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Re:Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting by dleslie on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @10:18PM (#23776369)
It really fell off the rails when it became an imageboard moreso than a forum and link aggregator. It was all about the text, and so attracted those most willing to tolerate a wall of text.

Use Archive.org to compare 2008 to 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and onwards. The addition of thumbnails and gradual shift of the frontpage away from textual content and towards images is almost as remarkable as the increase in high-anxiety, anger and tribalism.

At some point sub-reddits were added, as well, which probably didn't help with the tribalism.

Re:Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting by sjtindell on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @10:47PM (#23776490)
Ironically in my opinion subreddits are the only thing keeping the site useful at all. It’s all about curating a set of smaller subreddits targeted at your interests or frequented by people whose content you like. Beyond that it’s just terrible.
Re:Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting by Yhippa on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @11:20PM (#23776635)
The line between a small subreddit struggling to get enough posts and then getting big enough to have drama is so fine these days.
Re:Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting by BolexNOLA on Thursday July 09, 2020 @08:27AM (#23779423)
The amount of work the ask historians mods have to put in to make reddit function like people think it does/want it to is staggering. That team is basically doing a second full time job. I don’t know how they do it.
Re:Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting by _pmf_ on Thursday July 09, 2020 @02:09AM (#23777406)
> Ironically in my opinion subreddits are the only thing keeping the site useful at all.

At what point in time could one derive value from reddit without subreddits?

Re:Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting by rcxdude on Thursday July 09, 2020 @09:27AM (#23779908)
It didn't have them initially. Though at that point it was basically a slightly less focused /r/programming .
Re:Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting by lovegoblin on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @11:13PM (#23776602)
> At some point sub-reddits were added, as well

Hah that was in 2006.

The real change for subreddits was when they became user-creatable, but even that was already in 2008.

Point is it's not like they're a recent addition.

Re:Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting by jedberg on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @11:27PM (#23776678)
Reddit had thumbnails in 2007.
Re:Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting by byte1918 on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:14AM (#23777738)
I'm sure it did not or maybe it was not enabled by default. I distinctly remember having to turn 'condensed view' back on because the thumbnails were taking so much vertical space.

edit: Just noticed who I replied to. I guess you would know better.

Re:Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting by dleslie on Thursday July 09, 2020 @10:31AM (#23780663)
Of course, but the dominance of images over text was gradual. Compare archives of the front page in 2008, 2010 and so on. It is remarkable how the content focus shifts.
Re:Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting by jedberg on Thursday July 09, 2020 @01:03PM (#23782337)
Oh for sure. It's shifted way too far towards images now. I was just pointing out the shift started really early.
Re:Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting by fouc on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @10:47PM (#23776495)
probably related to the integration of imgur?
Re:Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting by rhizome on Thursday July 09, 2020 @02:51AM (#23777646)
Speaking of sites that have become nightmares...