You just have to sign-out and look at the homepage to see this. It's all attention grabbing subs like AITAH or "amiugly" or "ratemyface" etc etc etc. All the interesting subs have withered away and died. Take /r/3dprinting for example, there used to be cool new models shared there every single day, now it's just people sharing pictures of benchies, globs of spaghetti and the odd question from someone that hasn't done any research.
It's been that way for a while before the Great Purge; at least a few years. This was a driver behind me unsubscribing from all of my subs and grouping them into multireddits instead and enjoying a blank front page.
On one hand you're correct. On the other hand: holy crap I thought all the "roast me" trends were dying down. I check back for one day and there's like 3 new variation of "AmITheAsshole" and "Roastme" each on the front page. Why?
It's both. I'd also done the same with multis but kept a "casuals" multi for the defaults + populars, and it had been declining in quality for a while - but it genuinely fell off a sharp cliff with the Great Purge, even my multireddits now feel like the frontpage. Cacophonous shallow dreck.
/r/3dprinting dropped substantially in quality when /u/billierubencamgirl left the mod team. They had fought hard against meme posts, "look at my new printer/1st print" posts, and fad print spam. They had also tried very hard to maintain useful documentation for people.
It seems that keeping a subreddit high quality is a difficult and thankless job. You will be seen as the fun police and all your efforts downplayed as unnecessary.
Honestly I find this claim laughable and in my view represents a weak grasp at confirmation bias from the API doomsayers. Still remember seeing discussions here a few months ago where people predicted that the API changes would lead to Reddit being flooded by obvious spam and even child pornography. Well, obviously that didn't happen and the front page of the internet is just filled with low-quality trash like it's always been.
If someone wants to prove this point, support it with data. Otherwise it feels like simple mood affiliation. The UX of the median Redditor has not changed at all.
>If someone wants to prove this point, support it with data.
if you want to provide a criteria sheet for "quality", then sure. But I think we'll spend more time arguing over a definition than me collecting the data.
I'm sure not going to even touch the notion of "flooded by CP". I don't want to know if that has gotten better or worse and there are much higher authorities who won't get arrested trying to audit such claims.
>The UX of the median Redditor has not changed at all.
the median redditor isn't a moderator, and a moderator affects many more people than the median moderator. I feel that's a point constantly missed in this dismissal.
Note that this article isn't surveying users, it's about conversations with moderators, old and new. I do indeed question if the UX for the median moderator has gotten worse.