[brosefstalin]

It wasn't "great" but reddit used to be a nice place to stop by and find quality content on the front page.

These days on reddit, you will find on the front page:

reposts;

"dank may-mays";

pictures of someone's kids, relatives or pets;

celebrities who are peddling shit in exchange for the most generic answers on AMA;

advertisements disguised as normal posts (e.g., subreddits of movies, tv, music);

world news posted with a spin to stir outrage by government agencies hiding in military barracks of US and UK and "troll houses" in Petersburg;

and other junk that's posted to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

This is especially true with subreddits that are promoted to default status. It used to be that you could find refuge in other subreddits, but even now, as soon as word spreads of their existence, they too become saturated with the Facebook folk.

[visakanv]

Oh, fair enough. I think that's a function of large audiences– the larger an audience gets, the more it allows puns, jokes, etc to rise to the top– and the more incentive there is to be thoughtlessly controversial, and the more incentive there is for advertising and spam.

The challenge to maintain standards when an audience grows is really hard. There are some subreddits that try, but it seems like a universal problem (as far as I can tell.)

[Qwertious]

I suspect it goes deeper than that - one thing I've noticed is that the Dwarf Fortress community has much more depth than the TF2 community. I suspect that this is due to TF2's ease of consumption in comparison to Dwarf fortress, or rather Dwarf Fortress's high barrier to entry in comparison to TF2.

[leadjoint]

Isn't the whole point of reddit that you can choose the kind of content you want to see with subreddits? Don't like memes and pictures? Unsubscribe from funny, adviceanimals and pics.