[imglorp]

Similar, 65k, but still hanging on. I mod a couple small subs.

My observation is the worst aspect of monetization is on the communities themselves. For the first half, say, it was standard spectrum: some trolls and schmucks but for the most part regular folks with something to say. April Fools projects from the admins wowed us year after year at the creativity and cordiality.

Then came the ads and the apps, no picnic but down in the subs was a new problem: site policy. At some point, subs and posts were getting yanked or even altered by admins. Censorship, astroturfing, shilling, kowtowing to foreign investors, the whole political manipulation thing: you couldn't trust anybody's motivations anymore in a conversation. Most lately, the standard disney/youtube-ification has started.

I'm almost done, too.

[BlueTemplar]

There are some things on Reddit that I thankfully rarely experience, but that drive me absolutely mad when I do : automatic thread locking after some time and shadow bans.

Both of these violate netiquette!

As a reminder, proper netiquette is to necropost instead of creating a duplicate thread.

And shadow banning is not a tool that most moderators should even have, and should only be used against the most horrible trolls!

[jandrese]

I'm not sure I agree about necroposting. I find it tends to increase the noise level more than simply creating a new thread about the topic in some cases, as people see a post with tons of comments and don't realize that many of those comments are out of date and no longer accurate/relevant.

There's obviously a line to draw somewhere. You don't want 50 posts on the same topic clogging the top of the feed, but zombie threads where the first 90% is out of date or irrelevant are also bad. Locking a thread after it has been idle for a week or two seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

[BlueTemplar]

And completely unreasonable to me. Even on reddit the cutoff is... 6 months ? People not realizing that it's a necropost is either a failure of the poster not declaring it as such, or of the forum software - see how Discourse auto-highlights necroposting !

[jandrese]

How is a poster supposed to go back to the 5 year old thread starting comment and change it to note that the post is out of date?

Good forum software makes it less of a sin, but that's pretty rare on the Internet. This isn't the Usenet where people's clients could be fully featured on every topic.

[BlueTemplar]

Usenet would have it worse, because there you can choose your software yourself (and pick one without that feature)?

BTW, I prefer decentralized protocols like Usenet, there are plenty of features that would be unthinkable to leave out of "modern" clients, this could be one of them !