[ksd482]

The discussion quality is unbelievably shallow in most of the subreddits.

Unless it's a niche and technical subreddit such as mathematical topics, bio science subtopic, the discussion is quite shallow and in some cases simply misinformed.

For e.g., a recent question about "is this person racist?", everyone jumped on the bandwagon and said "yes!", "100%", "obviously" without citing any sources. They simply paraphrased a small segment of a video of what that person said.

It turned out the thing they paraphrased it was completely out of context and in fact proved it was opposite of what people were believing.

There were a couple of people who pointed this out but they were downvoted into obvilion: -50 downvotes or something like that.

So these comments were hidden by default.

This is what makes reddit an ecochamber. Now just imagine people coming in and reading this post without any prior knowledge, and taking away the wrong conclusion.

This happens ALL the time.

I used to enjoy reddit back in 2011-2013 when it was all about silly memes and jokes.

EDIT: "They simply paraphrased it" --> "They simply paraphrased a small segment of a video of what that person said."

[pudgywalsh]

> everyone jumped on the bandwagon

Reddit has become the epitome of Idiocracy, but let's not pretend like spam-level shallow commenters sucking each other off hasn't infected this place too.

I honestly think if we took voting away the dynamics of online discussion would reset to normal.

[Loughla]

/. Actually did do that right. You voted on comments and had to judge other votes as to whether or not they were accurate. And limit the + or - to a maximum of 5. Then you don't have people chasing scores.

Granted, the voting system was the only thing slashdot did right, but it was good.

[hparadiz]

/. Is the same 10 dudes arguing with each other all day long on every thread.

[Loughla]

20 years ago that place was awesome.

[unethical_ban]

The only subs of any value are the niche subs, hobby subs that show off creation, and city-sized geographical subs.

Everything else is politics, trolling, ragebait or simple spam. So much spam.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Not sure why you'd expect anything except a list like to be of "any value".

It's like, say, talk.politics.theory back in the Usenet days. For a while it was fun, and then it wasn't. Too big, too wide .. it killed itself as a useful place to discuss/debate politics.

[inigyou]

In my experience most of the city subs have been overrun by political trolls too

[qwerpy]

Not even the city-sized ones. My local ones (Seattle when I lived there, and Orange County ones now) are political cesspools full of intolerant people and outrage bait.

[api]

“Pajama Nazis vs Basement Bolsheviks.”

Forget where I saw that one but it’s Reddit now.

[dredmorbius]

Back in the End Times of Google+, I had access to a data dump of all n-million Google+ Communities metadata (name, subscribers, and visible activity on the Community homepage, the last of which gave an indication of post cadence).

I noticed two odd things:

1. Taking a log-log plot of number v. size of Communities, there were far fewer very large communities than a straight power-law relation would suggest ... by a factor of 2--4 or so. This didn't look extreme plotted log-log, but when you looked at the raw values, there was something dampening the count pretty markedly.

2. In terms of activity, posting cadence fell off once a community hit (very roughly) about 10k members. Above that there still might be a lot of activity, but it was a lot less than size alone would suggest.

I've never been able to conclusively answer why either of these behavious should be the case, though I suspect that:

I suspect that the first has to do with the tendency of very large forums to go rogue (be taken over by bots / shills / spammers, or otherwise go off), to be moderated by site admins (excessive and pervasive violation of site policies), and/or simply put real people off participation because there's no genuine reward for doing so (questions aren't answered, or are responded to with incivility and/or spam).

The second (more activity in mid-sized communities) would probably relate to the last factor above: with ~10k members (give or take an order of magnitude), there's probably a core of a few hundred to a few thousand active participants, which is about at the threshold where associations and affinities can form. People still have conversations, at least part of the time.

Keep in mind that G+ (similar to FB) has a flat discussion format, so that the most recent comments are appended to the end of a post. Reddit, like HN, has a threaded discussion. For a long time I criticised G+ for not supporting threads, but I came to feel that this was actually a strength where discussions were well-moderated, as there was a sense of a real discussion occurring, where later respondants would often refer to an earlier comment (usually naming the author and quoting a bit of context) in replying. Conversations could and did last for days, weeks, months, and years. By contrast, on Reddit (and HN), a conversation is effectively dead within a day or so, if not a few hours. Comments are simply howling into the void.

This happens somewhat less on HN than Reddit, largely due to the finite size of HN's front page (infamously: 30 stories, though many might cycle through over a day). Odds are good that a top-5 story actually has some exchanges on it, and I've carried on a few of these for a few days.

But I'd long ago noted that Reddit was where conversation, in the sense of an exchange between multiple parties, goes to die, especially on any of the larger (million-plus follower) subreddits. Smaller (~50 -- a few thousand members) generally does far better.

In a similar sense, HN's quiet days (weekends, holidays, or during The Burn) often see far less activity but far more interaction.

[SV_BubbleTime]

>and city-sized geographical subs.

lol. No. Every city sub is the EXACT same far left lunatic that needs to make everything about politics. Doesn’t matter if it’s a purple area, red, and reasonable-blue areas far reflected as bizarro versions of themselves if you go off their city reddits.

You may not notice depending on your perspective.

[dredmorbius]

It's not just leftists. It's polarization generally, with scale.

The mid-range views leave. The extremes remain. Often a sub / moderator bias selects for one polar extreme or another.

This is where HN's (generally) political-neutral moderator stance, maddening as it often is to both sides (see dang's many, many, many, many comments on perceived bias), seems to have largely succeeded. Neither side dominates, and the middle isn't excluded.

[inigyou]

HN definitely removes political extreme views.

[dredmorbius]

Almost always by user flags rather than moderation removal, no?

[inigyou]

Automated removal by user flags is itself a moderation decision.

[gs17]

Exactly, for example, there's often two subreddits which are polarized in opposite directions, which unfortunately doesn't make it any easier to figure out the reality than if it was purely left-wing discourse allowed.

[SoftTalker]

Certainly describes my local city sub.

[unethical_ban]

Different subs have it to different extents. The Texas sub was taken over last year by a left wing mod that made everything not merely a Daily Beast repost machine, but barely about Texas. They were finally removed to the pleasure of pretty much everyone.

Every sub has its far right trolls and agitators, too. Bots that respond automatically to any post with certain keywords in the title will lure accounts that have never posted there before, celebrating heinous things and trying to get a rise out of people. Pathetic attempts at destroying decency by celebrating murders by the government.

You may not notice depending on your perspective.

[whycome]

Looking at the conversations tied to movie fandoms has been fascinating. People treat movie franchises like a religion.

[tsss]

It is essentially religion. Politics too.

[markdown]

> I used to enjoy reddit back in 2011-2013 when it was all about silly memes and jokes.

Reddit is as it's always been. You just got older and don't get the current silly memes and jokes.

[ksd482]

I never said anything about not getting the current memes and jokes.

I was alluding to the current mix of the content on reddit. It has gotten more political and less entertaining if you look at the default feed whether you create an account or browse anonymously.

And in any political or open ended discussion, unless it is scientific, the discussions are shallow.

I will however concede that non-scientific/technical discussions were always shallow.

[pavel_lishin]

> It has gotten more political

I think this is also a reflection of the era we live in. In 2011, we weren't facing the same problems we are today.

[PearlRiver]

The world has gotten more political. Everything is going to shit and we have not even really started the climate change.

[inigyou]

We have. The heat waves were climate change. The super super super super El Nino ocean temperature anomaly predicted for November is climate change.

[inigyou]

Also we killed the Great Barrier Reef.

[burningChrome]

>> I used to enjoy reddit back in 2011-2013 when it was all about silly memes and jokes.

This was totally me. Advice Animals was my go to when I needed to decompress from being overworked as a developer. Just funny, silly memes, and cool inside jokes you could share with your friends. If you knew some of the inside jokes, you were considered one of the cool kids in your group.

Reddit almost always was first run to the big stories as well, then a few weeks later it show up on FB. Still remember the one day I was telling my GF something I saw on Reddit and she was like, "That was on FB last week" and I knew it was over.

The final coffin was when the political rubes overran AA and turned into a political echo chamber. Post something that wasn't political? Downvoted into oblivion.

That was it, the fun was over, nothing was cool any more so I checked out.

[SV_BubbleTime]

This is not accurate.

I get the jokes. They range from some retarded live stream drama, to some basic bitch puns or otherwise barely novel wordplay, to some thinly veiled political attack that can be thrown and doesn’t need defense because it’s “omg, just a joke, lighten up bro!”.

Think about it this way, everyone should be aware that intelligence has gone down in the last two generations. Reading comprehension has gone down. Terminally online addicts have increased.

So… Why would humor even stay the same on some cleverness scale?