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While it's not really a "niche" interest, the travel subreddit is a particularly prime example of this. ~6-7 years ago, I remember that subreddit had a substantive amount of text posts that were mostly about suggesting trip itineraries, destinations, travel tips, travel stories, etc. Now, I just opened it up and every single one of the top 20 posts is an Instagram-style photo post. The comments aren't any better. In the past, I remember that even on photo posts, there would be substantive comments discussing the destination pictured in the photo. Now it seems its mostly unsubstantive "oh wow so beautiful", "what a wonderland", "wish I could go there", etc. There are some exceptions, but they're rarer. I really wish there was a good solution to this, or at least a place to go to avoid the "instagram culture". Unfortunately, as you mentioned, all of the non-"instagram culture" sites have been mostly pushed out by monoliths like reddit. And as for solving it, it seems that most of society is still not convinced that "instagram culture" is a bad thing that needs to be solved in the first place. edit: I just opened up the "top posts of all time" page on that subreddit, and of the 600 posts I scrolled through, 599 were photo posts that were submitted within the past year (there are probably even more, but I just stopped scrolling at 600). The lone non-photo post was asking for help finding a missing person. Every other previous text post (even the megathreads giving advice for popular destinations, which used to be a huge part of r/travel) have been drowned out by the "Instagram culture" posts. |