Part of what keeps Reddit free of such nastiness (in my experience at least) is the downvote button. Sure, it creates an echo chamber that ruins the popular subreddits, but on the smaller subreddits, it means that anything toxic, inflammatory or misleading is nuked into invisibility. After getting used to this, I find it really hard to participate in places like youtube, Discord or old-style forums where conversations can be derailed or turned toxic by only a few bad actors.
Once old.reddit.com gets turned off, I worry about how long this can persist. The iOS app has tons of clickbait hooks, useless notifications, invitations to join "similar" large, emotional subreddits full of toxicity and extremism.
Interestingly some of the niche subs I'm on also have Discord servers which are lively and interesting, like the days of IRC.
What's sad is the political discussions aren't even good. Comments are written to appeal to the lowest common denominator of reader, and a lot of subreddit comment sections move at breakneck speed, so what you end up with is a bunch of politically like-minded people dogpiling on top of each other to write something like "Being a republican at this point is basically saying you agree with killing the planet" (an actual current top comment on r/news right now). A few comments down in the chain will be a Futurama reference.
If it bothers you that much, don't let yourself get pulled into political discussions! It's really not that hard. Why do you care if other people waste their time arguing dumb politics? Just ignore it and move on!
Maybe it's just me and my tolerance for this kind of BS has declined over the years or maybe the site is steadily getting worse as it gets bigger.
It's easier, a thousand times easier, to use the downvote button to express disagreement than to actual type words and construct arguments, and that's how most people will use it.
And I suppose sometimes it can filter the toxic, inflammatory or misleading comment.
Moderators also often selectively enforce the “no politics” rule either by only removing political things that conflict with their personal political views or by defining things that are political as not political so they can continue or vice versa.
I think a big part of the problem of Reddit is that there’s a handful of mods who just moderate everything
I wish there was a Reddit without all that crap, I’d pay money to use it
This trend of niche forums becoming politically biased isn't limited to Reddit either. For example, much has been written from both the left and the right about how Ravelry, a knitting community, chose a hard-left political bias during the Trump administration (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/style/ravelry-knitting-ba...). When that sort of change happens, a whole lot of people cannot engage in that niche community because it feels like a hostile place to participate, even if the typical piece of content is apolitical.
Reddit is a shell of what it once was. Censorship prevails.
It might just be an amazing coincidence, but after they succeeded reddit stopped being fun.
And it wasn't even remotely subtle, because it went down kicking, screaming and throwing the wildest tantrums I've ever seen.
Then the rest of the niche specialized communities are just pure gold. In particular: data_hoarders, anything D&D related, netsec and programming are ok.
The rest however are just obvious old accounts bought by influence campaigns, which now sells for hundreds of dollars. (not to hard to see if you look at their posts history). Reddit made it so that having multiple accounts is much more easy than respecting the rules, especially with their one post by 10 minutes rule for most default subreddits.
Their new site revamp however reeks of a Product Manager (tm) who got too much free time on his hand. If old.reddit.com goes away I don't know if I'll even bother. Thank God for the SingleFile extension for saving my favorite posts.
TikTok has avoided that somehow - def more fun and interesting there - I do keep on getting exposed at times to somewhat weird idea, but a bit less of the yell in your face while clapping kind of stuff you see elsewhere so they are doing something interesting with their algorithm.
This is why the whole social media world is easy to disrupt. It's not listening to the consumer and focused on influence. I mean the whole reason Gab.com exists is not because it's a good site with cool features. Nope. The reason it exists is nobody can host that stuff without building their whole infrastructure from scratch because of the political controversy.
TikTok on the other hand is just focused on user engagement right now and not politics, so whatever. There will come a day though when it become too powerful for just that.
TikTok is certainly not solving the Eternal September problem, it is accelerating it if it doesn't keep some groups separated at least. There is really good content, but there has been on Twitter and reddit too at first.
But only light-hearted content and artificial positivity can also be worse than doom and gloom in some cases. Political incorrect jokes are sometimes enjoyable. Not everything needs to be a message with the latest hot takes in pedagogy that don't even make too much sense.
I think healthy communities still don't take internet comments too seriously.
I also feel like reddit has become legitimized as a source of new information. Especially ever since Obama did an AMA. I seem to find up to date information there that news outlets/journals haven't caught up with yet.
And it's been good that they've taken down some really messed up racism subreddits. It's bad that they for some reason let anti-white hate subreddits thrive and develop. Still not cool with that one. But all in all, I'll take it.
It's been interesting to watch the steady decline of Reddit and Twitter since they launched. They've always had a significant amount of doom-and-gloom clickbait headlines, but in the past it was far easier to filter out the bad and follow subreddits or Twitter people with high signal to noise ratios.
Now, Reddit feels like a lost cause for anything other than consuming endless outrage headlines. r/popular is full of blatant misinformation that could be disproved with a simple Google search or outrage-bait headlines that make every event sound like the end of the world. Even the previously useful subreddits I subscribed to have been inundated with angry, angry people who manage to turn everything into an argument or relate it back to politics somehow.
I have to wonder if TikTok is simply enjoying the early days where the fun, light-hearted content still outweighs the intentionally rage-baity content. There does appear to be vast amounts of misinformation and angry content on TikTok, but it hasn't yet flooded the platform to a degree that it's unavoidable.
I feel like we watched a similar rise and fall of Clubhouse during the pandemic. The early days were full of people with genuine curiosity and good intentions about socializing, but it quickly devolved into lowest common denominator content. I haven't opened Clubhouse for months, but the last time I opened it I remember scrolling through endless "how to get rich" rooms that were keyword stuffing popular terms until I just gave up on the platform altogether.
Maybe TikTok's algorithm and model can stave off the Eternal September problem, but I feel like it's only a matter of time until the signal to noise ratio drops below most people's thresholds for decent content.