Smartphones are an interesting point and would definitely explain the shortness of comments (personally I never write Reddit comments from my phone so it's not something I thought of). But this still doesn't explain why short and empty comments rise to the top while contrarian but in-depth comments get downvote buried.

Even in this comments section, the most insightful top-level comment reply I've gotten as I write this is literally at the bottom: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30674104 , while the second-highest comment is "This is just an article by a guy with bad opinions upset others don't agree with his bad opinions."

the point is, reddit used to be a place where dorks who sat down with a PC or laptop with the intent of using the internet hung out, just like everywhere else on the internet. now reddit, like all of the internet, is something anyone can casually access from the supercomputer in their pocket. this changes the demographics and usage patterns, and therefore target audience and platform expectations, massively.

> it was not this way in the past

There was an /r/obama before users could make subreddits. It was certainly this way in the past, but more porn.

You admittedly didn't know that, and had to post a source you Googled in a panic, which says:

> There may have been a few more subreddits created by other employees as well but I’m not sure. Basically they would all have been things of personal interest to us.

Which supports that idea.

Well, subreddits were initially a way to move content off the main page, not necessarily to indulge it. So the first subreddit was r/nsfw followed by r/programming and r/politics.

I can't find anything that says r/obama was an early Reddit-created subreddit, but if it was, then they would have done it to have less Obama content on the homepage rather than to celebrate Obama.

Source: https://www.quora.com/What-were-the-first-subreddits-and-how...

Oh so you're just a jerk. Sorry I engaged.

Sorry if I came off that way, make sure to flag me. A big draw of the site was that it was so focused on politics, science and programming; if you'd been a regular user you just wouldn't debate that, I don't know how else to put it.

It's like saying "I miss the early days when Truth Social wasn't so partisan."

You don't seem to know much about the site's history, and just called me a "jerk," I guess that passes for "engagement."

I've been on Reddit from the beginning, and absolutely nothing I said contradicts me believing it was very politics/programming heavy from the start. Like I said, Reddit at the time believed there was too much politics/programming, and that's why they created subreddits.

You're putting words in my mouth and then being condescending. That's why you got downvoted and flagged (not by me, for the record).

You can look me up on Reddit; I use the same name (which happens to be my real name) on both. I created the r/sanfrancisco subreddit (among others) and my cake day is within the first year of Reddit's launch.

Erp, sorry, you already dismissed me as "just a jerk" when I gave you a chance to reply. I'd read what you wrote, but I don't want you to regret "engaging" again.

there's a difference between "eager support/celebration of Barack Obama around the time of his election" (Digg was the exact same way! most of the internet was, at the time!) and "go to reddit.com while not logged in to see who you're supposed to hate today and what you're supposed to now believe if you're a follower of the Democratic Party line, which you had better be, if you're using this website" which is what it evokes today.

There is, and reddit has always been the former. If you just joined in the last 5 years maybe you'd be surprised to learn.

Digg was not the exact same way; reddit in contrast had a huge Ron Paul audience (pretty much everything but mainstream republicans), I was surprised he didn't have a subreddit.

I used to use reddit heavily from 2008–2016. never unsubbed from the default subreddits as I used the front page as a "what is everyone talking about today" rather than a curated list of what I wanted to see. it was not as blatantly propagandistic as it is today back then. reddit was definitely more pro-Ron Paul than Digg but it was never anti-Obama by any measure, quite the opposite. the political spirit of reddit in 2008 was "let's get this young cool black senator to be the First Black President! but also Ron Paul seems to be right about a lot of stuff, like auditing/ending the federal reserve. but it's OK that I think he's cool despite him being a Republican and me being a Democrat, because he's definitely not like other Republicans, both in rhetoric and in how he votes."

now reddit hates Rand Paul saying and doing the same things his father did, because they've bought into the Democratic Party line so hard that anything "right of" whoever the current (D) main characters are, is basically an evil Russian nazi bigot just like the rest of the Republicans (and Tulsi Gabbard, apparently, judging by the #1 story today).

the front page of reddit was never like some truly open marketplace of ideas where every political opinion was given equal treatment and consideration or anything but it was a lot more genuine and a lot less blatantly following party propaganda lines, that's for damn sure.

You're talking about the site that hosted the biggest hugbox for republicans on the internet before it got banned (the_donald). /r/conservative is 50k shy of a million users. White supremacist reddits are a problem now.

Rand Paul was one of Trump's top supporters in the senate during and after his presidency. His ideals are very different than his father's.

Part of my point is that Reddit's platform leads to intense polarization, which could be alleviated by improving their platform. The default subreddits are hyper-Democrat (eg. to the point where dissent of COVID-19 restrictions was outright banned last year in many subreddits), and the conservative subreddits are hyper polarized in the same way in the opposite direction.

I think many just discuss this as if it's some inevitable human trends or feature of the internet, but I disagree. If platforms did better to reward higher quality discussion and a variety of viewpoints, then maybe there never would've been a /r/the_donald in the extreme form there was.

>Reddit's platform leads to intense polarization

And how is HN not exactly the same in that regard? Any system that distills approval or disapproval down to an upvote and a downvote (like/dislike, thumbs up/thumbs down, love/hate, etc.) is going to inherently generate polarization for any topic. The difference is that you don't come to HN for political takes but it's just as bad as reddit for people spouting incorrect technical information and techno-political opinions.

> His ideals are very different than his father's.

would you care to elaborate on this point? I don't see it and instead it seems that the sentence before this one, along with the general "if he's not a Democrat and he opposes Democrat talking points then we hate him" reddit consensus better explains the current reddit attitude toward Rand Paul than a supposed generational change in ideals between the Pauls. I don't see reddit eagerly claiming to support Ron Paul anymore, anyway.