As someone who has been using reddit and frequenting r/all for over 10 years orso, I dont know what you are talking about. Either make you point, or just don't make such comments. They add nothing.

I think one could argue that your comment adds much less to the conversation. It's basically just "you're wrong, because I said so."

Maybe - since you have a decade of material to draw from - you could offer a counter-example? I think that would be more conducive to discussion than "don't make such comments."

It's far more than that. The OP said "you know exactly what" - and the comment disproved that, by not "knowing exactly what". Also, how is the comment supposed to refute a negative? A negative that wasn't even a claim to begin with but rather a vague gesture towards some conspiracy (?).

And I am refuting the refutation by "knowing exactly what". Turtles all the way down.

Do you see how silly this is yet? The comment you are defending is - logically - about as valid as not saying anything at all, which is exactly what they told the OP to do.

How can you offer a counter example to such a vague claim?

With a specific claim demonstrating a contrary phenomenon, one would think. "Vague claims" aren't some rhetorical ace-in-the-hole. They can be argued against, presumably better than "you're wrong, and you should feel bad."

Mine's older than yours and I don't know what you mean, the DNC targeted reddit? Dramatic shift? Reddit started far left (being focused on science and tech) even horse-shoeing to the point where it attracted a big Ron Paul fan base. There was an r/obama before users could make subreddits.

It's been heading right or center-right ever since the_donald (2015), r/conservative, etc have gotten so huge, if there's been any political shift.

Do you really think you'd regularly see white supremacist content on reddit in 2006 as often as you do now?

They're referring to Correct the Record, which flooded the site with fake accounts to push narratives that supported the US Democatic party.

It was really obvious when something unexpected happened, like that video of Hilary collapsing and having to be pushed into a vehicle during the presidential campaign - for several hours the sockpuppet accounts didn't know what to say so comments from regular users started making it to the top again.

(Quick edit, had the wrong organization in mind before)

Thanks for citing something! I've been a casual Reddit user since ~2008 and felt very lost in this discussion.

In case anyone is in the same boat as me, heres an article on the subject: https://www.thedailybeast.com/hillary-pac-spends-dollar1-mil...

That was an SPAC in 2016, OP said "the night of the DNC primary in 2015." I was there for the CTR debacle, the SPAC hasn't existed since 2016(?), do you think they're still funding accounts?

The DNC primaries started in early 2016, so they're definitely misremembering part of the timeline. If we go by "primaries" and not "2015", then they probably are remembering CTR - it lines up almost exactly to when they started.

And yeah, it's probably not them but it definitely feels like something is still going on. In the Chicago subreddit, for example, on anything that touches a politically-charged topic, the comments and votes will be exactly opposite what they might be on a different day.

>It was really obvious when something unexpected happened, like that video of Hilary collapsing and having to be pushed into a vehicle during the presidential campaign - for several hours the sockpuppet accounts didn't know what to say so comments from regular users started making it to the top again.

Same thing happened after Trump's 2016 election win. For a day or two, it was possible to post something non-leftist to /r/politics without having it be mercilessly downvoted; as if the shills were awaiting orders.

> It's been heading right or center-right ever since the_donald (2015), r/conservative, etc have gotten so huge, if there's been any political shift.

Wait - you seriously and unironically believe reddit has become _more_ rightwing in the past 7 years?

I'm not who you're replying to, but this has been my experience in some communities I enjoy while I've had the opposite experience in others.

For example, I used to love /r/conspiracy which is now rather overrun with a particular kind of conspiracy theorist and I no longer feel welcome.

Speaking from the gut I'd say more communities have slid to the left than the right, but nearly all of my communities have been more politicized and it reduces the amount I use the service considerably.

My account is 10 years old. I have noticed no shift. But I do not subscribe to any of the popular subreddits, I only subscribe to niche subs, which is clearly the best way to use the site and avoids the issue of political nonsense getting in the way of enjoyable conversation.

/r/politics has definitely shifted from “OMG Ron Paul It’s Happening Narwhal Bacon!!!111!!” to dominated by progressives, but I think you’re seeing it through rose tinted glasses. After all, /r/atheism was also a default sub.

/r/all is populist as ever, but Reddit as a whole has simply fragmented. For politics specifically, non-progressives just live outside of /r/politics. Neoliberals tended to hang out in /r/political discussion, Trump supporters in /r/the_donald, neoconservatives in /r/tuesday, etc.

I use Reddit long term and /r/all was always bad and you should find your subreddits to care for.

I have been browsing /r/all for years, but I aggressively filter subreddits out that hold no interest for me. It allows /r/all to be semi-curated content for me, while I still will see something that breaks containment from the niche subreddits.

I don't feel that this makes reddit a great news source or anything - but it does make it palatable entertainment.

I do this same thing, it has worked really well. I browse the all subreddit and aggressively block/filter subreddits that are of no interest, then smaller subreddits start bubbling up and all becomes relatively good for finding new content actually. Blocking the main default subreddits and subreddits where they just keep posting memes and all subreddits that have anything to do with gaming or new games gets you like 80% of the way there. It's nice seeing small subreddits on all after that curation.

And hope it does not get quarantined then disappeared? No thanks.

Has this happened to you ever? I’ve been on reddit for 10 years, and this never happened to me.

I've also been on reddit for more than 10 years and it's also never happened to me, but I know what they're talking about. Let's not pretend like it doesn't happen.

I have seen it happen through complaints reaching the all subreddit. However it only seemed to happen to subreddits that were peddling deep hatred against outgroups like people of color, overweight people, or were just vile. Your comment makes it seem like any given subreddit is in danger of quarantining, but anecdotally that doesn't seem to be the case. However, I have an open mind: would you give me an example of a subreddit that was otherwise innocuous yet got quarantined?

Though technically it wasn't banned, r/star_trek recently got locked from having new posts, and only just the other day became unlocked because the mod agreed to not allow discussion related to r/startrek.

Wait, huh???

r/startrek, without the underscore, is the official Star Trek community. r/star_trek is an alternative community created because r/startrek is very hostile to anyone who doesn't just slobber over anything Star Trek.

So people would join the alternative community and bring up why they got banned on the official one, or how people were being ridiculous in general on the official one.

But I don't buy that there was any meaningful amount of brigading that was happening. I think the official community, being its pious self, didn't like that people were exposing the mods for being arbitrary and condescending, or that anyone was exposing the likely possibility that they were highly controlled by ViacomCBS.

When it got locked, for all intents and purposes it was banned, if not temporarily.

/r/chapotraphouse wasn't any worse then say /r/conservative or /r/politics, but it got banned.

/r/DarkNetMarkets. Just for discussing DNMs, AFAIK.

/r/shoplifting

/r/stealing

/r/beertrade: for trading beers

/r/gundeals for a bit. Several other gun buying subs are still banned.

/r/fakeid

/r/scotchswap: for trading Scotches

/r/cigarmarket

There's more, too.

/r/chapotraphouse was calling for death on people on the reg with the full support of their moderators. That's why they got banned.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitPoliticsSays/comments/9m30os/rc...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitPoliticsSays/comments/bmtdqb/ch...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitPoliticsSays/comments/c66x0w/1_...

They cracked down on the baseball thing way before they got banned though; after they got quarantined. Yeah, they were saying killing slaveowners is good, but who doesn't think that? It's what the American Civil War was. It's self-defense, and no worse then everyone on reddit that is cheering for Ukraine to win the war against Russia (by killing Russian soldiers) or all the people that said what Kyle Rittenhouse did was good, or countless other calls for violence that occur on all types of subreddits.

>They cracked down on the baseball thing way before they got banned though; after they got quarantined.

And the_donald literally disallowed submissions for months before being banned. When reddit has a sub in their sights, they will find a reason.

This defense falls apart once you remember that this is a pro-communist subreddit that believes 'wage slavery' is a thing. And besides, this is hardly the only instance where content that breaks the sitewide rules was left up by the mods even after being reported.

IMO Chapo was banned as a misguided attempt at balance for banning /r/The_Donald, though it's not like they weren't an unruly bunch. Calls for violence weren't exactly unheard of there, ironic or not.

The rest of those are just banning discussions of illegal activity. Seems like a reasonable policy to me.

Trading beer and scotch isn't illegal, is it though? Neither is buying guns, or visiting/discussing dark net markets.

And it's not like there aren't thousands of other subs that discuss illegal activity. They haven't banned all the drug subs, or the hacking subs, etc. Pretty much any illegal activity you can still find subs for it. /r/streetracing, /r/piracy, etc.

> IMO Chapo was banned as an attempt at balance for the misguided banning of /r/The_Donald

FTFY

Nah. If anything that subreddit was kept around for way too long in a misguided attempt to not appear biased.

/r/bigchungus (pictures of fat Bugs Bunny? wha?)

/r/mgtow

2balkan4u was nothing but making fun of the ingroup for the atrocities and other bullshit their contries were pulling

r/watchpeopledie, despite the horrible name it is a very "educational" sub that helped me become painfully aware of my mortality and in many cases helped me become much more aware of my surroundings when I cross the streets, when I'm around elevators and big machinery and so on.

the most recently banned subreddit to my knowledge was about disagreement with public policy for covid lockdowns. the ability to protest public policy is essential to a functioning democracy.

innocuous to thee but not to meee

Instead of being glib, take the challenge: name a subreddit that got quarantined that you think shouldn't have been.

/r/2balkan4you (banned, not even quarantined)

I also know it happens. And I'm also mostly like "Yeah, that makes sense".

X: They keep banning my favorite subreddits

Y: Like /r/programming?

X: No, not that one

Y: /r/movies?

X: No

Y: /r/lego?

X: No

Y: /r/nfl?

X: No

Y: Well, which ones?

X: /r/letsmockminoritiesanddisabledpeople

The concern is with the subs, users (including mods), and behaviors that are miraculously exempted.

For instance, reddit has a raging hardon for Sinophobia, but Asians in general aren't treated as a protected human class. Incredibly vile, vitriolic content and comments get huge acclaim as long as you frame anything Asian as being tacitly un-American.

Look through the Olympic speed skater threads, or the recent "the result of Chinese lock down policies" video that's just a compilation of Asian people committing suicide, totally unrelated to lock downs.

I get nobody wants to feel like they're surrounded by closet xenophobes and ethnopurists, but all it takes is seeing the collective blind-spot in "remember Russian people are innocent, it's just Putin we hate!" versus "makes sense, Chinese are all freedomless brainwashed moral aliens" to drive home how rotten it is.

This is just one example. Terrible behavior by megamods going unacknowledged and unaddressed weakens the platform, and reddit stoking the tribalism that makes people feel like they're safe and powerful there lends itself to harmful extremism. It's like nationalism is okay as long as it's not white nationalism.

Right but the solution isn't to go backwards and say, "well we think it's fine to be xenophobic to the Chinese and so to be consistent we should allow xenophobia across the board," that would be absurd. It should really go the other way and I think you would get a whole lot of support for it.

> It's like nationalism is okay as long as it's not white nationalism.

I think the issue is because "white" isn't really a race, nobody is trying to cancel someone proud of their Polish heritage. Black ended up becoming a de-facto race to deal with the descendants of slaves who had their ancestry erased so they're not really comparable. I can only speak to the US but "white nationalism" (hell even "American nationalism") just became the rallying cry for white supremacists. Which sucks for anyone who was benignly proud to be an American but this is just the reality we have to deal with. It's political suicide to run on "I'm racist and proud" anymore so we're surrounded by dogwhistles and people organizing under informal banners and "you know what I mean wink" type policy.

> "remember Russian people are innocent, it's just Putin we hate!"

That's pretty much gone in the comments section on r/politics.

The vitriol directed against Russians is often over the top now.

As someone who remembers the hatred towards Russians by the American Right during the 80s that is fairly disturbing to me.

Of course the Hacker News threads which try to play down the consequences of a nuclear exchange with Russia are probably worse.

I'm not sure when it started, probably around Trump's time but the Sinophobia on reddit is becoming unbearable. Any random "China bad" thread is upvoted to the sky even with sketchy or non-existent sources, and anyone expressing skepticism or asking for source in the comment is immediately personally attacked and called names like tankie/50c army/Chinese bot/etc. Unlike HN, when it comes to politics everyone on reddit seems to immediately assume bad faith when discussing with someone who doesn't agree with your political view.

This is a “razors in candy” kind of problem.

Disagree. Reddit is not a safe place for political movements, minority groups, etc, for this reason

Which minorities

How do you discover subreddits if not by browsing /all? I mean I for one don't know what I'm missing.

This is one way: https://old.reddit.com/reddits/

Another is subreddit search engines like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22823109

Just to note, some subreddits decide not to appear on /r/all, so even there you're missing stuff.

One of my favorite ways of discovering niche content has been browsing /r/all/gilded and taking a look at the variety of highlights throughout the site that never make it to the front page or other kinds of publicity.

I dug in there one time and found a fascinating obituary for a user on a subreddit for people living with addiction -- full of some touchingly personal and weirdly public stories. Following the user's profile from there taught me about the wild world of the "opiate roll call" subreddit (a thinly veiled Craigslist for drugs) which was at the time flourishing. Fascinating stuff.

> browsing /r/all/gilded

These days that awards are free, that's just a list of popular things, not a list of cool things. The major subreddits can have a selfie posted that gets a dozen awards.

/r/chonkers is the holy grail of reddit. I was sad it took me 10 years to find that subreddit

How on earth is that animal abuse subreddit not banned? Those animals deserve a better life, not diabetes for the sake of memes.

What is wrong with you chaosbutters.

This has been a theme on reddit since comments were introduced.

The largest shift in the site was something 12-14 years ago when they redesigned the site to have thumbnails.

This brought people to the site for images instead of content. That was absolutely the original torpedo.

It made the site much more popular, but the quality tanked fast, and has continued since due to having to cater to the lowest common denominator of millions of people.

The biggest change came after the migration from Digg, which would have been about 5 years prior.

the_donald brought a lot of a younger users and white supremacists. I haven't seen a DNC-related reddit conspiracy before though. Certainly no noticeable shift that night.

>I haven't seen a DNC-related reddit conspiracy before though.

What? You haven't noticed social media marketing on reddit?

I've never heard someone say "the night of the DNC primary in 2015 there was a dramatic shift." Not sure what your comment about ads is related to.

The digg exodus was nothing, just a bunch of group A basement dwellers moving in with group B basement dwellers. At the time the average person still had no idea what reddit or digg was.

The whole thing was just internal internet geek culture drama.

No, it changed reddit from having interesting content and mostly useful constructive commentary to being full of memes and jokes (like Digg). Sure there were pun threads before, but you didn't have to custom tailor the front page to keep it from being complete shit.

I can only recommend aggressively blocking popular subs, ones that are managed by the big mods, and any that have even one political thread that gets a suspicious amount of votes. All actually becomes a source of new interesting content that way.

I tried this but quickly hit a limit on the number of subs you can block. It is fairly low, maybe a couple hundred. There are a lot more big, low quality subs than that.

Do you use RES? I don't think there is a limit with RES.

I wonder if your comment is an instance of the Eternal September effect [0]. The "quality" of a website is such an intangible and immeasurable thing, it's more or less impossible to say, in aggregate, if something has objectively gotten worse, especially considering the fact that Reddit has grown exponentially more popular.

At the very least, there's a distinct lack of self awareness of how small your one opinion is, to the sea of overall opinions. "Has gotten worse" vs "I've grown to like it less" are very different statements; one externalizes the decline, eschews your role and responsibility for your own opinion, and the other owns up to the reality that something my be worse "for you" while getting better for many, many others.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

r/t_d basically pulled every single trick in the book to frontpage their content constantly.

However I think that no matter what they (reddit) would have had their hand forced eventually. The site has grown massively since 2015.

It was really just one trick, which was to immediately sticky select new posts. Those posts would garner large amounts of upvotes immediately by virtue of being stickied at the top of a subreddit where most users did not browse reddit overall but rather just browsed the sub. Reddit's algorithm favors posts that really take off with lots of votes right away, so as a consequence The_Donald's posts were constantly making r/all.

> It was really just one trick, which was to immediately sticky select new posts.

and (imo) if they were really wanting to fix this trick they would have just made it so something that was ever stickied couldn't show up on /r/all. Instead they did what (to me) was basically a complete change of their algorithm with very slow changes to placement.

I can’t speak to that timeline but I’ll add that I have a use-hate relationship with Reddit. It’s a source of great information and misinformation, caring and callousness.

I don't think it was related to that at all - I think it was just around that time that Reddit also started to really become more mainstream popular. Anytime a forum or sub forum grows in size you end up with a lot more crap to sift through. And with greater number of users also of course comes greater numbers of bots / fake / shill accounts as well.

I remember early on Reddit when Ron Paul was a big deal. Not really sure it went downhill once that got swamped.

>Sometime around the night of the DNC primary in 2015 there was a dramatic shift in the content on Reddit. If you were a frequent visitor of the homepage and /all at the time, you will know exactly what I am referring to.

Indeed.

It's especially visible when the effect temporarily abates. After Trump's 2016 election win, for a day or two, it was possible to post something non-leftist to /r/politics without having it be mercilessly downvoted; as if the shills were awaiting orders.

Republicans have used Russian help to spread disinformation against Democrats.

Are you saying the DNC primary is to blame for reddit's content policies?

I don't know if that's exactly the claim they are making, but I can certainly attest to their timeline. It was a day-night shift from "Bernie or Bust" to "Eww Bernie Bros are gross". Putting my own politics aside, I was more shocked by the sudden, very drastic shift in narrative. It's really hard to believe that it was organic. It wasn't even a "maybe we should support Clinton now that Bernie is out" narrative, which would have been more believable. It was a "Bernie supporters are sexist" narrative.

In the months leading up to the DNC primary, reddit was a battleground between Correct the Record[1] and /r/The_Donald. After the primary, it felt like every post on left-wing subs was inline with the narratives that CTR had been pushing for months. Before the primary, there was quite a bit of resistance to CTR, even from the left-wingers. That evaporated over a single night.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record