Agreed. It seems mostly a tool to enrage people now. I cant stomach it anymore, the tin foil hat wearing part of me would say there are larger forces at work here. The flipside of these subreddits(public freakout, etc) is that a non-trivial percentage of these things are/could be fake.

To the main point of the article- Reddit must really get a lot of dough monetizing user data because its as bad or worse than ad/malware...

There definitely are larger forces at work, plenty of times I see what is pretty clearly political propoganda on the front page. Iran had a lot of success in r/worldnews [0]. I actually noticed a lot of pro-iran propoganda on Reddit when the US killed their general, the post would be pro-Iran and all the comments would be against it, mostly stopped after they shot down the plane though.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/volunteers-found-iran...

It's a shame that Reddit relies so heavily on their "default" front page experience.

99.9% of people looking at Reddit will never see how good and useful it can be. My front page is just the stuff I'm into - a couple dozen niche subreddits with good cultures. It is nice. It is my favorite place on the internet.

Most people will never take the time to make an account and curate their subreddit subscriptions.

Could that process be improved and streamlined? Absolutely yes. When you make an account -- or perhaps even before -- it should probably hold your hand and walk you through a preferences discovery process.

As it stands now, customizing Reddit is effectively a collection of "power user" features and we all know how that goes: only a tiny fraction of users will ever bother.

Agreed. Also, with the redesign UI there is no way to manage your multireddits, making it a chore to curate content. I have to go to the old reddit version of the sub to add or subtract it from a multireddit.

I thought multis are just URLs you can bookmark.

With the old reddit design, you can create your own Multireddits. If you switch to old reddit (click username dropdown > "Visit Old Reddit"), and hover over the "Join" button on a subreddit, you should get a menu to check and add that sub to a multireddit (or create a new one). Some subs with custom CSS break this functionality, but this is a way to curate and categorize your subs. So you can read posts from all of you favorite programming-related subs together in one multi and all your favorite cooking ones in another, etc. Once you have them set up you can use them in the new redesign, but to manage them you need to go back to Old Reddit.

You’re right. I’ve been on Reddit since 2012. But over the last 2-3 years, the front page seems to feature more controversial or upsetting content. I wonder if Reddit promotes that to increase engagement metrics.

There's also tons of "memes but named differently" subs. Cursed images, blessed images, blursed images, etc. images. They're all picking from the same pool of reposted content.

Some of the best stuff has actually been long form comedy writing from the sports subreddits during the lockdown. It's good banter, unlike the twitter screenshot repost subs like murderedbywords, kamikazebywords, etc.bywords.

>the site has become like a nerdy version of World Star Hip Hop.

Wow, this is an excellent comparison. You're absolutely right.

Reddit is not quite dead yet, but if I had to pick a specific point when Reddit began its downfall it quality, it was definitely when r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu exploded in popularity, and Reddit shifted to primarily a place to get terrible 4chan memes.

I think screenshots of Tweets had a much more detrimental effect than 4chan memes.

Yes absolutely. The turning point for me was when I visited r/all one day and the first page was almost entirely screenshots from Twitter

Reddit is completely infested with politics too, many subs that you wouldn't expect to be political are clearly aligned a certain way.

And this was the reason I finally deleted my account and stopped browsing Reddit. It was hard to find any sub that didn't turn in to a left vs right argument. I intentionally avoided political subs and anything news related but unfortunately most discussions some how turned political.

Yeah, I’ve noticed recently. For instance /r/ActualPublicFreakOuts is quite conservative, in comparison to /r/PublicFreakOuts

That happened as a reaction to PublicFreakouts becoming ProtestsAgainstPolice

>You really can't browse the regular Reddit front page without encountering a lot of content that is designed to upset you

This 2 minutes of hate thing is prevalent on HN as well. "Content that is designed to upset you" is right.

I used to visit /r/amitheasshole for a bit until I realized that subreddit was just porn for a certain type of personality. I found it super distasteful and left.

I don't even understand why people would live their life with that much anger and hatred. I would literally see what was obviously just a miscommunication or bad actions with good intentions that could be resolved by communication and people would just vilify the person.

yuck.