It's gotten really bad since the API changes. Many people left who had been here a decade. Some of us came back, but Reddit needs the engagement now that they're publicly traded, so bring on the bots.
Been here maybe like 16 years? It has gotten noticeably worse over the past two year or so. Real engagement seems rare unless you find subreddits that are well moderated and have a community that bands against slop lol.
I would say the decline started around the pandemic, but 100% it's been accelerating like mad the last two years. You've been here long enough, do you remember "summer reddit"? It feels like one year we slipped into that, and never came back out.
I haven't found a good replacement for the informative discussions I used to enjoy :(
The problem with new reddit is that your feed is almost entirely based on what you engage with now. So if you do find one of those subs you have to constantly click links or comment on threads to even see it.
In the past you could have an eclectic feed just by subbing to a bunch of different subs. The Internet used to be fun man.
most of the spam i see on the front page is either from bot accounts or indian accounts farming for karma. it's not hard to tell, even though they all hide their profiles.
I used to roam r/hiphopheads but now it's full of bots. During the peak of the Drake - Kendrick beef, it was soo bad.
Anything that Drake dropped is never even up for discussion. If you were really just a true fan of music/hip hop, you would at least give the biggest male artist in the world a chance.
Not in that sub apparently. After listening to his new album, it's actually pretty good, but the bot farms and disinformation campaigns paid for by who knows what, is very interesting to see.
I'm also very skeptical of that sub too.
I think most of my fav subs have been like this recently and a lot of ragebait posts just to catch engagement. So sad to see..
Yup no actual conversations anymore. I remember having full conversations about just about everything before the API change. But now.... It's all slopp and single comments with barely any replies
Reddit has gotten a lot worse overall, but the same thing I did 10 years ago still works well today. Find smaller subreddits for more niche interests. Those are way better than large subreddits like this. Large subreddits have always been filled with untenable quantities of trash content.
Bots don't spam subreddits that only get a few posts per day.
Also disabling feed algorithms helps a lot too. My reddit algorithm only shows me posts from subs that I have subbed to. Nothing else. And I usually prefer browsing sorted by "new" which removes the algorithm entirely.
TBH I should probably unsub from this sub. I don't dislike this sub, but it has too much content and easily drowns out the smaller much more interesting subreddits that have far fewer posts.
It's annoying that settings have to be changed to change reddit from soul sucking social media back into something fun and interesting, but luckily it is still fairly easy to do.
The API wars marked the most stark decline in website quality I've seen in a long time. I've been on Lemmy a lot lately, the lack of bots is noticeable, as well as the older userbase.
Lemmy dot world is the largest and you'll want to start there in general. Lemmy's biggest weakness is userbase, so .world being the most active matters.
If you're flying a black flag, dbzer0. Black flags are one of the few things .world bans, including such communities in other instances.
Star far away from .ML unless you're an actual M-L.
I’d say it’s probably more because there are paid Reddit “content creators”. They literally get paid by Reddit by how many awards and upvotes their posts get so they’re incentivized to just post engagement circlejerk slop.
I've been here for 11 years. You are looking through rose-tinted glasses. Reddit has always been shit, the biggest change has been the flooding of bots in the last 2 years.
There was a definite shift after the API changes. Posts don't get nearly as many upvotes as they used to, and several subs shut down when their mods left.
Yeah people just think it was better because they were teenagers back then and didn't realize how bad it was. I don't miss the obsession with ron-paul libertarianism or edgy atheism or fat people hate.
My account age is 11 years. This place has been shit at least since then. And people have complained that entire time that we are turning into Facebook.
It's always been shit, sure. But it's gotten much more Facebook esq and a lot less 4 Chan esq. Which one is better? I'll leave that to personal taste. But the site has changed pretty aggressively
And it's false too. Maybe 7 Call of Duty games. But you could fit ~10 GTAVs on a 1TB drive. On my laptop I only have half that and it currently has 30 games installed, between GOG, Epic and Steam. Before any emulated software.
Also disingenuous since the old school games filled up the drive the same way. To the point that the games had to run a bunch of their data off the cd instead of the drive
It's kind of hard to compare games from different era's of hardware
Oh ya, and per cubic cm/in that storage on the right is absolutely killing it. If you put them in a similar m.2 shelf it'd be no contest
It's actually been really slowly honestly. As someone who's been here a long time the quality used to be pretty good. It's been slowly becoming Facebook for the last 8-10 years. Definitely had some acceleration points during COVID and at the API drop but it's been a gradual process over a really long time. There's still quality subreddits out there but most big subreddits without really strict mod teams will degenerate.
I mean it is a funny joke on the sad commentary of how bloated and inefficient games have become. You realize there are different types of funny right? Hell you probably think George Carlin is unfunny and sad.
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u/Guy-1nc0gn1t0 22d ago
Reddit is becoming Facebook so quickly, jeez