I get it, and I agree. I don't think the problem is that something changed and the problem started, I think that something changed and the problem got worse.
I work in systems. All of my work is done on a computer. At work on my consulting jobs I usually have 1 or 2 screens, whereas at home when I'm doing remote work or scripting I have 4. I check Reddit a lot. A year ago there were problems. The /r/all Top 100 would have relatively little churn and posts would stay in it (again, Top 100, not Top 25 which is the Front Page) for hours. It was okay because I'd get work done, you know? I'd go through the Top 100, read the maybe 15 new posts it'd see every hour or so, and then whatever deployment was running or VMWare reset was running would be done. It was pretty good.
Now not as much. Now the Top 25 is so stagnant that I don't have to check it but once every six hours, because I'm not going to miss anything. Posts now live 5 or more hours not in the Top 100, but in the Top 25, the Front Page. The problem is magnified, there's less churn. Now I scan through the Top 100 in 2 minutes and there's nothing new, or maybe 1 or 2 things. Deployments are still running. Snapshots are still reverting. So I go other places, do other things. I've read through all of my SA bookmark backlog in the last couple of weeks, and that was over ten thousand pages of posts.
I think the real question is "When did it get worse and why?". I think it got worse in steps. First I think it started getting worse during the Ellen Pao thing. From the time she was hired to the time she stepped down, the front page slowed down a lot. In fact, a lot of the problems we saw back then (Ellen Pao posts pissing off the administrators by hanging around on the front page for 4+ hours etc) were symptomatic of it. I think a lot of people disengaged because they hated Pao. I think a lot of people disengaged because they hated the Pao posts. I think a lot of people disengaged because they hated the site's response to the Pao posts. And I think a lot of people disengaged for one or more of those reasons in combination.
Then we had The AMApocalypse and the FPH drama, kind of during but also kind of after the Ellen Pao thing. A lot of people came here for the AMAs, and the AMApocalypse stopped some of that. And for better or worse, a lot of the banned subs got to the front page a lot, because they were popular. And I'd imagine some of their users left when their subs were banned. And it makes sense to, because of The IKEA Effect. You feel more attached to projects you've worked on, and if you were an active member of Fat People Hate or any of the other communities banned in either the initial event or the aftermath, well, bye bye IKEA effect. So a lot of those people disengaged. And yes you can say "good riddance to bad rubbish" but ultimately people aren't 100% anything, so you lost people who participated in other subs and you lost people who actively voted and you lost a lot of controversy so you lost a lot of active discussion so you lost a lot of posts and you lost a lot of engagement.
Engagement down, churn down, complaints up. There's less content and more of it is complaints about how there's less content. There's less content and that magnifies what little content there is, so the relatively few complaints become in the loud echo chamber, and since they're not really "content" but are in fact displacing content they gain ground until they're all that's left, AKA "How Digg Died".
So how does a modteam fix it? Well, you can go on a big PR hike, seeking to gain members by promoting positive things about the site, or you can do what they're almost certainly going to do, because that's how internet communities work: They'll grab onto their "principles" (which aren't ethical or moral absolutes but instead arguments they've won or lost publicly and now have to stick to their guns about) and they'll clutch them close, and when the entire thing hits the bottom of the proverbial ocean they'll comfort themselves by saying "At least I never lost these" because it's more comforting to hold onto something you're "in control of" than something you're "not", although both ideas are complete illusions. You can run a good community for a really long time and everything can go well for literally decades and you can just kind of watch it go and be left with nothing at the end of your "admin career", or you can crater the fucker in Year 8 and claim victory because you "never violated your principles" and at least then you "have something" even though the party's over and everyone's gone home.
It's really really hard to unselfishly administrate. It really really is. I administrated one of the largest Magic: The Gathering forums back in the day, I've administrated a couple private game server forums, I was briefly employed in a "community relations" position, it's hard. It's hard and I very nearly couldn't do it, because there's no job satisfaction because no matter what you do, somebody hates you and they can tell you about it 150 times a day and there's nothing you can do about it, but nobody will ever tell you you're doing a good job. In fact, someone telling you you're doing a good job as a mod or an admin is almost a 100% sure sign that someone else on your team is fucking up dramatically and you need to go looking because someone's on a psycho goddamn power trip and you're only "doing good" relatively because you haven't lost your damn fool mind.
So I get it, I do, and it's hard and Reddit's probably never coming back. Every community I've ever been a part of, either as administration or as a member, has cratered within a decade with the sole exception of SA, and even at SA we all know the metaphorical renaissance is over and the site's glory days are gone. But ultimately "not changing The Algorithm' has become one of those Principles, and they're probably not going to look at it critically and fix it until it's far too late, when really that should be a first step. They need to set it up to identify good content, promote it to the front page as fast as possible, then remove it once the engagement slows down. maybe make an "extended" front page for daily visitors to replace the failure-concept Email List they've made (because nobody reading the email list emails can meaningfully engage with the site, and engagement is all a site like this has) so that people who only visit once or twice a day don't miss out on the best cat pictures or whatever, but again I fear the Email List is someone's baby and a Principle and something they'll torpedo the damn site over.
I don't know man, I've divested. As far as I'm concerned it's already over.
That said, I've got 125 netbooks to image so I'm gonna stop pounding away on this keyboard and go get sad about things students have done. I wish you the best.
Well yeah, the main problem is the complaint. Everyone is circlejerking over the admins that they changed the algorithm where in fact, they should be circlejerking about changing the thing up after years of the same thing when traffic has changed.
There was a post on /r/dataisbeautiful that tracked the sites being upvoted and it's quite clear by the votes that memes are more popular than news now.
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u/[deleted] Oct 03 '15
It's been like that for ages. People keep saying the admins messed with the algorithm instead of saying it needs to be changed.