[vehemenz]

It's hard to generalize about Reddit because each subreddit is kind of its own world. If you want good discussion, go to where the good discussion is. What is terrible about the UX? Are you not using old.reddit.com?

If you're judging by /r/all, sure, it's not much better than YouTube comments. As much as I hate this word, it's mostly "normies" with "normie" views. The cream rarely rises to the top, except on humor threads.

But other than that, I don't think Reddit has changed too much for the worse in the 14 or so years since I've used it. The demographic has gotten more mainstream, and arguably dumber, but that's just a microcosm of the Internet. It's still better on Reddit than many other places.

[BitwiseFool]

/r/all is heavily manipulated and it's quite obvious a small cadre of power users and power mods are responsible for the content and character of what gets shown. I would not be surprised at all if there is dark money behind all of this, especially considering the political nature of it all.

[jandrese]

The default feed is completely worthless. Unfortunately I think that's what a lot of people see. Carefully curating a list of quality subreddits is key to a good experience, but most people either don't know to do this or don't know how.

[rg111]

> Carefully curating a list of quality X

That is the only way to use any social media, for me at least.

[tsol]

It has become incredibly political. It always has had a heavy political aspect, but now it's just about completely impossible to avoid.

[dmix]

Even a subreddit like /r/nba has become super political. Literally impossible.

[BitwiseFool]

Even r/Lego went through a phase where minifigures mocking prominent Republicans and Donald Trump were posted. It has since quieted down but the mods took an obviously hands-off approach and it was likely they agreed with the message and had no qualms about the divisive content.

[tootie]

Yeah, and honestly that's a really great thing that they have pulled off very well. In the olden days, the front page was the only option and now it's really just their "Top of the Funnel" so to speak. Most user-generated content sites have a solid 90/9/1 split where 90% are passive consumers who are either not logged in or logged in only to curate their feed, 9% might make comments, and 1% are driving most of the submissions and moderation. The front page is dominated by the 90% and exists to drive SEO and ad views to pay for everyone else. If you are in the other 10%, you login, curate a feed that excludes /r/funny or /r/pics and just zooms in on the special interests you like and it's a fantastic experience. And yeah, you do that with old.reddit.com (or i.reddit.com).

[tinus_hn]

The UI of the site itself certainly has went down a lot, in favor of ‘engagement’ tricks like ‘this image hasn’t been approved, use the app to look at it’

[singhrac]

This is one of the best things about Reddit, which is that the individual subreddits still have relatively strong control over moderation over their own content. You can find incredibly niche subreddits that align with your interests or sense of humor. Personally I find it full of interesting content and discussions (maybe too much).

[bergenty]

tbh I’ve come a full circle and feel like the “normie” stuff is actually good, quality content. It’s the non-normies with agendas and single minded thinking that ruin a lot of what Reddit was.

[marginalia_nu]

> What is terrible about the UX?

It's been a few years now, and they still haven't fixed so you can copy and paste text in their text inputs.

[maleldil]

Are you using old or new reddit? I can't reproduce your issue on old reddit + RES. Copy-pasting stuff works fine.

I'm using Firefox 100 on Monterey, but I'm sure it worked on previous Firefox versions on Windows 10.

[marginalia_nu]

I'm specifically talking about new reddit. Old reddit is fine. Old reddit basically just has a <textarea>.

[warrenm]

I copy-paste all the time into Reddit ... what makes you think you can't?

[marginalia_nu]

Whenever I do, the text box crashes and I need to switch to basic markdown mode.

[warrenm]

Weird

In the 11+y I've been on Reddit, never seen that behavior