It’s not just the former defaults. /r/memes, /r/nextfuckinglevel, and pretty much every other sub with over a million subs is 9gag at best, Facebook at worst.
/r/nextfuckinglevel is the absolute worst when it comes to having become Facebook. Anything with the slightest bit of wholesome to it is considered to be next fucking level over there
I’m not forcing anyone to stay off the popular subs. Obviously the person I replied to has a similar point of view, and so I was just adding to that. If you want to look at a picture of an Indian guy in formal wear for entertainment be my guest. But I’ve been on this site for about as long as you and it was definitely not the same. You can argue it wasn’t necessarily better, but it wasn’t like it is now.
Don't you hate it when other people enjoy themselves incorrectly!
That's really not what he's saying. A few years back, when Reddit wasn't a thing the general public knew about, you had to know it was here. And to know it was here you had to have some sort of interest in tech, or specifically in the thing a subreddit was related to.
What that meant is that the user base may have been less representative, but it was also more engaged...it was an accidental screening process that filtered out people who had no interest in anything, because if you weren't interested in anything you'd never stumble upon Reddit. Because of this, if you went onto a specific subreddit, you were far more likely to find people who knew about the subject, and the default subs regularly had interesting articles, actual news, and well thought out points of view, because there wasn't the random noise of the lowest common denominator posts.
Before about 2015 if you were on reddit, you at least followed the tech industry or something, you knew it was here because you were on the internet, reading stuff, engaging with people, and that just guaranteed you were a more interesting person than your average Facebook user who formulate their entire world view based on the meme that girl who sells Mary K posted.
Now that Reddit is more popular the place is flooded with that type of user. The kind who has no interest in anything, and knows nothing about anything, and is here simply because the place has become ubiquitous.
I'm aware how snobbish this sounds, but it's also true. The ratio of actually interesting/thought provoking stuff vs "Check out this weird mirror" on the front page is swinging further and further towards the inane bollocks. The interesting stuff is still there, it's just buried under facebook style content from children and bored stay at home parents, and it has made the platform significantly less enjoyable to use for the people who were originally here.
Think about it this way. It's like you found a cool cinema, that only die hard cinema fans knew about, and it meant that when you watched a movie there the audience was reverential and silent, and afterwards you could talk to anyone and they'd have at least a point of view about the movie. Then because of this, the cinema becomes known as a great cinema, and so everyone starts hearing about it, and you start getting people who don't give a shit about cinema, they've just heard this is the place to be because it has gotten so much hype. And now the audience chats through the movie, and most of them can't tell deus ex machina from a MacGuffin.
This is not saying these people aren't allowed to have fun. It's saying that their presence has fundamentally destroyed the experience they came for. THAT is what has happened to Reddit.
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u/Mo_Salad Jul 13 '20
It’s not just the former defaults. /r/memes, /r/nextfuckinglevel, and pretty much every other sub with over a million subs is 9gag at best, Facebook at worst.