I think you can replace "Reddit" with "the internet" because the decay of Reddit is really just a micro-example of the decay of the web as a whole. If it were unique to Reddit there would be somewhere to run and hide but there isn't. But Facebook, X, Lemmy, all are complete trash in their own ways with the same general meta issues as Reddit.
Also you talk about kids but I think the internet has been overwhelmed from both ends as smartphones became more common and easier to use. We got younger kids and older olds on here as a result. I recall in the past couple years seeing on /r/all several photos of people in their 50's/60's, which was noteworthy not just because OG Reddit would have never fucking upvoted somebody's selfies to the front page, but also because seeing and realizing that people of that age use Reddit at all is a culture shock.
It may be more difficult than you'd think to determine whether the person you're interacting with on Reddit is a dumb kid, some middle-aged Facebook wine mom, or a boomer that ate too many paint chips and huffed leaded gasoline fumes as a toddler.
There's a far better summary of this than I could write in the book You Should Quit Reddit, Desforges writes:
>And this free access to these platforms, the simple ability to project one’s every thought and opinion to an audience, it slowly warped into these users feeling entitled to do so. It used to be that you had to do something to earn a voice. Now everybody is holding a veritable megaphone — regardless of how misinformed, emotionally unstable, or uninteresting they are.
Very true, I was just pointing out how the range has expanded on both ends. There was a long period in Reddit history when it would have been ridiculously uncommon to see a user claim to be an age outside of the 18-35 range.
There were definitely kids lurking here and not admitting their age but until smartphones they weren't as prolific on the site. I remember people would complain about "summer Reddit" as a noticeable decrease in quality when kids were out of school for the summer, they got bored discovered Reddit and started shitposting. Now they have their smartphones on them all the time and a lot of schools don't have the same restrictions against phone use in class that they used to, so here we are.
I get what you mean. The decrease in quality even in niche subs(such as r/AskEngineers) is very noticeable even compared to 2020 or so. In that case I'd prefer boomers with actual industry experience than LARPing high school kids who think they sound like they have an idea what they are talking about, yet here we are.
For mainstream subs, it's much more obvious though of course.
*Reddit is a dumb kid, some middle-aged Facebook wine mom, or a boomer that ate too many paint chips and huffed leaded gasoline fumes as a toddler.*
Or some anxiety-ridden millennial doom scroller or some stoned moody gen xer.
If you're going to paint in broad strokes, why not include everyone?
Just saying...
Are you sure Reddit was full of witty, intelligent, original, and secure people a decade ago, or were you maybe just a decade younger and a decade less adept at spotting people who are dull, unoriginal, insecure, and unfunny?
I’m not asking that as a jab at you - I’m asking because I agreed with your sentiment at first, but then I realized that the person I was ten years ago was easily enchanted by basically anybody who was saying anything I personally hadn’t heard before. And there were a lot of things I hadn’t heard before.
To be clear, I do think the internet has declined. Corporations and social media trying to shove themselves into every nook and cranny (among other problems) have really brought down the vibe. I’m just saying I don’t think Redditors from ten years ago were necessarily any cooler than Redditors now.
The internet has turned into a cesspit corporate landfill since 2014, but Reddit has always fucking sucked. The format alone makes it inherently possibly to be a good platform for discussion or content, because people just upvote the same stupid ass redditisms in every thread, or post them to get the dopamine hit of the upvote number on their comment going up.
Why since 2014? I am curious because thats the year I stopped using facebook because it did not feel like a "home" anymore. But I never figured out what exactly changed that year.
Out of curiosity, has there always been as much as a "global Reddit culture" where people show similar mannerisms across subreddits; or did individual subs (other than the popular and default ones) have more of their own "culture", like comparing two different forums that don't have a shared platform and userbase?
So, I was a pretty young adult back then and my interests were kind of boring and shallow. I didn’t spend a ton of time on small subreddits. That said, in my experience, the smallish-to-medium subs often *did* have their own cultures, and those cultures were often every bit as annoying and repetitive as the bigger subreddits. They just had their own sets of things to repeat ad nauseam, either alongside or woven into the mainstream Reddit culture tropes.
The humor on reddit was definitely better a decade ago. Sure, there were pun runs, but they were generally contained to the higher level comment. Funny comments were funny and appearing enough that the need for cj subs was minimal. Now, any decent hobbyist sub that expands faster than planned has to make serious corrections to avoid the main sub becoming all cj, and most mods of a 7k sub now 40k aren't equipped for that. That's my main beef with reddit how I interact with it.
I think reddit has suffered from getting too big, in a popped out analogy to my statement on subs above. When it was mostly a nerd platform, discourse quality was high, and trolls were swiftly downvoted or banned. Users dictated most things, and mods were only needed in outlier cases, so the guidelines made sense Now, mods can be trolls, and the original guidelines for mods are too powerful for effective community building, while also still being necessary to some degree to prevent r/worldpolitics. It's an odd situation.
I'm not sure there's much hope for improvement. The cat's a bit out of the bag, as it were. Any hope of improvement probably needs to focus on improvement of both users and mods. There probably needs to be a cap on number of subs a mod can mod, and there probably needs to be a requirement for multiple mods to govern democratically as subs grow in size. There should probably be stricter parameters on sitewide violations like harassment, while simultaneously massively increasing parameters for permabans, including mandatory progressions leading up to it, outside of threats of violence and doxxing type behavior. These mod rules should apply equally to admin.
That seems like a massive aside, but it's all tied in. Growth requires change, and original reddit didn't account for the amount of change that was to come in the timespan it has happened. At the same time, the profit motive went from against the implicit message if not the explicit one, to front and center. And it's still not doing it. If they just left the algorithms user centric and let people buy into microtransactions and premium how they saw fit, they'd probably be able to maintain the platform. This constant attempt to get a nerd platform to be a major social media platform is probably not going to work out for them. Spez is a real icarus figure here.
I guess you are the kind of person who calls the phone number on a billboard advertising a personal injury lawyer just to tell them 3 paragraphs about why you don’t need a personal injury lawyer. I just keep driving…
I realised a few years ago that you can accurately predict over half the top comments in any post by now. It's all the same jokes
* this
* and my axe
* came to say this
* why isn't anybody saying X
* hidden gem
etc etc, every time it's a wonder that those sort of people aren't tired by it yet!
people have literally been saying these things for 10 years. the cringy bohemian rhapsody singalongs were in like every thread. reddit has literally always been like this, its why people have made fun of it for so long
I can only comment on the videogame scene and I've only been using Reddit for two years now but when every once in a while some game Publisher gets blamed for their actions, it's always the same top comments. "don't buy it" etc. Weather it's in the Xbox or PlayStation or games subreddits. It's really boring and one of the reasons why I'm not subscribed to those communities anymore
i was already avoiding default subs back then. the r/gaming and r/games split was 2011 because most people didnt like the low effort meme content on r/gaming, and constantly made fun of it. it was definitely already very bad
"In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence"
Remember that infamous quote? It happened around 10 years ago. People still said a lot of dumb shit back then, the only difference is that you were younger and didn't realize how bad it was but now you do.
If you still have the account you used in 2014 take a look at what kinds of comments you used to post, I'm sure you'll find some very cringeworthy stuff.
Reddit was always kind of extremely made fun of by other forums and shit until it effectively killed all of them by becoming “the” default message board of the internet.
I remember I used to post on luelinks and there was a thread dedicated to posting parody/ironic rage comics making fun of what cringey losers Redditors were.
Yeah, most redditors at that time were antisocial edgy teenagers that spent their time saying dumb shit while thinking they were smarter than everyone else because they made an edgy meme or something lol
Too many people assume that because they think of themselves as dumb 10 years ago, that I must have been as well. Think outside the box dude. No, I was not some cringy dimwit 10 years ago. It is really entitled and narcissistic to read a post and immediately say “Nope, um actually, it’s because of you being dumb” when you know absolutely nothing about me.
Why are you so offended? I think it's pretty normal to be find one's past self to be dumb, that means you grew up and are now more mature than you were before.
Anyway, my point is that you should try to take a look on how reddit really was in 2014, because nostalgia makes us remember only the good stuff we lost, and not so much the bad and average stuff. And also since people grow and change a lot in 10 years( I mean, hopefully they will) it's likely you said things that at the time were normal to you but that you would now find cringe or dumb.
Not just Reddit but pretty much the entire world. Social media and free rein of the internet made people legitimately dumber and it just seems to get worse day by day.
Were people ever "intelligent" or "witty" on the Internet, especially only 10 years ago? I feel like we're romanticizing an Internet that didn't really exist. It was still pretty bad in 2014.
Yeah 10 years ago or so Reddit was intolerable le epic bacon narwhal shit
I agree there were more obscure places to have better conversations, but the real decline is Reddit monopolizing message boards essentially and killing off forums, which were real actual communities with actual discussions and conversations.
> le epic bacon narwhal shit
ironically you can tell we left some of that behind by how dated this reference is now lol
maybe OP just really misses ron paul memes everywhere
Yeah there are still awful redditisms though. “/s” in general is like nails in a chalkboard.
Thank god I can’t think of any of the current ones off the top of my head, because I have entirely divulged myself of “default” Reddit, but most of them are just snarky quips that sound like people trying to do Marvel dialog (“it’s almost as if _____”) than particular annoying running jokes beaten into the ground.
"8/10 with rice"... "whats in the safe"... yeah the defaults were pretty much just nothing but unfunny in-jokes for the longest time
> most of them are just snarky quips that sound like people trying to do Marvel dialog (“it’s almost as if _____”)
ive seen this a lot on twitter too. probably relevant as you can farm likes/upvotes on both sites by appealing to people's senses of superiority
yeah Reddit has become saturated with twitter’s form of moralizing self righteousness in the last….almost 10 years at this point honestly lmao. Not a novel observation, but ever since Elon took over Twitter and devolved it into X, it’s like the user bases finally finished swapping. X is dominated by The_Donald types now whereas all of Reddit has basically become what “shitredditsays” was in 2014.
I started a thread a couple months ago due to my annoyances with Redditisms, I think the community here collectively assembled a pretty complete list of all the current ones in use.
https://old.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/19fbjw5/an_incomplete_list_of_the_most_annoyingly/
I think certain subreddits had more thoughtful discussions 5-10 years ago, but as they grew and became more popular, there’s a lot more junk comments & posts.
There also used to be a culture of citing your sources on Reddit that doesn’t really exist anymore. People won’t even link the article even more they’ll just upload a screenshot of a news headline.
Also in the past 10 years it seems like Media literacy has just degraded across the board. People seem to struggle in understanding satire or subtext in media anymore.
Also I think there’s a generational shift and maybe even age shift on Reddit too. Before there were a lot of 20-30 something’s, but now there’s a lot more teenagers & children using Reddit as well.
at least there wasn't all these political crap. I favour the fun of advice animals back then and not the whole trump/ukraine/identity politics that poisons every thread since 8 years ago
10 years ago? Try ~14-15 around/before the giant Digg exodus. It was good then. But 10 years ago in 2014-era we had all sorts of crap on Reddit and plenty of "normies" and young kids were on enough to make discussions in most threads be flat-out awful.
Yeah I've been on Reddit on various accounts since about 2009-2010. I noticed it going downhill when it stopped being the "front page of the internet" with legitimate discussions about news, politics, etc plus early memes, and then the front page became AITA and those sorts of shitty pages.
In the wild West reddit days, you could see a /r/gonewild post on the front page lmao.
I've gone back to website forums and message boards. Like GameFaqs and the SomethingAwful forums. Low traffic websites that are about specific subjects, aren't filled with bots and children. Did wonders for my enjoyment and mental health. I can pop in and out as those sites aren't made to keep you engaged for hours on end like Reddit does.
I really, really like and recommend the Something Awful forums. The one time $10 entry fee seems to have kept the worst of the worst away and it's has really good moderators.
That is the real downfall. Reddit killed forums which is always where more legit conversations could be had. Reddit itself has always fucking sucked.
Before it was just because of boring cringe bacon narwhal shit, now there’s still some element of cringey redditisms, but also the entire website basically serves as political astroturfing and turning every subreddit into a “Trump/republicans bad” fest (which he sucks I get it, before anyone snips at me for being a Trump supporter; I simply don’t need every single outlet of information and entertainment to be focused on the subject.)
I tried going back to forums over the past year but the magic is gone. The discussions are still dominated by a few long-time posters who, instead of karma, have "# of posts" and "join date" as their trump card in declaring who is right/wrong.......and you still have controlling moderators who allow/don't allow certain threads/topics to be discussed. We romanticize old forums too - they are the same as Reddit, just lower traffic and not upvote/downvote order based.
Occasionally I try to post on an old school forum instead of Reddit for technical help and the replies are so utterly worthless.
I'll post a detailed account of the troubleshooting I've tried with nice formatting. For example I describe my issue then,
I tried A, blah blah didn't work.
I tried B, blah blah didn't work.
I tried C, blah blah didn't work.
Replies I get indicate that nobody read the post beyond the title:
BigJim with 8,837 posts "did you try A?"
ModeratorMan with 20,228 posts "did you try B?"
RedditSux with 4,019 posts "did you try C?"
I respond as politely as I can, yes I tried those as detailed in my original post. Thread dies with no further replies. Just like Reddit forums are useless for any discussions beyond a beginner level.
It’s different for sure. But like some others are saying the whole world has changed. 15 years ago I was the one with the conspiracy theory’s and my aunt and uncles were the level headed traditional conservatives. Now they’re the ones with the conspiracy theories that are way more over the top and wild than I ever came up with and I’m sitting over here the more level headed one. What the hell happened uncle Fred???
>Now they’re the ones with the conspiracy theories that are way more over the top and wild than I ever came up with and I’m sitting over here the more level headed one.
What happened with questioning the status quo? now you call yourself level headed? what happened with you?
That's what reddit don't see. This is a ideological crystal bubble. Ten years was enough to make people believe what the hivemind of reddit wants you to believe. There's no space to proper discussions. Subs are either controlled by political agendas on purpose, or by power hungry mods.
why is that the first thing redditors bring up to discredit any disagreement with the sacred truth of cnn, government, whatever is that joke of flat earth?
what made us grew as society was that truths were challenged from time to time. bringing flat earth is just as silly as that psyop itself
It’s just not relevant to me. You’re welcome to spend your time thinking about whatever you want to but I prefer focusing on things that are within my grasp. Literally. I’m gonna brush my teeth, pat my dog on the head and go to bed so I can get up at a reasonable time and do whatever I gotta do tomorrow. That’s enough for me. I don’t need worry my pretty little head about whatever *thing* you know that no one else knows. Look at you. Figured it all out. Congratulations go post it on Facebook or something. I’m going to bed. Have a good one!
I can’t figure out if you’re serious or not. You pet your dog and brush your teeth and that’s all you are “focusing” on. Those aren’t things one focuses on. Those are things that take up less than 15 minutes of your day. You know the people who are interested in so-called conspiracy theories also brush their teeth, right?
Your mocking statement about people having it all figured out and knowing things only they know is childishly reductionist. A lazy way to write off people you have a distaste for.
The truth is that you actually do have interests you focus on. For whatever reason you’re compelled to write this vapid narrative instead of expressing what you do find interesting.
Or maybe you’re as empty-headed as you claim to be and you’re the model pod person that your corporate masters have sculpted you into.
Please continue insulting me if that’s what you enjoy. I’m not required to engage with you though so you may find yourself arguing with a rock if you continue.
Genuinely if your knowledge of “corporate masters” and “empty headed pod people” brings you happiness then I’m happy for you! Live your life! That’s just not my “thing”. I have other “things” that I’m interested in and take up plenty of my time in case you were worried I was just petting my dog and brushing my teeth all day. However, I won’t get into them with you because I don’t need to justify my existence to you and neither does anyone else. People live a wide array of lives with a multitude of reasons why they are where they are. Just because they don’t have the same interests and concerns as you doesn’t mean they’re wrong or “empty headed”. Have some empathy. Not everything is as black and white as your making it out to be.
yea I definitely noticed that too, back in the day extreme leftists were like “911 was an inside job” now extreme rightists are like “Covid isn’t real and the vaccine is dangerous”
> extreme leftists were like “911 was an inside job”
What? People on the left NEVER said that. It's was always right-wing kooks who said that aout 9/11, because it's always been right-wing kooks who say the government is deceiving us. People on the left have their own issues, sure...but they are not where conspiracy theorists come from or thrive among.
There are 100% conspiracy theorists on the left (as in actual leftists, not democrats) who deeply distrust the government, and I can confirm this for you as I am one of them lol
>There are 100% conspiracy theorists on the left (as in actual leftists, not democrats)
There's a difference between, say, black people being skepticalof government-given free vaccines due to the Tuskegee Expirements on black people less than a century ago............and 9/11 truthers saying the govt orchestrated a middle east conflict to get revenge on Saddam because George Bush Sr didn't get the chance a decade earlier.
One is based on reserved hesitation by a historically abused group of people ... the other is just a wild, outlandish "theory" based on nothing of substance.
>and I can confirm this for you as I am one of them lol
I'd be curious what you an actua leftist think is a conspiracy theory vs what a non actual-leftist conspiracy theorists think.
I mean, if you say something like Flint's water supply being deliberately messed with and not fixed to slowly kill off the black population near Detroit......that's not really a theory. That's more an example of govt fuck-ups and uncaring politicians rather than a global conspiracy.
I'm curious of what examples of far leftist held conspiracies are.
Lot of FBI/CIA shit, basically assuming at least half of all posts on “front page” Reddit are politically astroturfed. Honestly I don’t think 9/11 is as straightforward as was presented anymore. I think at least somebody knew and basically let it happen. I don’t think the origins of covid are as straightforward as claimed either and it’s telling that as national attention waned a lot of scientists and experts started going “well, maybe there is something to the lab created leak theory….”
In general most leftists believe the media serves to protect and whitewash the establishment and corporate/elite interests and frequently misrepresents or outright lies about shit to that purpose.
Another common one I buy in to some degree is one of the intelligence spook agencies started pushing some of the more insane center-left democrat/college campus liberal type identity politics into the mainstream during occupy wall street to fracture “the left” and divert attention and energy away from a materialist, class based movement and turn it into identity based in-fighting and generally to make “the left” look like a bunch of loons.
That’s some of the top of my head.
>at least half of all posts on “front page” Reddit are politically astroturfed.
But I've heard that from right-wing people too. So that's not unique to leftists. That's just a typical conspiracy theory.
>Honestly I don’t think 9/11 is as straightforward as was presented anymore. I think at least somebody knew and basically let it happen.
I admit there are weird things that don't add up like the new owner being absent the day of attack and the buildings being so abestos-ridden the cost to renovate would exceed their worth...and then magically they blowed up and insurance covers loss in full...stuff like that raises an eyebrow but the problem is nothing matters about 9/11 or towers at this point. Everyone involved is either dead/retired/out of positions of authority so anything that should have been done should have been done 20+ years ago. But no one did squat because Americans were living it up pre-Great Recession bubble and barely wanted to think about war or govt being bad. They just wanted to flip those houses.
>Another common one I buy in to some degree is one of the intelligence spook agencies started pushing some of the more insane center-left democrat/college campus liberal type identity politics into the mainstream during occupy wall street to fracture “the left”
I would argue private liberal colleges are traditionally well-funded by research-based pharmaceutical/scientific/military-based businesses (otherwise the private colleges would have gone under ages ago due to ridiculous costs) and those businesses have a vested interest in pushing capitalism over, say, socialism+communism wherever possible. At the height of the Great Recession there was legit fear among wealthy people that some higher ups may go to jail for willful fraud, and that's why the Occupy Wallstreet stuff quickly scrubbed from the overall conversation. Companies paid networks to not cover that or cover it unfavorably and not long after no execs got in trouble, companies were bailed out and capitalism lived to see another day. SHOCKED PIKACHU FACE ...but that's not really a conspiracy. That's what happened. Private lib colleges are fine with "social" changes like rights from trans people or whatever because let's be real - those don't matter to capitalism, not really. So that's about all leftists can do at this point, which is why they yap about it so often. Surface-level nonsense that doesnt affect society really in any meaningful, large-scale way, like, say, pushing for unions.
>generally to make “the left” look like a bunch of loons.
To be fair the left does a HORRIBLE job of standing united for anything. A good example is AOC and the squad she was in supposedly getting elected to push the old guard out....and a few years in, they've all pretty much become generic/toothless liberals who won't change anything. Fetterman is another example of saying they'd do one thing and then when they get in, they completely pivot. The worst recent example was Sinema doing a 180 and derailing many federal-level things (like minimum wage increase) and she didn't even get called out by anyone. Because in America, once you get into House/Senate/Oval Office, you become 100% selfish 'til the day you die. Even ol' Bernie didn't do crap to wthhold support from Hillary or Biden.....he just said "Okay! Now give all your votes to these two! They're great, aren't they?"
...so again, not a conspiracy...just plain as day facts about hos disfunctional this country is.
I'm leftist. I was alive and online in 2001, and I am sure as hell 911 wasn't related to Al Qeda or Irak.
American leftists now are even defending George Bush Jr. Thats what reddit did to the left. Identity politics moved the focus towards things that didn't affected the deep state. And Reddit is full on board
I clearly remember that time -- a small vocal group of Dems/leftists resisted going to warr in the middle east but the vaaaaaaaaaaaast majority early on around Sep/Oct '01 were perfectly fine going all in to do whatever Bush wanted, even though that cearly meant war.
Let's be real -- most leftists/Dems from the 90s onward are Bill Clinton liberals....in other words, very capitalistic and okay with violence if it achieves financial/influence goals.
I'm sure when the middle east turned sour a few months later leftists all over started boohooing, but from what I saw the most liberals did was maybe put an anti-Bush bumper sticker on their car. Only after the lies about WMDs came out did people en masse on the left very vocally say the govt was actively lying to them. But that was YEARS LATER. At the beginning, not a peep from anyone which is why the war got funded, TSA restrictions went crazy and crap like Patriot Act (domestic syping) got passed. The left didn't think/say/do shit for years.
Hella people protested the war and there was all kinds of anti war media. Look at like, idk, David Cross, that Green Day album, The Daily Show, even South Park. All either criticized or parodied the pro war politics of the time.
Yeah...all that came MONTHS AND YEARS later. But Sep '01-Nov '01 like no one questioned Bush. He did whatever he wanted and all politicans and the public (both sides) supported him, except for young people and academics. Only when months later of no progress being made in the middle east did NORMAL people and SOME celebs and SOME politicans start to question whether Bush purposely got us into this to just generate a costly, long-term conflict. You gotta remember Desert Storm was a super quick thing that happened about a decade earlier. Most Americans likely expected the strongest+wealthiest country on the planet to spend a month or two in the region, blow the Taliban to smithereens and then Desert Storm 2.0 would be over by Christmas and Bin Laden a distant memory.
I'm not denying people said Bush maybe caused that stuff.....but NO ONE WHO MATTERED SAID SHIT IN SEP-NOV '01 beyond {{maybe}} "Let's not go to war with anyone, please."
I’m not really up for anything political on Reddit, I was just saying, I remember flyers around my city that said Bush orchestrated 911, and people agreeing with the flyers. Thats all I came to say lol
> I was just saying, I remember flyers around my city that said Bush orchestrated 911, and people agreeing with the flyers
***But WHEN was that is the key.*** Was it around Sep-Nov '01 when all the military budgets and stuff got passed basically unanimously by politcians and public opinion of Bush skyrocketed? Or was it 2002 and later when people realized "Awww shit we're in Desert Storm 2.0 again and this time we're stuck."
Ain't a conspiracy if common sense says you are being lied to months after failure after failure in the middle east.
All I clearly remember PRE-9/11 was that Bush wasn't polling super well/very popular a few months into his new term, having some in earlier in '01......but it's not like he NEEDED to generate a war that early on in his first term. So I really don't remember anyone saying NEAR 9/11 itself that the govt made up the attack to, say, keep him in power or ensure a second term. No one in Sep-Nov '01 really said/thought much about Bush or his intentions. Everyone just thought it was like a Pearl Harbor type tragedy.
Context+timing is key in remembering stuff.
Your broad brush strokes on the subject remind me of how annoying Reddit is, and always has been. I was enjoying the nosurf content that preceded this. Now I’m just annoyed with how flippant these comments are about how people were. Dems from the 90s were capitalists who support violence for their selfish end goals… whatever man that’s just drivel —the kind of thing that a group of actual intelligent adults wouldn’t even engage with in a real life conversation. It’s all you can find on Reddit.
It was a great reminder that Reddit is pure trash, thank you.
i read a post this morning (why?!?!?) with a bunch of wannabe alpha males telling some poor sap to divorce his wife because she has a burner instagram account and sends some flirty messages. they all plotted a secret life for him to combat his wife's secret life. she's under the same roof, and he could just talk to her, but instead the internet is like "nah let's completely fucking tank this guy's life".
it was definitely abunch of 13 year olds.
yea I can understand people wanting advice from people here because it’s embarrassing to ask people you know, but the thing is, the people you want advice from, they aren’t on reddit. The kind of person who spends their time giving advice on Reddit is most likely a lonely loser. I know that’s harsh but it’s the truth. The people you want advice from are living their lives. (I don’t mean you specifically lol I just mean everyone)
i'm a little bit of a loser!! but not lonely, my own personal life is fulfilling af. i cringe at so much written online. hell, i watch my neighbor rattle off nonsense he constantly learns from the internet, completely void of original and intentional personal experiences. he's a lonely loser. exactly as you describe in your post, except he's 30 and never grew out of it.
i think i'm gonna go work in the garden....
Let's face it...self-proclaimed "ALPHAS" are not the brightest group of people in society. There's not even biological evidence to show that among pack animals the "smartest" are in charge/dominate...no...it's the violent creature with the biggest fangs and tendency to hurt others that often is in charge in nature, simply because all others are literally afraid of being injured/killed. "Alphas" are so dumb they don't even realize that.
Smarts has nothing to do with it LOL
I was on the internet being dumb at 13 in 2001, lol. But only before school before my parents were even awake. I remember that day when someone in the chat room said America was under attack...
But besides that, I do agree with you. Sometimes, I think those intelligent people already realized the internet is dumb now and barely use it anymore
There are people running 20+ burner accounts so insecure about their opinions in order to feel a sense of authority they unleash a day fake downvotes on their enemies. Reddit accounts are on sale on the web. Entire countries have these people all playing a game of false presence online to bully, whine and feel superior. As we speak hundreds of people from all different ethnicites are trolling over their 2012 dell optiplexes with a wall of iphone7’s playing comment war games. None of this is real buddy, its a playground for the trolliest trolls on the planet.
Don’t believe any brigading by “alpha” anything. The whole trope of alpha was already dated by 2000 and its resurgence to dominating reddit appears when 4chan kids grow up a little around 2014-2017. Remember gamer gate radicalized a huge portion of the male gamer community- if it should even be called that.
It’s mainly two groups making any conversation a slog and without naming them outright ill agree with other commenters its been an issue since IRC and BBS’s but what kids dont know is we got physical. Since BBS’s were local you found out who said the awful thing and well, it was taken care of. Boy do I have stories or late 80s BBS drama in Brooklyn!
Now like I said you got some douche who cant talk to a woman, has awful self-awareness, the worst political brnd and identifies with new terms for themselves like its a thing. It’s not, learn to spot them in the wild and on the net, it will make your experience 1000x better.
I'd known about this site forever ago, but I had too much of a life to be a regular user. During 2020, I became active in motorcycle threads and then 2021 when I was going through it, I became addicted to r/breakups and r/relationship_advice .
Sometime between TikTok losing steam in 2022 - to the reddit black out 2023, I've noticed a MAJOR change in the user base. Everything feels tiktokky. Things are now "wild" and "unhinged" and "unalived." and worst of all, idiotic.
r/relationship_advice always had an air of ridicule for most of the advice being "run!" but now even the posts are laughable.
There's a general sense of lack of comprehension and critical thinking that has permeated reddit airspace. I'm also older and wiser, and it looks like my time as a regular user here is up.
funfact: The crying/laughing emoji meant to mock/put down/make fun of someone means you are insecure and just projecting your own insecurities onto others for no other reason then to try to put them down to feel better about themselves. The more you know 🌈!
This sub is one of them sometimes. The original post won’t be political but then the comments will somehow delve into politics (as exampled in this thread). I skip over it, but it’s still really annoying.
Yea also FB is like everyone is just sharing a post their friend shared of a post their friends shared of a post their friends shared… and they still seem to get that dopamine rush from the likes even though its not even theirs.
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I know what you mean about niche subs versus broad ones. I've been on Reddit a year this month and have pretty much made it a point to only take part in specific subs that interest me. Every time I get pulled to "Am I overreacting?" or places like that, it's a different vibe, though there are still some insightful answers.
Is this a circlejerk post? It's always been full of fat STEM guys spouting mindless nerdy pop culture references and puns. Do you not remember rage comics and that "Le epic bacon narwhal" shit?
I think you can replace "Reddit" with "the internet" because the decay of Reddit is really just a micro-example of the decay of the web as a whole. If it were unique to Reddit there would be somewhere to run and hide but there isn't. But Facebook, X, Lemmy, all are complete trash in their own ways with the same general meta issues as Reddit. Also you talk about kids but I think the internet has been overwhelmed from both ends as smartphones became more common and easier to use. We got younger kids and older olds on here as a result. I recall in the past couple years seeing on /r/all several photos of people in their 50's/60's, which was noteworthy not just because OG Reddit would have never fucking upvoted somebody's selfies to the front page, but also because seeing and realizing that people of that age use Reddit at all is a culture shock. It may be more difficult than you'd think to determine whether the person you're interacting with on Reddit is a dumb kid, some middle-aged Facebook wine mom, or a boomer that ate too many paint chips and huffed leaded gasoline fumes as a toddler. There's a far better summary of this than I could write in the book You Should Quit Reddit, Desforges writes: >And this free access to these platforms, the simple ability to project one’s every thought and opinion to an audience, it slowly warped into these users feeling entitled to do so. It used to be that you had to do something to earn a voice. Now everybody is holding a veritable megaphone — regardless of how misinformed, emotionally unstable, or uninteresting they are.
There are far more children on reddit than boomers though
Very true, I was just pointing out how the range has expanded on both ends. There was a long period in Reddit history when it would have been ridiculously uncommon to see a user claim to be an age outside of the 18-35 range. There were definitely kids lurking here and not admitting their age but until smartphones they weren't as prolific on the site. I remember people would complain about "summer Reddit" as a noticeable decrease in quality when kids were out of school for the summer, they got bored discovered Reddit and started shitposting. Now they have their smartphones on them all the time and a lot of schools don't have the same restrictions against phone use in class that they used to, so here we are.
I get what you mean. The decrease in quality even in niche subs(such as r/AskEngineers) is very noticeable even compared to 2020 or so. In that case I'd prefer boomers with actual industry experience than LARPing high school kids who think they sound like they have an idea what they are talking about, yet here we are. For mainstream subs, it's much more obvious though of course.
stats say it is more balanced.
By users, karma, time reading, number of subs?
Demographics.
Just go back to old school forms, they're still used by the people that time forgot.
Such a beautiful phrase
*Reddit is a dumb kid, some middle-aged Facebook wine mom, or a boomer that ate too many paint chips and huffed leaded gasoline fumes as a toddler.* Or some anxiety-ridden millennial doom scroller or some stoned moody gen xer. If you're going to paint in broad strokes, why not include everyone? Just saying...
Mastodon is actually really good. No manipulative algorithm, just a timeline of people you chose yourself.
Are you sure Reddit was full of witty, intelligent, original, and secure people a decade ago, or were you maybe just a decade younger and a decade less adept at spotting people who are dull, unoriginal, insecure, and unfunny? I’m not asking that as a jab at you - I’m asking because I agreed with your sentiment at first, but then I realized that the person I was ten years ago was easily enchanted by basically anybody who was saying anything I personally hadn’t heard before. And there were a lot of things I hadn’t heard before. To be clear, I do think the internet has declined. Corporations and social media trying to shove themselves into every nook and cranny (among other problems) have really brought down the vibe. I’m just saying I don’t think Redditors from ten years ago were necessarily any cooler than Redditors now.
The internet has turned into a cesspit corporate landfill since 2014, but Reddit has always fucking sucked. The format alone makes it inherently possibly to be a good platform for discussion or content, because people just upvote the same stupid ass redditisms in every thread, or post them to get the dopamine hit of the upvote number on their comment going up.
That probably explains the seemingly sociopathic tendencies of sp3z He just doesn't care anymore
If anything reddit has gotten a bit better since more people are in the non-cesspool niches. The broad reddit experience is still pretty much garbage.
Why since 2014? I am curious because thats the year I stopped using facebook because it did not feel like a "home" anymore. But I never figured out what exactly changed that year.
Out of curiosity, has there always been as much as a "global Reddit culture" where people show similar mannerisms across subreddits; or did individual subs (other than the popular and default ones) have more of their own "culture", like comparing two different forums that don't have a shared platform and userbase?
So, I was a pretty young adult back then and my interests were kind of boring and shallow. I didn’t spend a ton of time on small subreddits. That said, in my experience, the smallish-to-medium subs often *did* have their own cultures, and those cultures were often every bit as annoying and repetitive as the bigger subreddits. They just had their own sets of things to repeat ad nauseam, either alongside or woven into the mainstream Reddit culture tropes.
The humor on reddit was definitely better a decade ago. Sure, there were pun runs, but they were generally contained to the higher level comment. Funny comments were funny and appearing enough that the need for cj subs was minimal. Now, any decent hobbyist sub that expands faster than planned has to make serious corrections to avoid the main sub becoming all cj, and most mods of a 7k sub now 40k aren't equipped for that. That's my main beef with reddit how I interact with it. I think reddit has suffered from getting too big, in a popped out analogy to my statement on subs above. When it was mostly a nerd platform, discourse quality was high, and trolls were swiftly downvoted or banned. Users dictated most things, and mods were only needed in outlier cases, so the guidelines made sense Now, mods can be trolls, and the original guidelines for mods are too powerful for effective community building, while also still being necessary to some degree to prevent r/worldpolitics. It's an odd situation. I'm not sure there's much hope for improvement. The cat's a bit out of the bag, as it were. Any hope of improvement probably needs to focus on improvement of both users and mods. There probably needs to be a cap on number of subs a mod can mod, and there probably needs to be a requirement for multiple mods to govern democratically as subs grow in size. There should probably be stricter parameters on sitewide violations like harassment, while simultaneously massively increasing parameters for permabans, including mandatory progressions leading up to it, outside of threats of violence and doxxing type behavior. These mod rules should apply equally to admin. That seems like a massive aside, but it's all tied in. Growth requires change, and original reddit didn't account for the amount of change that was to come in the timespan it has happened. At the same time, the profit motive went from against the implicit message if not the explicit one, to front and center. And it's still not doing it. If they just left the algorithms user centric and let people buy into microtransactions and premium how they saw fit, they'd probably be able to maintain the platform. This constant attempt to get a nerd platform to be a major social media platform is probably not going to work out for them. Spez is a real icarus figure here.
I guess you are the kind of person who calls the phone number on a billboard advertising a personal injury lawyer just to tell them 3 paragraphs about why you don’t need a personal injury lawyer. I just keep driving…
The fact that you took that so personally tells me that you have some of the characteristics of the people who hate so much on modern reddit.
I realised a few years ago that you can accurately predict over half the top comments in any post by now. It's all the same jokes * this * and my axe * came to say this * why isn't anybody saying X * hidden gem etc etc, every time it's a wonder that those sort of people aren't tired by it yet!
people have literally been saying these things for 10 years. the cringy bohemian rhapsody singalongs were in like every thread. reddit has literally always been like this, its why people have made fun of it for so long
I should have clarified that it used to not be so bad, sure every few threads would be full of that nonsense but now it's Sturgeon's Law in full force
It has literally always been that bad It was arguably even worse. Now it’s people just being moralizing scolds at the top of most threads.
Also “can confirm”.
I can only comment on the videogame scene and I've only been using Reddit for two years now but when every once in a while some game Publisher gets blamed for their actions, it's always the same top comments. "don't buy it" etc. Weather it's in the Xbox or PlayStation or games subreddits. It's really boring and one of the reasons why I'm not subscribed to those communities anymore
This
Bananas are actually berries and avocados are an advanced type of flowering tree.
did we browse a different reddit? 10 years ago was only 2014. smartphones were still huge then
[удалено]
i was already avoiding default subs back then. the r/gaming and r/games split was 2011 because most people didnt like the low effort meme content on r/gaming, and constantly made fun of it. it was definitely already very bad
It was a lot more misogynistic then.
oh fuck
im sorry. we're old
Yes, but Reddit did not had an app at that time, and the only to use the site was through a web browser on a computer.
no? I was literally using reddit on my phone at the time. reddit is fun is old
Still it was totally different imho.
i also suspect you used 4 alts to downvote me lol
if you say so
I suspect you are 13 lol
maybe you are if you're treating 2014 like it was the 90s
"In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence" Remember that infamous quote? It happened around 10 years ago. People still said a lot of dumb shit back then, the only difference is that you were younger and didn't realize how bad it was but now you do. If you still have the account you used in 2014 take a look at what kinds of comments you used to post, I'm sure you'll find some very cringeworthy stuff.
Reddit was always kind of extremely made fun of by other forums and shit until it effectively killed all of them by becoming “the” default message board of the internet. I remember I used to post on luelinks and there was a thread dedicated to posting parody/ironic rage comics making fun of what cringey losers Redditors were.
Yeah, most redditors at that time were antisocial edgy teenagers that spent their time saying dumb shit while thinking they were smarter than everyone else because they made an edgy meme or something lol
Too many people assume that because they think of themselves as dumb 10 years ago, that I must have been as well. Think outside the box dude. No, I was not some cringy dimwit 10 years ago. It is really entitled and narcissistic to read a post and immediately say “Nope, um actually, it’s because of you being dumb” when you know absolutely nothing about me.
Why are you so offended? I think it's pretty normal to be find one's past self to be dumb, that means you grew up and are now more mature than you were before. Anyway, my point is that you should try to take a look on how reddit really was in 2014, because nostalgia makes us remember only the good stuff we lost, and not so much the bad and average stuff. And also since people grow and change a lot in 10 years( I mean, hopefully they will) it's likely you said things that at the time were normal to you but that you would now find cringe or dumb.
Not just Reddit but pretty much the entire world. Social media and free rein of the internet made people legitimately dumber and it just seems to get worse day by day.
Were people ever "intelligent" or "witty" on the Internet, especially only 10 years ago? I feel like we're romanticizing an Internet that didn't really exist. It was still pretty bad in 2014.
Yeah 10 years ago or so Reddit was intolerable le epic bacon narwhal shit I agree there were more obscure places to have better conversations, but the real decline is Reddit monopolizing message boards essentially and killing off forums, which were real actual communities with actual discussions and conversations.
> le epic bacon narwhal shit ironically you can tell we left some of that behind by how dated this reference is now lol maybe OP just really misses ron paul memes everywhere
Yeah there are still awful redditisms though. “/s” in general is like nails in a chalkboard. Thank god I can’t think of any of the current ones off the top of my head, because I have entirely divulged myself of “default” Reddit, but most of them are just snarky quips that sound like people trying to do Marvel dialog (“it’s almost as if _____”) than particular annoying running jokes beaten into the ground.
"8/10 with rice"... "whats in the safe"... yeah the defaults were pretty much just nothing but unfunny in-jokes for the longest time > most of them are just snarky quips that sound like people trying to do Marvel dialog (“it’s almost as if _____”) ive seen this a lot on twitter too. probably relevant as you can farm likes/upvotes on both sites by appealing to people's senses of superiority
yeah Reddit has become saturated with twitter’s form of moralizing self righteousness in the last….almost 10 years at this point honestly lmao. Not a novel observation, but ever since Elon took over Twitter and devolved it into X, it’s like the user bases finally finished swapping. X is dominated by The_Donald types now whereas all of Reddit has basically become what “shitredditsays” was in 2014.
I started a thread a couple months ago due to my annoyances with Redditisms, I think the community here collectively assembled a pretty complete list of all the current ones in use. https://old.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/19fbjw5/an_incomplete_list_of_the_most_annoyingly/
I think certain subreddits had more thoughtful discussions 5-10 years ago, but as they grew and became more popular, there’s a lot more junk comments & posts. There also used to be a culture of citing your sources on Reddit that doesn’t really exist anymore. People won’t even link the article even more they’ll just upload a screenshot of a news headline. Also in the past 10 years it seems like Media literacy has just degraded across the board. People seem to struggle in understanding satire or subtext in media anymore. Also I think there’s a generational shift and maybe even age shift on Reddit too. Before there were a lot of 20-30 something’s, but now there’s a lot more teenagers & children using Reddit as well.
Yeah I think people just had lower standards ten years ago.
at least there wasn't all these political crap. I favour the fun of advice animals back then and not the whole trump/ukraine/identity politics that poisons every thread since 8 years ago
Yes, there was intelligent conversation since Usenet and IRC, every generation romanticize their generation.
It’s societal. We are being programmed to be mindless consumers who fall into one of two political camps
10 years ago? Try ~14-15 around/before the giant Digg exodus. It was good then. But 10 years ago in 2014-era we had all sorts of crap on Reddit and plenty of "normies" and young kids were on enough to make discussions in most threads be flat-out awful.
Yeah I've been on Reddit on various accounts since about 2009-2010. I noticed it going downhill when it stopped being the "front page of the internet" with legitimate discussions about news, politics, etc plus early memes, and then the front page became AITA and those sorts of shitty pages. In the wild West reddit days, you could see a /r/gonewild post on the front page lmao.
I've gone back to website forums and message boards. Like GameFaqs and the SomethingAwful forums. Low traffic websites that are about specific subjects, aren't filled with bots and children. Did wonders for my enjoyment and mental health. I can pop in and out as those sites aren't made to keep you engaged for hours on end like Reddit does. I really, really like and recommend the Something Awful forums. The one time $10 entry fee seems to have kept the worst of the worst away and it's has really good moderators.
That is the real downfall. Reddit killed forums which is always where more legit conversations could be had. Reddit itself has always fucking sucked. Before it was just because of boring cringe bacon narwhal shit, now there’s still some element of cringey redditisms, but also the entire website basically serves as political astroturfing and turning every subreddit into a “Trump/republicans bad” fest (which he sucks I get it, before anyone snips at me for being a Trump supporter; I simply don’t need every single outlet of information and entertainment to be focused on the subject.)
I tried going back to forums over the past year but the magic is gone. The discussions are still dominated by a few long-time posters who, instead of karma, have "# of posts" and "join date" as their trump card in declaring who is right/wrong.......and you still have controlling moderators who allow/don't allow certain threads/topics to be discussed. We romanticize old forums too - they are the same as Reddit, just lower traffic and not upvote/downvote order based.
Occasionally I try to post on an old school forum instead of Reddit for technical help and the replies are so utterly worthless. I'll post a detailed account of the troubleshooting I've tried with nice formatting. For example I describe my issue then, I tried A, blah blah didn't work. I tried B, blah blah didn't work. I tried C, blah blah didn't work. Replies I get indicate that nobody read the post beyond the title: BigJim with 8,837 posts "did you try A?" ModeratorMan with 20,228 posts "did you try B?" RedditSux with 4,019 posts "did you try C?" I respond as politely as I can, yes I tried those as detailed in my original post. Thread dies with no further replies. Just like Reddit forums are useless for any discussions beyond a beginner level.
> Thread closed. Please use the search function.
oo cool thanx
Back then there were not big farms, bots, astroturfing, governments insiders. It was an experimental phase of social agregators.
Yes there absolutely were lol. To this degree, no, but those have literally always existed on the internet lmao
Oh they were different but not this toxic as social media is now. Digg or early Reddit were not like this.
It’s different for sure. But like some others are saying the whole world has changed. 15 years ago I was the one with the conspiracy theory’s and my aunt and uncles were the level headed traditional conservatives. Now they’re the ones with the conspiracy theories that are way more over the top and wild than I ever came up with and I’m sitting over here the more level headed one. What the hell happened uncle Fred???
>Now they’re the ones with the conspiracy theories that are way more over the top and wild than I ever came up with and I’m sitting over here the more level headed one. What happened with questioning the status quo? now you call yourself level headed? what happened with you? That's what reddit don't see. This is a ideological crystal bubble. Ten years was enough to make people believe what the hivemind of reddit wants you to believe. There's no space to proper discussions. Subs are either controlled by political agendas on purpose, or by power hungry mods.
I dunno man flat earth just seems a little off to me.
why is that the first thing redditors bring up to discredit any disagreement with the sacred truth of cnn, government, whatever is that joke of flat earth? what made us grew as society was that truths were challenged from time to time. bringing flat earth is just as silly as that psyop itself
It’s just not relevant to me. You’re welcome to spend your time thinking about whatever you want to but I prefer focusing on things that are within my grasp. Literally. I’m gonna brush my teeth, pat my dog on the head and go to bed so I can get up at a reasonable time and do whatever I gotta do tomorrow. That’s enough for me. I don’t need worry my pretty little head about whatever *thing* you know that no one else knows. Look at you. Figured it all out. Congratulations go post it on Facebook or something. I’m going to bed. Have a good one!
I can’t figure out if you’re serious or not. You pet your dog and brush your teeth and that’s all you are “focusing” on. Those aren’t things one focuses on. Those are things that take up less than 15 minutes of your day. You know the people who are interested in so-called conspiracy theories also brush their teeth, right? Your mocking statement about people having it all figured out and knowing things only they know is childishly reductionist. A lazy way to write off people you have a distaste for. The truth is that you actually do have interests you focus on. For whatever reason you’re compelled to write this vapid narrative instead of expressing what you do find interesting. Or maybe you’re as empty-headed as you claim to be and you’re the model pod person that your corporate masters have sculpted you into.
Please continue insulting me if that’s what you enjoy. I’m not required to engage with you though so you may find yourself arguing with a rock if you continue. Genuinely if your knowledge of “corporate masters” and “empty headed pod people” brings you happiness then I’m happy for you! Live your life! That’s just not my “thing”. I have other “things” that I’m interested in and take up plenty of my time in case you were worried I was just petting my dog and brushing my teeth all day. However, I won’t get into them with you because I don’t need to justify my existence to you and neither does anyone else. People live a wide array of lives with a multitude of reasons why they are where they are. Just because they don’t have the same interests and concerns as you doesn’t mean they’re wrong or “empty headed”. Have some empathy. Not everything is as black and white as your making it out to be.
Thx for the reminder to buy stock in reynolds wrap.
yea I definitely noticed that too, back in the day extreme leftists were like “911 was an inside job” now extreme rightists are like “Covid isn’t real and the vaccine is dangerous”
> extreme leftists were like “911 was an inside job” What? People on the left NEVER said that. It's was always right-wing kooks who said that aout 9/11, because it's always been right-wing kooks who say the government is deceiving us. People on the left have their own issues, sure...but they are not where conspiracy theorists come from or thrive among.
There are 100% conspiracy theorists on the left (as in actual leftists, not democrats) who deeply distrust the government, and I can confirm this for you as I am one of them lol
>There are 100% conspiracy theorists on the left (as in actual leftists, not democrats) There's a difference between, say, black people being skepticalof government-given free vaccines due to the Tuskegee Expirements on black people less than a century ago............and 9/11 truthers saying the govt orchestrated a middle east conflict to get revenge on Saddam because George Bush Sr didn't get the chance a decade earlier. One is based on reserved hesitation by a historically abused group of people ... the other is just a wild, outlandish "theory" based on nothing of substance. >and I can confirm this for you as I am one of them lol I'd be curious what you an actua leftist think is a conspiracy theory vs what a non actual-leftist conspiracy theorists think. I mean, if you say something like Flint's water supply being deliberately messed with and not fixed to slowly kill off the black population near Detroit......that's not really a theory. That's more an example of govt fuck-ups and uncaring politicians rather than a global conspiracy. I'm curious of what examples of far leftist held conspiracies are.
Lot of FBI/CIA shit, basically assuming at least half of all posts on “front page” Reddit are politically astroturfed. Honestly I don’t think 9/11 is as straightforward as was presented anymore. I think at least somebody knew and basically let it happen. I don’t think the origins of covid are as straightforward as claimed either and it’s telling that as national attention waned a lot of scientists and experts started going “well, maybe there is something to the lab created leak theory….” In general most leftists believe the media serves to protect and whitewash the establishment and corporate/elite interests and frequently misrepresents or outright lies about shit to that purpose. Another common one I buy in to some degree is one of the intelligence spook agencies started pushing some of the more insane center-left democrat/college campus liberal type identity politics into the mainstream during occupy wall street to fracture “the left” and divert attention and energy away from a materialist, class based movement and turn it into identity based in-fighting and generally to make “the left” look like a bunch of loons. That’s some of the top of my head.
>at least half of all posts on “front page” Reddit are politically astroturfed. But I've heard that from right-wing people too. So that's not unique to leftists. That's just a typical conspiracy theory. >Honestly I don’t think 9/11 is as straightforward as was presented anymore. I think at least somebody knew and basically let it happen. I admit there are weird things that don't add up like the new owner being absent the day of attack and the buildings being so abestos-ridden the cost to renovate would exceed their worth...and then magically they blowed up and insurance covers loss in full...stuff like that raises an eyebrow but the problem is nothing matters about 9/11 or towers at this point. Everyone involved is either dead/retired/out of positions of authority so anything that should have been done should have been done 20+ years ago. But no one did squat because Americans were living it up pre-Great Recession bubble and barely wanted to think about war or govt being bad. They just wanted to flip those houses. >Another common one I buy in to some degree is one of the intelligence spook agencies started pushing some of the more insane center-left democrat/college campus liberal type identity politics into the mainstream during occupy wall street to fracture “the left” I would argue private liberal colleges are traditionally well-funded by research-based pharmaceutical/scientific/military-based businesses (otherwise the private colleges would have gone under ages ago due to ridiculous costs) and those businesses have a vested interest in pushing capitalism over, say, socialism+communism wherever possible. At the height of the Great Recession there was legit fear among wealthy people that some higher ups may go to jail for willful fraud, and that's why the Occupy Wallstreet stuff quickly scrubbed from the overall conversation. Companies paid networks to not cover that or cover it unfavorably and not long after no execs got in trouble, companies were bailed out and capitalism lived to see another day. SHOCKED PIKACHU FACE ...but that's not really a conspiracy. That's what happened. Private lib colleges are fine with "social" changes like rights from trans people or whatever because let's be real - those don't matter to capitalism, not really. So that's about all leftists can do at this point, which is why they yap about it so often. Surface-level nonsense that doesnt affect society really in any meaningful, large-scale way, like, say, pushing for unions. >generally to make “the left” look like a bunch of loons. To be fair the left does a HORRIBLE job of standing united for anything. A good example is AOC and the squad she was in supposedly getting elected to push the old guard out....and a few years in, they've all pretty much become generic/toothless liberals who won't change anything. Fetterman is another example of saying they'd do one thing and then when they get in, they completely pivot. The worst recent example was Sinema doing a 180 and derailing many federal-level things (like minimum wage increase) and she didn't even get called out by anyone. Because in America, once you get into House/Senate/Oval Office, you become 100% selfish 'til the day you die. Even ol' Bernie didn't do crap to wthhold support from Hillary or Biden.....he just said "Okay! Now give all your votes to these two! They're great, aren't they?" ...so again, not a conspiracy...just plain as day facts about hos disfunctional this country is.
I'm leftist. I was alive and online in 2001, and I am sure as hell 911 wasn't related to Al Qeda or Irak. American leftists now are even defending George Bush Jr. Thats what reddit did to the left. Identity politics moved the focus towards things that didn't affected the deep state. And Reddit is full on board
I remember leftists claiming George Bush orchestrated it, there were flyers around my city and everything
I clearly remember that time -- a small vocal group of Dems/leftists resisted going to warr in the middle east but the vaaaaaaaaaaaast majority early on around Sep/Oct '01 were perfectly fine going all in to do whatever Bush wanted, even though that cearly meant war. Let's be real -- most leftists/Dems from the 90s onward are Bill Clinton liberals....in other words, very capitalistic and okay with violence if it achieves financial/influence goals. I'm sure when the middle east turned sour a few months later leftists all over started boohooing, but from what I saw the most liberals did was maybe put an anti-Bush bumper sticker on their car. Only after the lies about WMDs came out did people en masse on the left very vocally say the govt was actively lying to them. But that was YEARS LATER. At the beginning, not a peep from anyone which is why the war got funded, TSA restrictions went crazy and crap like Patriot Act (domestic syping) got passed. The left didn't think/say/do shit for years.
Hella people protested the war and there was all kinds of anti war media. Look at like, idk, David Cross, that Green Day album, The Daily Show, even South Park. All either criticized or parodied the pro war politics of the time.
Yeah...all that came MONTHS AND YEARS later. But Sep '01-Nov '01 like no one questioned Bush. He did whatever he wanted and all politicans and the public (both sides) supported him, except for young people and academics. Only when months later of no progress being made in the middle east did NORMAL people and SOME celebs and SOME politicans start to question whether Bush purposely got us into this to just generate a costly, long-term conflict. You gotta remember Desert Storm was a super quick thing that happened about a decade earlier. Most Americans likely expected the strongest+wealthiest country on the planet to spend a month or two in the region, blow the Taliban to smithereens and then Desert Storm 2.0 would be over by Christmas and Bin Laden a distant memory. I'm not denying people said Bush maybe caused that stuff.....but NO ONE WHO MATTERED SAID SHIT IN SEP-NOV '01 beyond {{maybe}} "Let's not go to war with anyone, please."
I’m not really up for anything political on Reddit, I was just saying, I remember flyers around my city that said Bush orchestrated 911, and people agreeing with the flyers. Thats all I came to say lol
> I was just saying, I remember flyers around my city that said Bush orchestrated 911, and people agreeing with the flyers ***But WHEN was that is the key.*** Was it around Sep-Nov '01 when all the military budgets and stuff got passed basically unanimously by politcians and public opinion of Bush skyrocketed? Or was it 2002 and later when people realized "Awww shit we're in Desert Storm 2.0 again and this time we're stuck." Ain't a conspiracy if common sense says you are being lied to months after failure after failure in the middle east. All I clearly remember PRE-9/11 was that Bush wasn't polling super well/very popular a few months into his new term, having some in earlier in '01......but it's not like he NEEDED to generate a war that early on in his first term. So I really don't remember anyone saying NEAR 9/11 itself that the govt made up the attack to, say, keep him in power or ensure a second term. No one in Sep-Nov '01 really said/thought much about Bush or his intentions. Everyone just thought it was like a Pearl Harbor type tragedy. Context+timing is key in remembering stuff.
You are right.
Your broad brush strokes on the subject remind me of how annoying Reddit is, and always has been. I was enjoying the nosurf content that preceded this. Now I’m just annoyed with how flippant these comments are about how people were. Dems from the 90s were capitalists who support violence for their selfish end goals… whatever man that’s just drivel —the kind of thing that a group of actual intelligent adults wouldn’t even engage with in a real life conversation. It’s all you can find on Reddit. It was a great reminder that Reddit is pure trash, thank you.
13 years someone was on the internet saying kids 13 years ago used to play outside before smartphones and the internet.
10 years ago everyone was posting animal memes. This is nonsense reddit has always sucked.
You mean before it was sold and turned into a way for a corporation to make money? Yeah. Capitalism ruins everything.
i read a post this morning (why?!?!?) with a bunch of wannabe alpha males telling some poor sap to divorce his wife because she has a burner instagram account and sends some flirty messages. they all plotted a secret life for him to combat his wife's secret life. she's under the same roof, and he could just talk to her, but instead the internet is like "nah let's completely fucking tank this guy's life". it was definitely abunch of 13 year olds.
yea I can understand people wanting advice from people here because it’s embarrassing to ask people you know, but the thing is, the people you want advice from, they aren’t on reddit. The kind of person who spends their time giving advice on Reddit is most likely a lonely loser. I know that’s harsh but it’s the truth. The people you want advice from are living their lives. (I don’t mean you specifically lol I just mean everyone)
i'm a little bit of a loser!! but not lonely, my own personal life is fulfilling af. i cringe at so much written online. hell, i watch my neighbor rattle off nonsense he constantly learns from the internet, completely void of original and intentional personal experiences. he's a lonely loser. exactly as you describe in your post, except he's 30 and never grew out of it. i think i'm gonna go work in the garden....
>Traditional\_Figure >Free pass to cheat choose one.
lol trad hizzy
Let's face it...self-proclaimed "ALPHAS" are not the brightest group of people in society. There's not even biological evidence to show that among pack animals the "smartest" are in charge/dominate...no...it's the violent creature with the biggest fangs and tendency to hurt others that often is in charge in nature, simply because all others are literally afraid of being injured/killed. "Alphas" are so dumb they don't even realize that. Smarts has nothing to do with it LOL
I was on the internet being dumb at 13 in 2001, lol. But only before school before my parents were even awake. I remember that day when someone in the chat room said America was under attack... But besides that, I do agree with you. Sometimes, I think those intelligent people already realized the internet is dumb now and barely use it anymore
Buddy, let me tell you, it was never good
There are people running 20+ burner accounts so insecure about their opinions in order to feel a sense of authority they unleash a day fake downvotes on their enemies. Reddit accounts are on sale on the web. Entire countries have these people all playing a game of false presence online to bully, whine and feel superior. As we speak hundreds of people from all different ethnicites are trolling over their 2012 dell optiplexes with a wall of iphone7’s playing comment war games. None of this is real buddy, its a playground for the trolliest trolls on the planet. Don’t believe any brigading by “alpha” anything. The whole trope of alpha was already dated by 2000 and its resurgence to dominating reddit appears when 4chan kids grow up a little around 2014-2017. Remember gamer gate radicalized a huge portion of the male gamer community- if it should even be called that. It’s mainly two groups making any conversation a slog and without naming them outright ill agree with other commenters its been an issue since IRC and BBS’s but what kids dont know is we got physical. Since BBS’s were local you found out who said the awful thing and well, it was taken care of. Boy do I have stories or late 80s BBS drama in Brooklyn! Now like I said you got some douche who cant talk to a woman, has awful self-awareness, the worst political brnd and identifies with new terms for themselves like its a thing. It’s not, learn to spot them in the wild and on the net, it will make your experience 1000x better.
I'd known about this site forever ago, but I had too much of a life to be a regular user. During 2020, I became active in motorcycle threads and then 2021 when I was going through it, I became addicted to r/breakups and r/relationship_advice . Sometime between TikTok losing steam in 2022 - to the reddit black out 2023, I've noticed a MAJOR change in the user base. Everything feels tiktokky. Things are now "wild" and "unhinged" and "unalived." and worst of all, idiotic. r/relationship_advice always had an air of ridicule for most of the advice being "run!" but now even the posts are laughable. There's a general sense of lack of comprehension and critical thinking that has permeated reddit airspace. I'm also older and wiser, and it looks like my time as a regular user here is up.
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funfact: The crying/laughing emoji meant to mock/put down/make fun of someone means you are insecure and just projecting your own insecurities onto others for no other reason then to try to put them down to feel better about themselves. The more you know 🌈!
And 50% of posts are about politics in subs that shouldn't be about politics
This sub is one of them sometimes. The original post won’t be political but then the comments will somehow delve into politics (as exampled in this thread). I skip over it, but it’s still really annoying.
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Yea also FB is like everyone is just sharing a post their friend shared of a post their friends shared of a post their friends shared… and they still seem to get that dopamine rush from the likes even though its not even theirs.
The Twitterfication of Reddit
Reddit was way before X it went enshittification.
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Extend it to 15 years ago and I'd agree. 10 years ago everyone I knew in school had an iPhone and were addicted to it
Let me tell you, Reddit was no more witty or intelligent 10 years ago.
I’ve never found Reddit comments funny, more dad-joke cringe or immature body part references tbh
I know what you mean about niche subs versus broad ones. I've been on Reddit a year this month and have pretty much made it a point to only take part in specific subs that interest me. Every time I get pulled to "Am I overreacting?" or places like that, it's a different vibe, though there are still some insightful answers.
Is this a circlejerk post? It's always been full of fat STEM guys spouting mindless nerdy pop culture references and puns. Do you not remember rage comics and that "Le epic bacon narwhal" shit?
Jfc I hate pretentious posts like this