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Yeah. I joined Reddit pretty early and loved it for the longest time. It was my main social media place.

But anytime a small community would grow in popularity and hit somewhere threshold, it would be overrun by the greater reddit population The subreddit would quickly lose what made the community special and core users would migrate or just stop.

And volunteer moderation is bothe best idea ever and the worst. When it works it's awesome, but it feels as if it's only a matter of time.

So when the API changes hit last year, I saw it as Reddit handing me my hat. The old reddit was no more. I couldn't use it how I wanted to use it, at least not without paying. And given that my reddit usage was more habit than value, I made the decision to accept how things are.

I miss it. This PG post felt more like a eulogy than a promise, despite the closing. But I think I'm better without Reddit. At this point it seems to primarily be a content farm for AI agents, both producing and consuming. So maybe the dark-forest Internet is starting to arrive.

I agree, Reddit communities after a certain point become awful.

I think you can still find great communities but they feel like ticking time-bombs.

Only a matter of time before they became too big and issues from large communities begin to spill in.

In my experience that threshold is 20,000 subs. Anything between 5,000 and 20,000 is generally good. I've seen quite a few subreddits reach an inflection point at 20,000 where they begin to rapidly gain tens of thousands of users and the quality goes down.

> Reddit is kinda trash these days... it's just full of idiots

Reddit is the same as it always has been, but once a social media network reaches a certain scale, you can't really deal with the problems in the same way, or any way.

ex: Social network has 1000 active users. 1% (10) are disruptive: spammers, flamers, trolls, maybe just plain morons. That's fairly easy to handle, even if you only have 1 or 2 people with moderation powers.

Alternate scenario: Social network has 10,000,000 active users. 1% are disruptive. That's 100,000 people you need to regularly moderate. Which means instead of having a few "benevolent dictators" who can handle all of the content moderation, you need a team of moderators. Who probably have their own disagreements and agendas (like, I don't know, maybe a moderator of the largest picture/meme subreddit using their power to funnel traffic to a site they control while blocking competitors to slurp up ad revenue[0]). So now you need super-mods for the mod team.

It's like building out a business. You can have a high-performing 20-person team where everyone is a strong, valuable contributor. But the likelihood of your 10,000 person corporation, or even your 250 person department, having every single person be a valuable contributor is 0%. The percentages don't change as you grow, but the absolute number does.

The % of HN readers who want to make dumb reddit-style jokes here may be low, but if HN were 100x more popular, it would be as bad as Reddit. It's just the way things go.

[0] https://www.dailydot.com/debug/reddit-quickmeme-banned-miltz...

I think what happens with Reddit is that it's basically a collection of niche message boards for very niche interests, and over time the people who stay active in a given subreddit are people who take some topic extremely seriously and it essentially devolves into extremism/cult-like vibes with the mods at the helm.

I don't see all this. Take tea, cycling subs. I don't see any cultism there. Sub where I am mod, eupersonalfinance seems to be very polite and useful.

Well you're a mod so already you are biased here.

It's not every sub, but any diet related subs are a good example...keto/vegan/carnivore/the one for bryan johnson

The user quality on Reddit really has taken a nosedive over the years. I recall looking at some thread recently related to online services for consoles. The overwhelming sentiment in the thread was something like "I already pay for internet why should I pay for XBox Live". Maybe the thread was just especially full of children.

I remember people on Reddit (10 years ago) used to be knowledgeable and when new information appeared, that would matter. There's just so much ignorance now.

I gotta say, if thats the stupidest reddit comment you can think kff, you must not spend much time there. Try literally any political subreddit to find people being so absurdly left wing that they end up advocating for despotism.

I didn’t say that was the stupidest comment I could think of. It was just something that stood out to me recently. Tech literacy among Reddit users used to be pretty decent. Now it’s pretty much the opposite.

in all fairness to the people of reddit, this is a top-down propaganda assault, not a grassroots uprising. reddit is 100% used as a controlled-narrative dissemination tool by nation state actors all over the world.

monkey brain see upvotes, monkey brain assume group consensus correct, monkey brain follow [0]. repeatedly banning or blackholing anything that goes against your desired narrative leads to a smaller and smaller percentage of users willing to speak out against the consensus, so these opinions become even more marginalized, repeat until desired level of radicalization is achieved.

it even happens on HN - heavily downvoted comments are presumed to be barely worth reading because multiple people went out of their way to downvote. you could control the public opinion of a small country with <$50k worth of black market upvotes per year. that kind of power doesn't and hasn't gone unnoticed

[0] see 1951 Asch conformity study

Im not conspiracy minded but if you go to the /r/Canada subreddit it is so ridiculously pro Pierre Poilievre that I think something is up.

Not a single one of the 3 parties in Canada have a likeable head, it's shocking to see the people on there go nuts for this random goon.