go to the Google graveyard the day after acquisition.
I was a moderator of some very large subreddits, and due to reddits pigeonholing me into an app vs new mobile layout, I'm leaving those moderator positions (note: I am not complaining about the api issues). I don't want to participate in a community that is catering to the lowest common denominator such that the term "redditquitte" is a joke.
I've thought long and hard about it, and I think companies are intentionally creating Eternal Septembers in their products, because it's just easier to just put big pictures on the homepage to get clicks, when that type of UX only invites the type of people who see the site as something only to consume and not to contribute to.
I've been invited to multiple "moderator feedback" focus groups, that were worse than awful. After they defaulted an "annoying look here" icon in the right corner to try and get us to work more, I said "fuck this, I'm out."
My point here isn't just to bitch and moan, it's to point out that site:reddit.com only works because the community is one that actively values contribution over consumption... that's going away, and the usefulness of site:reddit.com will go away as that culture changes.
I guess the mobile app was what really broke the camels back but the quality of the posts had been on a downward trend in a severe way since at least Obama's second term, when I think both political parties recognized it as important and began to manipulate it. This is made easier by the partitioning of the site into subreddits. I hopefully don't have to explain here why that makes automated sockpuppeting much more effective and easier to accomplish. It's a fundamental design flaw (if we were to assume the design of Reddit was intended at all to provide a space for authentic personal takes on real issues and by real humans).
There is a danger of the same thing happening to HackerNews but I hope the lack of financial incentives to allow that sort of thing does some work to mitigate it, along with the lack of partitioning of the community.
You can easily ignore the vitriol and fake news on Reddit, you can not get around a lot of commercial detritus anywhere else anymore
Huh? I don't follow here: having multiple subreddits is exactly what makes the site usable for so many utterly different niche topics. There's probably a subreddit for repairing 1967 Camaros; do you really want to see posts like that every day in your news feed? I don't. Reddit isn't meant to just focus on tech topics like this site; it's meant to be a site with discussion forums for every topic imaginable, and there's no practical way to do that without subreddits.
Any attempt at pinpointing the enshittification is bound to be extremely subjective. What is clear is that it has been a continuous decline for a long time.
On the other hand, if google owned it, getting banned from a subreddit would possibly mean getting locked out of all of your google accounts.
Sorry I am good at leaving sources to backup what I say I guess?
They also don't quietly remove comments in a way that is invisible to a user for triggering some keyword in AutoModerator or a spam filter. And there are usually no minimum karma or account age requirements for posters.
Any large site does this. Even HN.
Moderation of that type usually seems to be secret, but the problematic moderators that I have noticed seem to be trying to protect some political belief or pet disinformation from discussion. It poisons the entire site for me.
For example, I wanted to post a funny Risitas youtube vid I made (you know the Spanish comedian with that laugh...), and couldn't find a single usable "funny" subreddit. Some banned youtube content completely. Some banned "video memes", some banned X and some banned Y... all of them had slightly different guidelines and you immediately got an insta-splurge from a bot-mod if you tried posting. Some required you to prefix every post subject with some code word. I had to give up eventually and post it on some super-small subreddit instead that accepted anything.
My sense is that the bigger the userbase, the more it attracts junk, spam, abuse, etc. So, the rules get tightened to combat it. Also, my impression is that the moderation tools are not great, so crude/heavy-handed methods are sometimes all that is available.
I think you found the corollary already: smaller subreddits have less rules and/or less strict enforcement.
I'm not sure a better solution, given the situation. Though I agree it can be discouraging for well-meaning occasional contributors.
"... It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
— Douglas Adams
Your comment has been auto removed for not linking your reddit account with a email.
He was Spanish, as in Spaniard, from Spain, Europe.
Maybe I'm just really paranoid these days, but I would bet looking at searches with Reddit in them and creating threads or commenting on old ones and paying for up votes is probably lucrative.
I don't know that the Twitch acquisition was smart. What was the strategic reason to acquire?
Amazon announced cutting 35% of Twitch staff (500) in January to stem losses after two rounds of layoffs last year.
where does this notion come from? google is for them to find out what you think you want so they know what ads to serve you. if it was for finding content, they would show you the results that were actually related to your query.
I mean does anyone actually like Reddit anymore? Front page is almost entirely bots reposing and reusing the same comments that have been used for years.
I do like the good parts, deeply hidden, that can often be surfaced with a Google search. Case in point, I had a bug with some installed software yesterday, to which the only viable solution I found was in a Reddit post from a few months back.
But the experience of actively browsing the "leading edge" of the site? Absolutely not. I purposely-deprecated my credentials a year or so back and haven't regretted it.
Yes, but if there was a better alternative I would switch in an instant … but those network effects.