Curious what people on this sub think.

Overall, how is Reddit? Is it better or worse than 2 years ago?

EDIT: Thank you all, some really great comments here.

37 comments

  1. It’s been all downhill since removing the up|down vote count. That decision reinforced echo chambers- a person with many comments at -1 will leave the subreddit; a person with many comments at +99 | -100 will remain.

  2. I don’t know how I would ever quantify this. I really only look at maybe 10 subreddits, and they seem just fine. The parts of reddit that cause cancer continue to do so.

  3. Digg was objectively better, reddit was okay when the great migration happened and has been progressively getting worse

  5. The anti-american rhetoric is getting worse. We don’t need to be bashed every day, every minute. [We get it, America is bad.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmericaBad/)

    There doesn’t need to be joke or pun on every post either. Reddit is far worse now than it was 10 years ago.

  6. Many of the parts I frequent have gotten worse while none have gotten better. There are more bots, more corporate control, worse moderation, more meme comments, and fewer insightful comments (or at least lower frequency).

  7. It’s the same two years ago as it is today. However in the 12 years I’ve been here I would say it’s gotten worse in terms of quality of content and conversations, but other things have improved, such as how the admins deal with subreddits about questionable content (that i dont even want to get into here). Overall, I enjoyed reddit more c. 2011-2015. I think 2016 onward has been a wild ride.

  8. Worse. More censorship of “undesirable” content, more hivemind, more bots, more corporate/government influence, etc.

  9. I have slowly had to taper down the subs I go to simply because of the sanctioned hate. There is no ‘safe place’ for me on reddit. There’s just places where the hate is less frequent.

  10. I still hate the no-longer-new redesign. I’ll keep using the old site as long as it’s available.

  13. I’ve been here a while and Reddit is exactly what you make of it. The subs in your feed, the links you click on, and the comments you read and respond to are what determines your experience.

    Personally I’m seeing far less virus and vaccine misinformation than 2 years ago, so it’s better in that aspect.

  14. Worse. It allows echo chambers to be produced and it also allows moderators, who are supposed to be fair, balanced, and neutral to be just as dogmatic as the typical users, if not worst than them.

  15. Reddit has been around too long and needs to be replaced. We used to go through big social news aggregators every two years or so until Reddit took down digg and we’ve been trapped here ever since.
    I’m hoping Musk eventually buys Reddit and runs it into the ground like Twitter so something new can form.

  16. I don’t have an answer re trends but I curate my feed to find positive communities and experiences and cut out toxic subreddits and people. I find momforaminute and dadforaminute downright inspiring. I’m also a fan of uplifting news and mademesmile.

  17. I mostly stay inside my little bubbles to avoid the rank stupidity that is the majority of reddit, but there are still issues. The ads are getting out of control, the bots are everywhere and more and more “journalists” are using reddit to content farm. As others have mentioned, the level of anti-Americanism has just gotten absurd. It’s as obnoxious as it is tedious.

  18. My own little corner of the subreddits I stick to is fine, but as a whole I think it’s getting worse.

    Here are some sitewide trends I’ve noticed in the last couple years:

    * Increase in “low effort, high engagement content” I.e. “Comment and I’ll tell you what kind of Pokemon you are!”

    * Increase in bots and spammers (yes, they’ve always been around, but it feels like there’s more)

    * Increase of self-censorship (i.e. “s3xual assault” “@sshole”)

    * Increase of emojis

    The first two are just fucking annoying. The second two might sound harmless, but they signify an influx of new (usually young) users from places like instagram and TikTok who post shit like you see in the first bullet point.

  19. It becomes more and more of an echo chamber every day. Whether that’s good or bad depends on where you’re standing.

    Early on it did have a much more balanced mix of most viewpoints and I think that led to better conversations. I don’t even just mean politically either. There was a time you could have a reasonable discussion on who the greatest basketball player or QB is or what was the best Super Nintendo game. Now, you’re told it’s Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, and Chrono Trigger then downvoted to oblivion for saying anything else.

  20. Reddit should’ve been shut down years ago, it’s just as bad as 4chan.

    Whereas 4chan is populated by underage alt-right schizoids who enjoy inflicting misery, reddit is populated by insufferably smug xenophobic close-minded dicksucks who pretend that they’re above such things.
    4chan is the future school shooter with kiddy porn on his laptop and dreams of redpilled trad-wives in his head. Reddit is the thin wristed dweeb who thinks he’s more intelligent than he actually is, and loves talking shit about how dumb and ignorant rural people are even though he’s just as dumb and ignorant.

  21. Worse. I have been kicked off hundreds of times, because cheap greedheads at Reddit trust an algorithm to decipher irony.

    I for one DO NOT WELCOME our new tech overlords.

  22. Worse. I’ve been a user on here for over 10 years.

    Back then the “anonymity” factor of the site led to more people showing kindness to total strangers. Now, it’s just an excuse to be a dick.

    The site has grown and blown up so much in the last 5 years and it’s really really changed. One of my favorite subs had like 1.5k users when I joined, and our live event discussions had like 20 comments from the same users. Felt like watching it with your friends. Now it’s like 4-5k per event and it just moves so quickly.

    Also so many users are getting younger and younger and the “america bad” posts just keep blowing up. It’s really frustrating at times.

  23. I made this account 11 years ago, I actually had one a little older but forgot about it and lost the password. I’ve been active here pretty much that whole time.

    I feel like it’s better in some ways and worse on others. There weren’t subreddits originally, which was a little before my time, everything just got posted to a single front page and it heavily leaned towards topics around technology, programming, and stuff like that. There’s a LOT more variation of topics and stuff now. The users are also a lot more diverse, though obviously there are still a lot of demographic trends that the site leans towards (as an old head who still browses on Chrome even on my phone it still trips me out a bit when i see people refer to reddit as an app instead of a site), my first few years here it seemed like 80% of the users were younger college educated (likely STEM), white male American atheist, mildly libertarian tech bros. And I mean there’s still a lot of people like that but not as many.

    A lot of people who’ve been here a while seem to think the quality of the comments has degraded, and I guess maybe it has to an extent, but I think it’s overstated by many. In depth, top level comments about subjects that seemed to be made by people who knew what they were talking about were pretty common, but so were stupid jokes that got repeated ad nauseum. Quote and pun chains have been around as long as I can remember. Fuckin rage comics were huge for a couple years there lmao, and I admit I participated. Maybe it’s a little harder to separate the wheat from the chaff these days but subreddits have also become so much more stratified by content it’s usually not too hard to find decent discussion on something.

    There used to be more of a focus on “power users” several years ago, and their rising and falling was often the source of meta reddit drama. You’d see a lot of familiar names even on places like AskReddit. There were just a lot less people here. And as the site has grown and the nature of social media itself has changed theres more talk about bots and astroturfing and etc, though that’s always been some type of concern.

    The dynamics of counting upvotes and downvotes has also changed several times and I can’t remember exactly what it was like at different times.

  24. They gave Reddit a face lift maybe two years ago. It’s awful.

    I use the reddit.old site because the new format is confusing to navigate.

  25. It’s turning into an amalgamation of Twitter and TikTok which are arguably two of the most insufferable platforms to date lol

  26. The constant Reddit bashing on this sub is hilarious. Motherfucker, you’re on Reddit too! Everything you’re complaining about also applies to you!

    Reddit is what you make of it. There’s a reason you can mute subreddits and block users. If your experience on Reddit is miserable, it’s because your a miserable person.

  29. I thought Reddit was great the first couple years after I first joined the site. Gaming subs, meme subs, science and factoid subs. You could spend an hour just picking through a topical sub and come away fulfilled. Stuff you wanted to avoid was easier to ignore back then, minus a few quirks here and there.

    Then 2016 happened.

    I think Trump getting elected was a catalyst event that led most of the liberal side of Reddit to finally have a name and face they could put to what they considered the corrupting, evil forces of conservative America. With a concrete rallying point for their rage, previously completely neutral subreddits started becoming more politically focused and ones that swayed too far in either direction and without active moderation trying to keep things civil all eventually fell to infighting. Honestly, if I didn’t find this sub right before the election, I wouldn’t be using Reddit anymore.

  30. I stay on old Reddit so it’s pretty much the same as always for me. The redesign is absolutely awful though, and I’m worried one day they’ll kill the site by removing the old layout.

    As for individual board discussions, if you’ve been on the internet long enough you know that every board will eventually catastrophize. It will develop in-jokes, cut off the inflow of new members, overactive members will drive away less active members and it will become a dark place. It happened to SA, ABS, chan image boards, it will happen here too.

    What makes Reddit unique is that the user base is much, much larger. Some boards will be relatively immune to this, large normal person culturally relevant ones like hip-hop heads, Nintendo, NBA, funny, etc. Large boards are also subject to larger cultural trends, mostly it’s just a reflection of life in the real world.

  34. On this sub I don’t know b/c I’ve only been really active for 6 months, however, I came to Reddit from Quora. Quora took a nosedive. I used to be an active user on that site but couldn’t take it anymore. Reddit has been VERY refreshing.

  36. It’s always been bad. It was bad 10 years ago, too. Definitely more bots and site crackdowns now though

    I feel like the best subs are a few of the ask subs or some niche sub before it hits too many users.

  37. Worse. Mod abuse has created massive echo chambers and communities where saying the wrong thing can get you permabanned.

    Many years ago I got suspended from a sub for calling something “stupid”. Fair enough I thought. I just won’t use that language.

    I got perma banned from a sub a few months ago because they have a bot that bans people who commented on certain subs. The issue is that some of those subs end up on r/all and people will comment in disagreement to that sub and still get banned. Mods will not respond.

    About a month ago I got banned from fuckcars for making a sarcastic response to a silly comment. Apparently that was harassment/trolling. Mod told me to fuck off and muted me.

    Also, the amount of subreddits in the last few years who auto ban for any dissenting opinions is very high and it used to never happen (pre 2018).

    I’m not sure what happened, but I’d say that it started getting worse sometime around 2019.

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