For users, Reddit has been in a downwards spiral since the IPO.
It's pretty clear that their focus is no longer on providing the best communities (see the many examples of power hungry mods, see below) or the best UX (see the deprecation of the API or the recent changes to old.reddit.com described in the post).
The "product" is now selling data to LLM companies, everything else is clearly a secondary concern. It's a shame because at some point I really enjoyed participating on Reddit and it was a good source of valuable information.
to give some examples of mod abuse:
- /r/energy used to (or still does?) ban anyone in favour of nuclear power
- /r/ubisoft and /r/assasinscreed do not allow any posts criticizing the writing or characters, these are clearly run by the company
- /r/unitedkingdom is famous for shadow banning everyone who's critical of some government program (I got a ban for criticizing motability cars)
- /r/europe banned me 1 minute after submitting a chat control post that got 1.5k upvotes before it was removed
- some vaccination subs ban anyone who posted in anti-vaccination subs (irrespective of what they post)
> For users, Reddit has been in a downwards spiral since the IPO.
I'd argue since redesign that introduced old.reddit
> to give some examples of mod abuse
You're barely scratching the surface. Many subreddits are directly astroturfed and sold out. The most clear indicator is when a subreddit links to alternative communication platform like Discord - it's there to signal that mods are selling out. This is particularly noticable in any entrepreneur/saas based subreddit.
Other subreddits like /r/worldnews are clearly propaganda operations.
All of these are solvable problems but Reddit simple has no one left who'd care to solve them.
I suggest decentralized Fediverse alternatives like Lemmy https://lemmy.world/ as Reddit will never get better.
The problem with Lemmy is that every instance seems to treat itself as an insular fiefdom that bans dissenters. It’s the same problem scaled up. Instances can cross-post in theory, but often people seem to treat the domain as a tribal affiliation, and mods may block subs or even entire domains based on petty disagreements.
I think Nostr solves this problem; individual relays may block certain accounts, but there’s no tribal signifier for preemptive blocking, and you can still get data from blocked accounts by using other relays. It would be very hard to get all relays to collaborate to fully block an account (and in any case you could spin up your own relay if this happened).
The “Satellite” client used to have a Reddit-like presentation, although they seem to have converted back to a Teitter-like feed—not sure why, perhaps it wasn’t a popular format. (The protocol is capable of Reddit-like communities.) I guess “Stacker News” is the current champion for Reddit-ish clients, although it’s more akin to HN or maybe Tildes. It’s a shame that it’s so crypto-focused.
https://old.lemmy.world/
works also.
i like lemmy but the idea that it's not astroturfed just ain't there, plus the number of dubious phishing links and images is offputting
limited doses
You can still enjoy Reddit and it's still a useful source of information. Just avoid the popular subs (including those you mention) or anything with 100k users or more. It's not difficult.
I tried this for a while. My local subs have been taken over by ideologues and the niche subs still get political/outrage bait flare-ups regularly. I've decided that the best way to consume reddit is through an intermediary, whether it's Google or an LLM that I ask to crawl through subs for recent posts, remove emotional/political content, and summarize for me. Ironically that's exactly what Reddit is trying to prevent, but when push comes to shove I'm happy to miss out on the 5% of useful stuff rather than have to wade through the memes, outrage, and bots.
Same with many/all news paper website comments, there is a preferred narrative that is controlled.
Powertripping mods have always been a problem with Reddit ever since they had user-created subreddits. The real problem is that Reddit has been very two-faced with what their expectations on moderators are. If we take "the purpose of a system is what it does[0]" then Reddit moderators exist primarily as unpaid volunteer employees, paid in control over the narrative of certain communities.
The flipside of powertripping mods is that Reddit does not support their moderation teams properly. Actually, that big stink people made over killing third-party Reddit client access was all powermods, because doing your job as a moderator is nigh-impossible with the standard Reddit tools. That's why we had so many subs get blacked out in protest, and why Reddit's response was to start deposing moderators until they caved.
As an example of what I mean by "do not support moderation teams", Reddit still has no good tools to prevent brigading. That is, the vaccination subs that want to talk about vaccines have no tools to prevent people from the antivax subs from coming in and changing the narrative by downvoting everything vaccine positive[1]. You generally can't stop someone from voting in your subreddit. But if they comment, you can scrutinize their post history and ban them from commenting if they're from the other sub that's brigading you.
There's also that video[2] that did the rounds a while ago of a Reddit mod trying to explain how them promoting a scam is really Reddit's fault for not paying mods. Despite the fact that this person is incredibly cringe, I actually do think he's grasping at an actual problem - it's just not one that exonerates him in any way. Reddit wants it both ways, and as a result, they get the worst people.
And they've been doing this since they were a start-up. Remember when one of Reddit's most popular subs was /r/jailbait, a forum dedicated to trading suggestive pictures of young women around? That forum was kept around because its top mod, /u/violentacrez, was doing basically all of Reddit's CSAM compliance. That's the business model of Reddit in a nutshell: find the scummiest people who are still capable of doing the job and give them total power over their domain so they don't question the lack of pay. The IPO was only tangentially related to this, in that it's when a lot of less power-trippy mods jumped ship.
[0] This is a big part of systems theory but it equally applies to critical theory
[1] The pattern is generally always "small group of people holding heretical opinions joins forum with orthodox opinion to agendapost", I've never seen the other way around - i.e. I haven't seen militantly "pro-vax" people going on anti-vaxxer subs to downvote everything.
[1] https://youtu.be/67CXV4o4dYM