[Arkhaine_kupo]

> Despite this, we have still seen a steady trend toward extreme views on the platform.

There were 3 conditions that were working and were removed very very quickly

1) it was a web application only. Which enforces an interaction that is more contientous

2) it skewed older. Compared to other sites like IFunny or Instagram the age profile was closer to 30 than 12.

3) the upvote/downvote mechanic was used to upvote relevant content not something you agreed with. And downvote to drown overused jokes, lack of nuance posts etc.

But in 2020 reddit destroyed 3rd party apis and went full head on the app.

Age plummeted, app useage is mroe casual than laptops and length of posts went full brainrot and lastly there was no enforcement to teach people what upvotes meant. So it became thumbs up or down, and the jokes went from heavily downvoted to always the top comment.

150 million users in 6 months is the death of any conversation and reddit did it on purpose to try an IPO.

[CM30]

It also had a design that was offputting to a lot of casual users, which probably kept out folks that didn't really have anything meaningful to say/didn't want to contribute much. Same with Hacker News: the average Joe doesn't find this site all that appealing compared to Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/whatever, so it mostly appeals to more techy, intellectual users than those platforms do.

[genghisjahn]

Slashdot's rating system was the best I've ever seen. But I'm sure it doesn't help improve engagement, in fact the system had so many rules (for an online ratings system) that I'd guess it reduced engagement. Which might have been a feature in its glory days.

[CM30]

You mean how you had to give a reason for your rating rather than just choosing 'like' or 'dislike'?

Honestly, I think that more nuanced setup may help limited toxicity quite a lot. If there's no general upvote/downvote option, people might have to actually think why they like/dislike something rather than treating the system as a "I dislike this because I disagree and everyone should think the same way I do" setup.

It's why I quite like the reaction systems some forum scripts have. Yeah they're not perfect (many still have like/dislike options by default), but giving users reasons for why they upvote/downvote a post makes things a lot more meaningful. I also quite like how for some of them, agree and disagree don't actually change how the post appears or count as a rating. They just exist so people can see how many people agree or disagree with something and that's it.

[ishouldstayaway]

(3) here was always just a fantasy. It never actually worked that way.

[Arkhaine_kupo]

Any platform with millions of users and dedicated communities will be hard to generalise, but there were countless examples of it happening.

Length of posts has plummeted, "meme" content and "twitter" like language was repudiated while now its basically the main mode of communication.

There used to be "famous" usernames, not everyone agreed with them but most people considered their input valuable, ending perhaps with the famous Unidan incident.

I would admit that having been in the site for 15 years the degradation has been continuos and small communities were much better than default subs from the get go. But the Eternal September post App release has been irreversible and made the site culture absolute trash

[nozzlegear]

Agreed. Moderators would even try to use custom CSS to remove the downvote buttons on their subs to prevent people from downvoting comments they disagreed with, as that was against "reddiquette." But oftentimes you'd want to indulge your monkey brain and punish people who have differing opinions by making the number go down and their comments go gray.