A lot of reddit does not seem to be aware that a huge amount of the content is totally fake, astroturfing, etc. Soon, the "product site:reddit.com" will be just as useless as Amazon reviews.
Been that way a long time, maybe always was. Bad behavior is often rewarded, compelling lies gain more upvotes than truth and there's little consequence for shitposting.
I think it's gotten a bit worse as the platform has grown since there's more reward, astroturfing gets more eyes and is more effective, posts in general can get more karma so more fake internet points.
It was pretty amazing in the early days. It has been bad for a while. The current era is definitely something new, though. Popular subreddits are mostly worthless, and the platform both cannot control all the bots and astroturfing, but also their attempts to do so have degraded the experience for the average user.
"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
Was active on Reddit a long time ago, there's a liminal band of popularity in which a service tends to offer the best experience. Enough interest to be good, not enough interest to make it shitty or incentivize abuse.
It's difficult to remain in that band particularly because at some point you have to actively fight growth, not sure HN is all that immune either. I think HN tries to stay in that band via it's archaic UI and somewhat intimidating culture.
Yep, I think that's right. Even if reddit, its company, and its moderators were all perfect, it might still crumble and become awful under the weight of its popularity. Too many bad actors, too many companies astroturfing, not enough monetization to solve these problems. And of course the site, the company, and the moderators are far from perfect.
That's unquestionably incorrect, although I would agree that HN is declining in quality as its user base balloons in size (this would be the bigger contributor) and as general disenfranchisement with tech companies rises. (this would be a smaller, but still-noticeable contributor)
A lot don't care if it is. I've had friends share things and I stopped replying with "you know this isn't a true story/fact/real image, right?". Their response is always "idk i thought it was funny/interesting" which is valid. I felt like I was raining on parades so now I usually just respond with an emoji.
Reddit is the fakest social media platform out there. The amount of fabricated situations like "my marbles totally aligned like this by themselves", or "my husband eats his hotdogs with toothpaste" and it's a picture of something odd but that someone could easily fabricate and take a picture of is just crazy. That kind of posts always reach the top pages too.
The problem is though that even if they "just think it's funny", over time it gets built into their worldview.
It's like people who only consume TV shows and movies, they know it's all fiction, but if you talk to them about how the world works, you realize that all their mental structures are based on Hollywood tropes.
This even tracks to reddit, where everyone knows it's bullshit and reddit is dumb, but their entire perception of the world is still reddit's dumb views anyway.
'Everything is astroturf' is such a boring and cynical worldview. Its good to be suspicious, but not at the cost of joy. Underwood sauce is good. They got screwed over. Sometimes a story is just a story.
