It was. Now it's a cesspool.
> Recommendations, discussion,
It's become the worst kind of echo chamber. The comments feel like they're written by GPT-3, and there's a lot of prideful ignorance or confidence when it's undeserved.
I had to laugh when they added "avatars" and everyone started setting theirs to dancing seizure cockroaches.
My avatar is the Digg logo.
> backstage access to celebs
AMA was sincere when it started. Now it's just lame cash grab marketing and self-promotion.
> And it's YC.
Yeah. I feel like they exited too early. Conde Nast made all the money here.
All of it?
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians for example.
Tiny subreddits (like usbchardware where I am mod) are easy to keep nice. But most larges ones are horrible, horrible toxic cesspools. It is basically a phenomenon that communities break off the larger one when it becomes too toxic -- but all too often the larger one won't wither. /r/canada and /r/onguardforthee/ is a classic example.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7z706y/whats_... and an example post from /r/canada within the last hour, you don't need to look far for stuff like this "I feel like ISIS would be better the liberals at this point for canada."
Let's not even mention the childfree subs because what the original one became is shudder
Lobste.rs tried that for technical stuff with tags and that engine is really powerful but the community never took off.
HN, of course, well, you know what it's like here when people of diverse interests and moral foundations are placed together.