alt Hacker NewsReddit has been a cesspit of recycled pablum, populist image macros and low effort reply comments for more than a decade. Enthusiast subreddits are astroturfed to hell and back by people with a Shopify storefront and a dream trying to growth hack their way to a hockey stick. The low barrier to entry to each community means that this vapid culture eventually diffuses itself across subreddits that might otherwise be good. It's a postmodern toilet that flushes into its own tank.
I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB and Invision forums. Even those are being bought up by marketing companies to sell ads and transformed with social media features... Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds.
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Agreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.
>Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds.
On spacebattles you get infracted for chan-like (or instagram-like) behaviour. It's all about how strict moderation is. They do allow likes (but there's no algo)
phpBB was quite nice, but you must remember that people used phpBB less and less over the years. Many phpBB style webforums are dead, and died before discourse etc... came about.
People's habits changed.
I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.
The craziest thing about Reddit for me is how most communities forbid "self-promotion." To me that sounds like a thing only admins would want because it keeps users on the site/app, but this is enforced by moderators for some reason and a lot of drama has occurred over banning creators over these silly rules.
It's a place that originally was a link-sharing platform, where you literally can't share a link to your own website on any subreddit. At least not if you are honest about it. It's okay if you pretend you aren't associated to it.
Reddit has become essentially watermarked videos posted by people pretending they aren't the creator of the video, twitter screenshots with 10 likes posted by people pretending they aren't the user who tweeted the tweet, and links to news websites posted by users whose only activity on reddit seems to be posting the same link to 5 different subreddits as if it was their job, because it probably is.
After a certain point, these threads start sounding like,
"I hate my rights. I hate the town square. There is litter in the common square. There is a child outdoors. Take away my pubic square."
> I miss phpBB and Invision forums.
As someone who's paid for an Invision Power Board licence before: I remember when they screwed all existing "lifetime/perpetual" licence holders with v3, and once again with v4.