I agree. I've been using Reddit heavily for 15 years and it's almost unbearable now. Whatever shred of credibility it had at the beginning is being intentionally destroyed to drive shareholder value. Sadly its decline is happening in tandem with Google's decline, meaning that Reddit is one of the last places to find real feedback from real people about a wide range of products, services, and topics.

We really need some decent alternatives, to lots of services.

Interesting. I’ve only ever used Reddit for like diy, maker type subreddits and those are pretty hard to fake. Between Reddit and twitter, it sounds like we are being manipulated to the moon and back.

Can someone create a Reddit where posts are videos instead of text? The community could downvote people hiding their faces if those chose. In the age of deepfakes would that even solve the problem?

You mean... YouTube?

TikTok?

I'd assume that niche subreddits are probably fine, but any that have frontpaged are probably laden with bots

That's why I've nuked all my accounts, and I find the comment sections nearly unbearable. Even when I more or less agree with the bots, it is just useless commentary.

The threads on Ukraine are particularly bad since its just a bunch of bots and kids trying to meme and be clever and edgy about how Russia sucks, which isn't actually useful discourse or information, even if you sort of agree with it.

What about HN then? This thread looks full of anti-Reddit "bots" to me…

nah this thread is just bots, reddit is very single ideological trash. it has the illusion of discourse with only a single verdict ( in almost every sub ). The amazing amount of people who have no idea about Eastern politics instantly becoming ^experts^ is dumbfounding.