Midnight Pub

Reddit Probably isn't broken

~analog

Problems with Reddit:

I spent money posts: "look at this new 3d printer that I bought."

"I'm going to..." posts: "I'm going to make these life altering changes! Look how cool I am!"

I can't bother to look at past posts post, so let me post the exact same thing that was said yesterday.

I did a beginner thing! : "I know this has been posted 1000 times before but here is my first attempt!"

a meme!

But

But it isn't a problem, because Reddit isn't a platform for learning things, or finding new ideas; it's a platform for creating nonstop content that people can endlessly scroll through, and that's what it does. Reddit needs all these worthless posts so they can fill the never ending scroll. The only thing more worthless than Reddit posts are the comments on the posts. It's always a sad day when you are searching for an answer to a problem you're having and the only results you find are a question asked on Reddit; you can be about 90% sure that the comments to that question are all worthless.

And why should the comments be useful on Reddit? It's just a never ending flow of content; it would be like putting post it notes on parts of a waterfall. You could put a meaningful comment on someones question, but the same question has probably already been asked, and will be asked again in a few days; nothing is built upon in reddit, just a new post starting fresh everyday.

Reddit isn't broken, it's a perfect content fire hose; it's just not the platform I was looking for.

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Replies

~quilliam wrote:

Depressingly when trying to learn something or looking for recommendations for something to buy you need to type “good toaster Reddit” and go to the comments to see a bunch of opinions and hope they’re right. Reddit has lots of problems like the ones you’ve listed but they’re also the best source of information of this kind on the internet. I wish everything wasn’t advertising driven. If Reddit costed $1 per month I wonder how different it would look.

~jetgirl wrote:

Reddit problems are the same as they were when we were all on phpbb forums. Same posts, different location.

~bitdweller wrote (thread):

Reddit is fine but like with most things, we mis-use it. We're doing it wrong. And reddit loves it and encourages it, because... money.

Generic subreddits are one of the problems with reddit. The niche subreddits are good, probably even awesome, at least in my opinion. The users are usually friendly and will help you. Searching for answers about specific things may also work.

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The biggest problem I have with it, is actually not its fault. It's a problem with the internet as a whole. It's the almost disappearance of RSS, at least as a culture.

I used to have a centralized place to get my news, the news that I want to get, based on what I like, curated by me.

But is has shifted to a company-backed and algorithm-based mechanism where you either don't decide what you want to get and/or you get lost on the platform in the many ways it persuades you to consume what it wants.

And it's very difficult to get out once you're in.

Recently, I've set up a private miniflux instance (an RSS feed reader) and I'm loving it. Problem is, I'm hooked on reddit. I am. I'm strongly trying to moderate it, but it's very difficult.

It's another reason why I'm on the smolweb. This is fun. And hopeful not mindless. Or at least not capitalistically or algorithmically or popularistically mindless.