My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.

The last 2-3 years this issue just became worse and worse.

Reddit is fantastic for memes though. There are some hilarious subreddits out there. But I rarely engage, just consume.

The reason for deliberately antagonizing them, and eventually banning them, was that /r/The_Donald's moderators were directly telling their membership to upvote specific posts so they'd rocket to the front page. "Inorganic results", "vote manipulation", "gaming the algorithm", whatever you'd like to call it.

So the admins had a reason to ban it, even if no doubt they and most of Reddit's users saw Trump supporters as "the enemy".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Prominence_on_Red...

Also, as this article has reminded me... 'member that time Spez admitted that he invisibly edited users' comments?

https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...

There would need to be extensive evidence to convince me that the subreddit wasn't just botted. Threads would get thousands of posts extremely quickly, and there would sometimes be only a handful of comments. I don't really believe organic users were spending their free time refreshing "new" just in case a new post was made that required an immediate upvote.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/4fh8s9/this...

Normal humans tend to upvote things that are already upvoted. But normal humans don't tend to look at the incoming stream of posts.

Ordinary T_D users were refreshing the subreddit's front page. Mods stickied the posts they wanted to rocket to the top. This got them past the hurdle where very few people look at /new to give those all-important first few upvotes. Ordinary T_D users upvoted the stickied posts. The mods then unstickied them less than an hour later, because now they're "organically" at the top of T_D, and the upvotes continued to pile in, rocketing the post to /r/all

Meanwhile, all the other subreddits weren't playing this game, so their users votes were split across multiple posts on their subreddit's front page. And mods of other subs use sticked posts for administrative notices, which are worded as such and tend not to get upvoted much... but if you were to sticky a normal post, users would upvote it. But stickied posts aren't eligible for /r/all... unless you unsticky them. Oops! T_D successfully gamed that oversight.

EDIT1: Also... as the comments in the link above reminds me; it used to be that any post could be stickied, e.g. normal link posts. It wasn't necessarily clear that they were stickied posts. What changed after the T_D manipulation is that sticky posts were renamed "Administrative Notes" and had to be text posts and had to be coloured differently from normal posts. Before that change, they weren't distinguished that way. Now perhaps the subterfuge by mods makes more sense?

EDIT2: WIRED's postmortem on T_D - it was cunning mods, not bots.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-hate-fueled-rise-of-rthe-don...

    T_D’s moderators were looking for a way to game the system and force T_D onto r/all every day.

    The mods realized that a key lay in the “sticky” system, by which moderators could pin a post at the top of their subreddit indefinitely. The system was meant for announcements, rule changes, upcoming events, and other minutia of day-to-day Redditing. But any thread could be stickied, and stickied threads behaved the same way that any other Reddit thread did: They accrued points by vote, and more points boosted the thread closer to the top of the page. This didn’t typically matter, since a stickied thread was by definition artificially held at the top of its subreddit already. But the mods weren’t trying to make threads visible on The_Donald. They wanted to boost them onto r/all.

    T_D’s moderators began to sticky threads unrelated to their rules or announcements. Instead, they promoted especially provocative user-created threads. This tactic quickly proved effective. Before long, T_D was elevating a post or two onto r/all day after day.

    Another T_D mod, Alex, says the team kept in close touch not only with which threads were successful, but also how mods could encourage their users to vote on stickied threads and drive them higher in Reddit’s r/all rankings. “We trained our subscribers to upvote and comment in every thread,” Alex says. “That is how we originally gamed the algorithm.” Jessie, a third mod, says T_D’s mods made “repetitive requests” to the user base to vote and boost threads. They used memes, gifs, and jokes to push users to act. It worked.

On the other hand, there aren't simple technological fixes to social problems. T_D's mods remained tricksy and continued to work their userbase to upvote and focus - in ways which didn't breach the sitewide rules on manipulation - and still kept hitting /r/all

But yeah, using the sticky system to force posts to top of mind was super effective back then. It's all coming back.

Flaired only threads, so many bans and and hundreds of deleted posts on your average thread for anything against he MAGA party line.

You see the same phenomena on /r/all, which isn't personalized.

I deleted my account ages ago to break my own habit.

You have to remember that there was some pretty nutso tariff news right about the same time, not that strange for it to be highly represented on the front page.

That's not the whole truth. Subreddit Moderation is the key point that's vulnerable to abuse. I block all political subreddits. My blocklist has 120 entries. 10 of those are of inherent political nature. The rest is just like /r/pics - enshittified rage bait about Trump.

Then it returned with a vengeance.

A consequence of years of reddit allowing its mods to shadow ban centrist voices.

It’s hard to see how reddit escapes this mess. They need more normal people and less political zealots, but the site is already so far down the echo chamber path that its overt political partisanship scares off potential new normal users from participating.

I don't see why they would. Rage drives engagement, and they just got the number one rage inducing factor back into public office for the next 4 years. This form of engagement also works better on progressives I think.

I think Kamala actually did have the lead in Reddit's demographics.

So much anti-Kamala and pro-Trump stuff in the communities that are supposed to be strong for her.

That Kamala did as well as she did was really shocking to me. I mean it wasn't close, but Kamala couldn't even make past the very first debate in 2020 and her list of accomplishments is basically nothing. I never met anyone in real life with an actual compelling or supportive argument for her. At best it was "she's not Trump".

Taking Biden out and having no primary is probably the worst thing Democrats could have done.

I'd argue the 15 years of identity politics that both led to Harris as VP and prevented them from being able to commit the faux paux of possibly passing her up by letting their constituents decide if they liked her was their worst decision.

Using the 1/9/90 split [0] for creators/commenters/readers, it seems farfetched to suggest that reddit accounts (which benefits readers making an account to curate subreddit subscriptions) can't follow this pattern where many legitimate human users do not comment often.

[0] "The 1% Rule", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record

In my experience, Reddit can be an okay place for niche hobbies until the reddit becomes semi-popular. Then it's a lost cause for anyone but newbies posting the same question every day and old timers who take pleasure in yelling at them.

Any real discussion is drowned out so the average post now is "bought these, new to the hobby, what do I do with them?".

The meshtastic sub is a good example of that. People buying hobbyist hardware, without doing any research. They probably saw some youtube video, hit the amazon "buy", then when it arrived, they're stumped.

Post a photo of your new gizmo: 300 upvotes. Video of you using your widget: 4 votes.

And in subreddits dedicated to actually making things, it's just hustling hustling hustling. With a small percentage of self-help posts like "how I spent 4 years in my boring-ass generic video game and nobody wanted it".

This is exactly what happened to all of the hobby reddits I enjoyed.

Any useful discussion was crowded out by 10 posts per week (or day) of people posting their newest purchase or asking a question that had been answered 1000 times already.

The useful Subreddits have mods who come down hard on these posts. They don’t proliferate as much if people don’t see them everywhere. It’s a lot of work for mods though.

A really great (awful) example of this that I saw was on the typewriters subreddit (which is already 90% people posting pictures of the same 5 or so overhyped machines):

In the 1950s, Royal used to give out gold typewriters as part of a writing contest.[0] I saw one of these come up on Goodwill’s auction site, saved screenshots for my records and followed it closely, since I knew bids would get really stupid really fast. Sure enough, winning bid was around $1500.

About two weeks after the auction ended (about the time Goodwill’s very slow shipping takes), I saw it pop up on the subreddit, exact machine, identical scratches, blemishes, and all to the one I had screenshots of. The post title? “Found this at my local thrift store for $50. How’d I do?”

That was enough to finally make my delete my account and seriously question anyone who thinks Reddit is actually good for niche hobbies.[1]

[0]https://www.antikeychop.com/gold-royal-quiet-de-luxe-typewri...

[1] Well, that and the fact that and the fact that I was probably going to lose my mind if I earnestly gave detailed advice on repairing a machine I had personally stripped and reassembled, only for someone to get upvoted to the top for posting a confident pseudo answer about some mechanism—that may or may not even exist in that machine—that they only faintly understood from a general YouTube video that they only half watched.

It takes a lot of effort to moderate a subreddit. People will post stuff all day, in large volumes.

Who's going to be willing to do that? Sure, some will just be nice people with a ton of free time, but many will definitely be political activists (or even state actors at this point) who have something to promote.

This. On forums you recognize members by their funny avatars and the hyper specific advice that they have (useful or otherwise). Stickied posts like "timbit2's Guide to Vintage Frobulators" or "New to Frobs? Not Sure Where to Start? READ" abound. There are usually decades of easily-searchable posts accumulated. People reply to your threads helpfully. The marketplace forums abound with well-cared-for gear.

On Reddit you get a lot of beauty shots and question posts with replies like "bro just get the new Vinculum x Chadbert420 frobber. Shit is [fire emojis]". There's usually a woefully out-of-date wiki or sticky that you can only access from one interface or another. There's no sense of community, just upvotes of pictures for clout.

Of course these are contrived straw men versions of their respective communities but in my experience they're correct more often than not. I have been dipping my toe into various Discords that seem to have a better sense of community but Discord doesn't seem to lend itself to longer-form content as forums do... I wonder whether this is something the Discord platform could be augmented to facilitate.

Now I think that it's a perverse incentive that requires very heavy handed moderation to not suck (AKA more free labor), and that time decaying posts can discourage quality, in-depth discussions.

Corollary: necroing forum threads isn't necessarily bad.

I've always agreed with this. It was usually considered bad etiquette at best on forums, but I never really understood why.

So what changed or what makes this place different? I would argue it's not the forum software but rather run differently, not placing in charge of every subreddit a cabal of unemployed fringe lunatics wielding power and waging war against their users because it's all they have.

Or maybe the forum software does suck and some just naturally migrated to a text-only low-bandwidth version of Reddit?

It's an interesting question. Primarily, I think it's because HN doesn't allow you to downvote instantly or even after a lengthy period of time. I think it's tied to total karma, but someone would have to provide more information there. Regardless, that single change probably makes a big difference.

Compared to Reddit, I've had some comments go into the tens of negative karma points within five minutes of posting. It wasn't because it was low quality, but because it wasn't the "correct" view to have in whatever subreddit I was engaging in. The downvoting there is practically militant.

However, as someone who usually holds a minority view on HN, I don't think the system here is perfect either. Usually an echo chamber forms because the dissidents don't last long and leave. If you reward the ones that stay the longest with downvote capabilities, it would explain my general experience quite well. But again, it's nothing compared to Reddit.

Note: I recognize this is a conversation on karma, which has a rule associated with it, but I hope we can make an exception here given it's a good faith discussion between Reddit/HN :)

According to https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented "After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment."

I often wonder whether "limited downvotes" scheme would work: (let's say) 30 downvotes per 24h are free to use and after that each downvote decreases your karma by 1.

There’s several natural filters that promote healthy communities - Highly informed users, Active mods, Small community sizes, “Get stuff done” type conversations. In essence, communities where it’s easy to identify BS, and discourage navel gazing, have high signal to noise ratios. They are actively hostile to lazy posting.

A good example of this type of community is r/badeconomics, or was the last I checked, and askhistorians.

A separate note, There’s a 2024 paper that showed that that estimated that young adults spent a smaller portion their time online on high cognitive load reading. A majority of the time would be spent on “timepass” content.

Mainly it's niche/less popular. There is less of an incentive for outside interests to care.

Not having any real way for the audience to expand (there is only one "subreddit") definitely helps with that.

Speaking of which, does anyone know if there are any good articles/documentaries/exposés on reddit moderators? I really just want to know what one is like.

I dislike the voting mechanism here. It incentivises me to optimize my posting to things that will maximise the votes, rather than things I think will add value to the community, even if it's controversial.

On a forum, if I say something stupid/against-the-grain, I am called out by the forum members, or we have a debate about it. On HN and on reddit, I'm downvoted into oblivion with very little in the way of any discussion that helps me learn and improve.

The only thing that makes HN better than reddit for me is the community of like-minded people, a general respect for the rules, and the fact that here we have fantastic moderators.

But I maintain that the underlying _system_ that is managing discourse here is flawed in it's design. I wonder what HN would look like if voting was abolished, and /active was the homepage, where the most actively discussed posts are the ones that filter to the top of the list.

Forums were great too, but reddit made it really easy to get access to new niches quickly. Without having to join a new site, learn the forum slang and etiquette, etc.

Reddit is awful now though. IDK what the alternative is either. I'm in a few discords and Facebook groups that cover most topics but they both offer a much poorer user experience imo.

I would not describe the sub as toxic or anything, but it's literally impossible to get a dissenting opinion across on Reddit. Other hobby subs were the same.

Every single time I mentioned an opinion differing from the "hive-mind" consensus it was downvoted to hell, with no responses, counter arguments or anything resembling discussion. I would have liked to trade experiences but that's not possible.

While at the same time some of the other posters giving advice freely admit they don't actually have experience with what is discussed and are just repeating older posts.

There is no real value in that, and nowadays you can get mostly the same experience by just asking ChatGPT. Both have no clue and no real opinion of their own when it comes to details.

I take part in a few forums now, and it's a breath of fresh air. Much better experience and a lot more personal as well.

I'd propose having a separate UI for users to agree/disagree, vs. for users to flag rule breaking posts, like spam, flamebait, insults and so on. The agree/disagree count would just display a vanity number, but the rule-breaking UI would actually downweight the article or comment. You could audit occasionally and remove voting privileges from people abusing the rule-breaking UI as a "Mega-disagree."

But it isn't worth reading anything else anymore.

I really doubt most of it is astoturfing. You can find bot accounts, obviously. However, the Reddit hivemind has a very intense echo chamber.

Everyone learns very quickly that if you write something that doesn't match the popular opinion of Reddit, you're going to get downvoted quickly. Strike a nerve and you'll even get angry private messages or people going through your post history and trying to extend their argument into old comments.

Large forums have always been like this. You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight. You just can't compete with someone with infinite free time and a lot of anger to get out. Eventually they all sync up to drive away differing opinions

> You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight.

These people are also masters at toeing the line of forum or subreddit rules when trashing others, constantly baiting people to cross the line in replies and get themselves moderated. It's worse in forums where downvoting isn't available.

There have been discord servers made public where the entire point was to game the reddit algorithm to favor one political candidate.

The number of subreddits that do this is small. Hardly representative of typical Reddit behavior.

Everyone knows by now that /r/conservative isn’t a real subreddit because it’s “flavored users only”.

However, too many people make the leap from “astroturfing exists” to “everything I don’t like is astroturfing” way too quickly. It’s right up there with accusing people you disagree with of using ChatGPT or being paid shills.

The truth is, a lot of subreddits are the way they are because that’s just what Reddit’s user base thinks, not because a shadowy cabal is making them say those things.

I read a post from a former reddit admin a while back that was talking about they managed that. Apparently they had one sticky post each day, and sticky posts are blocked from being on the frontpage but since they'd change the main post each day, once they un-stickied it, it'd immediately get picked up by the algorithm for the frontpage, inadvertently gaming the whole system.

It's just so blatantly, demonstrably, obvious the level of manipulation which was targeted at the sub. Somebody, somewhere, added it to a list of subreddits to be manipulated. But you can't even discuss it there, because how are you going to use a compromised communication channel to communicate about how it's compromised?

The majority of the population seemingly can't even notice that sort of communication manipulation, it's gotten so sophisticated. Bot accounts used to be much easier to detect, now they all have very cleverly built-up account history and posts that are near indistinguishable from humans. And of course not all manipulation is bots/AI, there's coordinated shill/sockpuppet/astroturf campaigns with real people being tasked with doing the manipulation.

The smart people have already left and gone on to the next place, which will never be allowed to grow large enough or significant enough without the propaganda fire hose eventually being turned on it too. The only way to fix things is a radically different framework for communication.

What do you think that might look like?

But the five vote options (insightful, interesting, funny, off-topic, troll) were _useful_. Having a feed based on the score of votes plus friend bonus, friend-of-a-friend bonus, foe penalty, friend-of-a-foe penalty gave me a super news feed I stuck with for almost a decade.

I could see a more complex voting rule set being helpful. But basically, it was really good until it wasn't, and that was a problem of the people behind the scenes there, and not the system itself.

HackerNews is comment driven, but does a decent job of facilitating discussions - but not particularly deeply. Reddit is similar. Forums are much more amenable to linear, deep, discussion between a few parties, but can also facilitate comments. Both have their place on the internet, and I don't think that forums are necessarily the answer to everything, but it feels like a lot of people left those communities to end up in Reddit and that's a shame.

If you reply to an earlier one, the UI will handle it and show a new branch where that conversation started. I'm not a huge fan of typical mailing list web UX and usually view flat, but it's so common that I guess a lot of people like it. My opinion is probably biased from years of using/running forums, so I'm much more used to that UI.

I think newer systems like Discourse will formally track replies to you (versus a new message in the overall thread), while legacy forums like PHPBB usually just quote-reply.

its not that. they realized: a) that folks were filtering out the astroturfed subreddits in /r/all, and b) that r/all's filter list has a hard limit of 100 subreddits. so, by astroturfing >100 subreddits, they can guarantee to their clients that their posts will make the front of r/all for everyone.

But, somehow, partisan posts in one direction always seem to net over 1000 or 2000, yet partisan posts in the other direction net about zero.

Even with a skewed distribution, I would only expect maybe +20 to be the ceiling.

Why would you assume that? It's a fallacy to assume that political opinions are evenly distributed. People seem to agree that different sites attract people of different political persuasions. A post that gets highly upvoted on Truth Social might get highly downvoted on Reddit, and vice versa. That's not astroturfing, that's just self-selecting communities.

> partisan posts in one direction always seem to net over 1000 or 2000, yet partisan posts in the other direction net about zero.

Again, it depends on the audience. This is not a new phenomenon. 50 years ago, you would get a different response to certain political statements depending on whether you made them at a Grateful Dead Concert or at a meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police. Why should today be different?

> I would only expect maybe +20 to be the ceiling.

Why? People feel strongly about their political believes. It's polarizing and engaging in a way that a post about crockpots or guitar strings isn't.

For example one of the top r/aviation posts is a meme about airbuses with "slutty eyeliner" (87k points), and it far outpaces shop talk type submissions like "why does the landing gear not get retracted at the same time on this 777?" (2k points)

Yet political posts get +2000 out of nowhere and an influx of commentators who don't usually comment in that regional subreddit or don't even likely live there.

The top post of all time on r/toledo is about a police officer harassing a woman. It's highly engaging but not overtly political. It has 100x the upvotes of a normal r/toledo post about traffic or what have you.

One of the top posts of all time in r/sanjose is a video of someone trying to jimmy a hotel door open using a hook contraption. Highly engaging, not overtly political.

These were the first two city subreddits I checked. It's literally just how reddit works, highly engaging content bubbles to the top and can reach a much larger audience.

Either this is the design of the black box "algorithm," or it's not real engagement. There's no need to miscorrect me about something so hamfisted and overt.

A ton of near-dead subreddits with no activity and no reason to link to x.com for any reason suddenly had thousands of people show up demanding links to x.com be blocked like it's an everyday problem for the sub.

The quiet beneficiary of this campaign are those who benefit from Reddit's groomed narrative and their competing platform Bluesky.

I say this as a liberal, the artificially partisan takeovers of local subs is a real thing. It's one thing to ban trolls and consistent shit-talkers from a community. And frankly it's one thing to have some bias. But it was just so obviously hostile, and I was happy to see the sub get back some authenticity.