[samtho]

I don’t think the lowering of the average age is necessary one of the problems, but the fact that some of the new users are posing this problem is a symptom of a bigger one. They tend to comprise of many of the armchair-experts because a good deal of them learned very early to value engagement and good messaging over accuracy.

Part of this has to do with the gauges of success. Other first generation of this appeared on older forums, basic info like join date and post count served as an indicator of engagement and implied trustworthiness by the content creator.

The next big innovation was “karma” or “likes” which required very little effort on the part if the viewer but was a strong signal of audience engagement.

Both of these indicators of engagement are inherently flawed because they incentivize quantity over quality. The only thing I can think of that’s different is something like the famously meritocratic GitHub, which is it’s own dystopian ecosystem.

I don’t know how to solve this exactly, but as long as incentives to create reward those with pure eyeball counts and not material quality, we will constantly run into this problem of low-quality, high production value content that serves as useless trash to sift through. I think GPT programs will be created to make a greater and faster tsunami of shit that will grace the internet and we will eventually be totally and completely overrun with shallow pieces masquerading as quality.

[vehemenz]

I'd agree that age by itself isn't a problem. It's the correlates. Younger people are more likely to be using the mobile app, where the engagement is lower quality. They are less likely to have completed their formal education, let alone to have attended college. They are more likely to practice an intolerant form of politics and activism, which makes discussion on certain subjects nearly impossible outside of niche subs.

> Both of these indicators of engagement are inherently flawed because they incentivize quantity over quality.

The karma system has other arguably worse side effects. It incentivizes people to downvote things they disagree with and upvote things they agree with. I'd wager many of Reddit's longtime users think this is the point of karma, rather than a signifier of a post's effort and/or quality.

I agree that the incentive structure needs to change if Reddit or any competitor can remain viable places for discussion.