Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think the google graveyard is a concern, because it's obviously a valuable, profitable product they could sell, but if you haven't been horrified by the current enshitification of reddit, you haven't been paying attention.

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.

Reddit was enshitified circa 2014 or 2015, this is not a new thing. It's been garbage for a long time and I'm surprised it's taken so many this long to notice. In fairness if you kept to subreddits that were eminently unpopular and off the beaten path then it wasn't as obvious.

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.

It’s still a lot less enshittified than Google or most of the web. You can find actual humans giving actual advice for a lot of categories where Google just gives you (likely AI generated) SEO garbage.

You can easily ignore the vitriol and fake news on Reddit, you can not get around a lot of commercial detritus anywhere else anymore

>This is made easier by the partitioning of the site into subreddits. ... 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).

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.

I've been on Reddit for like 14 years now and politics have never affected me. At all. I stick to subs related to my interests like mechanical keyboards, retro computers, engineering, architecture... and hardly ever I see political stuff. But I don't remember when was the last time I browsed "All" or "Popular", or kept subbed to the large or "default" subs, which, I think, is where you'll find more political stuff. What I mean is that the best thing of Reddit is that you can -still- make of it whatever you want.

People have been claiming that Reddit has been enshittified (not with that exact term) since it was first created. People were already longing for the good old days when I first began using Reddit in ~2010.

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.

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