Reddit used to be a great platform to discuss some topic and get different points of few in a friendly but factual manner. However, slowly it seems like the platform has become a lot more like Facebook, where it’s been invaded by toxic people that are constantly looking for opportunities to shit and hate on others.
The change has been gradual so I really didn’t notice it creep up on me. It’s become super evident now having used Kbin and others for a week or so where people generally seem to be more friendly again and willing to actually discuss things in a usually civil way.
The difference is stark too. Today I replied to a comment saying that I hope things turn out better for them and wound up in a weird comment chain about how people were apparently insensitive for wanting to get a basic haircut that they for some reason couldn’t afford themselves. Meanwhile, Kbin and the Fediverse feels like a refreshing place to actually converse with people once you get past the clunk and figure it out.
I think Reddit may well have reached that main stream social media saturation point where it very objectively now sucks. It happened originally with the internet itself thanks to the rise of the smartphone and this is just another iteration of it. I feel like Spez might as well get that bag at this point because they’ve ruined what used to be the platform people went to for social media without the bullshit, without algorithms to drive “engagement” and to avoid the toxic culture that has prevailed.
Thanks for reading my rant.
I think genuine and thoughtful discussion takes a lot more effort than shit posting, and when you mix that with a karma system that encourages one-upmanship and a few echo chambers, it can get toxic real quick.
Its highly topic dependent:
On political things, speaking for myself, frankly, I learned a few hard lessons over the last 8ish years:
- Lots of people don’t want to think and didn’t think themselves into supporting what they support.
- Lots of people are dishonest about why they support/think what they do, even with themselves.
- Unless somebody is exceptionally rational, you’re not going to change their opinion in a short online argument.
So off the bat my preference is for reasoned discussion, sure. But at the first use of the buzzword-of-the-week (“woke” most prominently right now) you pretty much need to throw all that out on the principal of “you can’t win a chess game against a pigeon”. You can just walk away, sure. But if you’re going to continue to engage you need to be aware that you aren’t actually arguing with the person, you’re performing for an audience and trying to show that the other guys position makes him look stupid, and maybe make him feel stupid too… hopefully if that happens a lot he’ll take a different position (but it’ll be 100% based on feelings, not reason). And this isn’t just online, this is in real life too. I realized that I’m too inclined to just walk away from a stupid argument, which these people view as a “win”. Instead, now I more regularly rudely and publicly make my point and make things socially awkward for everybody. It sucks and I hate it, but they’ll never shut up otherwise and that sucks too so it’s like ripping a bandaid off.
Here’s the thing: typically I’m not going into a discussion on social media with the aim to change people’s opinions or even to argue with them.
But what ends up happening is that they immediately assume it’s a bad high school debate and things quickly devolve into bad faith arguments, attempts to nitpick and just general toxicity.
Here is what I honestly think happened: a lot of older gen x and boomers saw their reputations destroyed on Facebook during the Trump Era.
The people who didn’t leave Facebook because of them just put them on mute. They only had other old people to communicate with. This didn’t satisfy them though, because really their entire ideology is wrapped around triggering other people.
So they went to reddit and discovered that anonymous shit posting was safer and their Facebook went back to livelaughlove largely.
Speaking as an older person who’s been on the internet since it became a public thing, I don’t think it’s necessarily older folks’ fault. Most of the crappy interactions I had on there were with young “edgelord” male gamers.
I think it’s more nuanced than any one group.
Basically, if you build it they will come refers to the dross, who come in droves once something is a recognizeable “thing” and then we all have to abandon ship for greener pastures and more measured discourse.
Yeah, I’m another old school early adopter who was on the internet since the '80s. No way the enshittification and souring of Reddit was caused by boomers and Gen xers. Most of them wouldn’t know how to get on, and those who would… Honestly, I’m the only boomer I know who is on there. Well, unless you go to some of the subreddits that are specifically for people over 50. And those people are incredibly nice! One of the few things I will really miss about Reddit.
Reddit’s far left can be pretty toxic too. As an old liberal myself, I don’t believe that there are any good kinds of hate or discrimination, but if you argue against that kind of crap, the absolute worst people come out to defend it. A good chunk of my negative interactions have been with those people.
That being said, the Eternal September is real. I don’t know anyone in real life who actually thinks like that. The trouble is, if you have ten million users, a tenth of a percent of them could be assholes and that’s still 10,000 obnoxious assholes.
Would agree. Also, despite what much of Reddit seems to believe, there are plenty of conservative and moderate young adults and youngsters. Reddit is not a general good representation of public opinion at large. It’s very obvious when elections roll around and many subreddits are calling for landslides that never seem to occur.
When I joined Reddit 10+ years ago there was no “old.reddit.com” it was just reddit. The “new” UI was designed to basically entice users who found the original threaded discussion forum a bit daunting. But that (barely) complicated looking format kept a lot of lazy minded fools away from the place.
It’s that way with literally every “scene”. The easier it becomes to join, the more diluted the quality of the music/activity/discussion/hobby.
So…that’s what happened. Reddit made reddit more palatable to a wider audience, and that wider audience includes a wider spread of the bell curve that is humanity. Sucks, don’t it.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the official phone app for Reddit but its an even worse version of that. There’s no “hot” etc of your subscribed subs, rather it’s now a firehose of whatever the algorithm thinks will piss you off enough to interact more with it.
I still can’t believe people are okay with an algorithm choosing what they see on social media, let alone a completely private one where you have no clue how it works. Like, obviously because it’s a bright-red flag that they’re going to try to manipulate you. But even if you don’t care about that, like, I want to see posts from communities and creators I’ve chosen to follow. Not have my feed flooded with garbage from random creators / communities.
I first joined Reddit in 2007 when it was a genuinely friendly and informative place. The first big change came with the Digg exodus which brought mainstream meme culture. I think at that point, Conde Nast starting putting serious pressure onto management for Reddit to become more of a social network. This then led to the broken UI changes which, as you say, brought the wider bell-curve of humanity with it.
The problem is that Reddit simply didn’t have the security controls/moderation in place for that type of activity. By 2016, Reddit was being widely manipulated by outside sources – Large corporations were hiring troll-farms to shill their products; Nation-state actors were doing the same; political activists were trolling/abusing Reddit’s systems in any way they could – doxxing, death threats, extreme trolling…
And the friendliness and trust were gone forever. And instead of having discussions, it’s now just everyone shouting over each other.
Now the management just want to cash out and using Reddit is now like writing a college essay while sitting in a McDonalds basmement eating a stale three-hour old Big Mac.
Also, there are so, so many bad faith actors on reddit that at some point, you start assuming everyone around you is arguing in bad faith. So you don’t even try to engage in conversation any more, you either jump straight to insulting / trolling them, or just downvote/report/block without even interacting.
The real answer is that smart tech savvy people were first one reddit. Then the masses came. Then it sucked. This happened with literally every platform.
