[ilovecomputers]

I always feel strange being nostalgic about a website. Like I don't feel weird being nostalgic about a classic episode of The Simpsons or a rock concert, but for YouTube or Newgrounds or now Reddit, I do.

I've used reddit for like 7 years. Gleamed helpful info from it. Even won a contest off that site (still got that postcard of all the admin's autographs). Yet my continuing theme with that site was their social experiments. Some of them were one time events, like the Reddit Jet Blue Travels or naming a whale Mr. Splashy Pants or the Rally For Sanity (okay, we technically tagged along for that event, but I was the ones drawn to that pilgrimage). Most of them were short lived, like Soapier or The redditor zine. However, there were successful experiments like IAMA (we finally got the President in the end after making joke IAMA requests), Secret Santa, and shit, we even got Snoop Dogg as an honorary mod of /r/trees.

That was the thing with reddit, it was this general forum that various people showed up on who wanted to try new things or learn something new. Sometimes they took it too far and sometimes they had real life effects. Whatever redditors tried, it was something that broke the regular order of things. Hidden away in the subreddits, I can still see these attempts at trying something new. Try Paleo, donate a pizza, ask a scientist or historian for detailed answers, try not to jack off, meetup with like-minded people, try to be more productive with GTD, try to have this obscure politician win an election, or watch these obscure movies on netflix.

Now the site has gotten so big, so many stuff has been done on there, I'm likely just skimming the surface here.

Anyways, Jedberg, Raldi, if you're still on this thread, thanks for your early contributions to that site. It has brought me fond memories and even a few friends...who I can assure you are not the steretypical reddit weirdos. For reals!

[astrodust]

I think a lot of people feel the same way about Reddit as they do about The Simpsons: It used to be good.

Like so many mega-scale communities before it, Reddit is a case study in what happens if you let your user base grow faster than your cultural core can assimilate it.

To get the good content you need to dig deeper and deeper now, hide yourself away from the deluge of garbage that is the top-level groups. /r/programming remains fairly lively, but it's still a weak substitute for what it could be given proper community oversight.

[TTPrograms]

Eternal September appears to be universal property of online communities - IMO Reddit has tolerated it better than most thanks to it's ability to fractally segment itself into smaller and smaller communities that don't observe these issues.

The defaults are garbage, of course, but so would be literally any other community that size, so I don't really think it should reflect significantly on the nature of Reddit. They really need to start onboarding with "What are 5 things you're interested in?" instead of the defaults, though, or else the average first-time user will have no idea that this variety in community quality exists.

[NeutronBoy]

> Eternal September appears to be universal property of online communities - IMO Reddit has tolerated it better than most thanks to it's ability to fractally segment itself into smaller and smaller communities that don't observe these issues.

I think this is the key - Eternal September doesn't generally impact Reddit as a whole (except for the default or frontpage), but rather it impacts each individual subreddit. However, each subreddit this happens to then goes and makes a new, separate subreddit to essentially start again.

[alttab]

Entropy will still build up in the software, infrastructure (both human and hardware), monetization model ("my highly targeted customer base keeps moving subs, and they have ad-block!") and an accumulation of bad "federal-level" decisions that get made and held reddit-wide. The question is when this will this burden begin to stifle the creation of new "escape subs."

[alogray]

Frankly, I don't feel like Reddit's quality has changed altogether too much since even before Digg v4 killed Digg.

There was definitely a period where the average quality of a comment seemed higher. But those times also coincided with the rise of novelty accounts, power user personalities, often with foul sounding names and awful subreddits. Drama over subreddit bannings is nothing new, either.

Honestly, I'm enjoying the website more today now than I was a few years ago.

Which, I suppose, is the same thing the people say about The Simpsons.

[debaserab2]

> There was definitely a period where the average quality of a comment seemed higher. But those times also coincided with the rise of novelty accounts, power user personalities, often with foul sounding names and awful subreddits. Drama over subreddit bannings is nothing new, either.

Personally I'm pretty happy there's less of the narwhalbacon joke stuff that used to be rampant in the comments years ago. I think the noise:signal ratio is about the same as I can ever remember it being, but at least I can now stand the noise.

To this day I still don't tell people I visit reddit because I don't want to be associated with or labeled as a "redditor" despite the fact that I find the site to be a valuable source of content. There's a strong faction of the core user base that I just can't relate to.

[baddox]

I'm a week away from the reddit 8 year club, and I couldn't disagree more (about reddit—I haven't watched The Simpsons). I think reddit has navigated their massive popularity better than any other similar services. Subreddits are brilliant. Of course, individual subreddits go through the same transition when they get too big, but you just can't be sentimental. Unsubscribe from a subreddit if it annoys or disappoints you a few days in a row, and never look back. Once I did that (and, of course, unsubscribe from the vast majority of the default subs), reddit has been an amazing hub for all my widely varying hobbies and interests.

[ravishi]

I feel terribly sad to read that, since I'm still in love with Reddit. I've learned so many cool things there, ranging from technical stuff (even HN was probably introduced to me there) to politics, fitness, drugs, and all kinds of cool stuff I can think about. I've probably be using it for a couple years, and I still like it as much as I liked it yesterday. I can realize how cooler it was before, but really, it's still a really good site with really good content.

[MrAlmostWrong]

I agree with the other replies in that I don't think the quality of Reddit has necessarily gone down, you just have to look in the right places. You probably can't get the deep discussions that you initially could, but on the other side of the coin you also can't get the vast amount of new content that you might've never come across.

You certainly do need to hide away from the top level stuff and find the sub-reddits which you can tolerate. For example, the sports reddits are awesome forums for me to visit, but the design and web design ones rarely grab my attention.

With a community of any size that can grow infinitely it is going to be tough to maintain quality. With that being said I created a site that tries something a bit different where you can only follow 150 people and the content you see are the links and posts those 150 people comment on.

This doesn't limit the amount of content you can see because the 150 people in your network will be following their own set of people and so forth so the good content should spread naturally throughout the site. In essence I guess you could think of it as a mix between HN and Twitter where you get to curate the content based on who you follow.

It's called Dunbargo if anyone is interested in checking it out: https://dunbargo.com

There are two restrictions that might not sit well with the HN crowd, but things I put in place to manage quality:

1. You have to connect to LinkedIn just so the site can get your real name. 2. The people you invite you are stuck with forever. This means you can't just toss around your invites without any thought, but instead have to consider if the person you are going to invite will actively do a good job contributing to your stream.

These guidelines make it so the site isn't for everybody, but then again I'm not trying to create a place for everybody.

[lfowles]

> 2. The people you invite you are stuck with forever

What happens when people stop using the site? You're stuck without content... and then you leave the site?

[ilovecomputers]

Yeah, but that popularity gave us the president and celebrities. Even better, I've seen more instances where someone would post a missing person or object or ask what a mysterious bug was and you'd have high chance of someone successfully completing that request. Tapping into more people for help can be as much of blessing as it is a curse.

[panic]

Reddit's low point was right before they separated out political posts into their own section (this was about seven years ago, before subreddits). The front page was full of "vote up if" self-posts and overly-hysterical articles about the upcoming elections. It's much better now that you can pick what kinds of articles you want to see.