Reddit’s strength has always been its community

There’s something nobody talks about much when it comes to reddit. It’s that the internet has moved past community. It now revolves around monetized “influencers”. Nobody fosters community for the sake of it anymore.

Reddit has outlived its time. It’s apparent they’ve been trying to evolve with the times but the platform isn’t fundamentally geared towards this coporatized era of the internet. They’ve been trying to pivot the platform into social media style. Users now have profiles with avatars, bio text, followers/subscribers. There’s now a social graph. The big picture with these things is they’re trying to make it into a corporatized social platform like all the rest.

The problem isn’t reddit itself. It’s the internet that isn’t geared towards community anymore.

Free speech versus civility. Say what you want but don’t think you won’t get punched in the face for being an asshole. On the internet you should absolutely be able to get punched in the face. The virtual version of that is being modded. Which is apparently tantamount to human rights violations these days so mods have had to walk on eggshells. It’s no wonder the old guard have been leaving in droves.

There was never a time in the past when you wouldn’t receive a digital face punching for being an ass. As time went on people started giving up on reddit. Especially mods who cared to foster communities people wanted to use. Mods became glorified bot operators. “Automated customer service lines” as someone else said. And so the trolls have completely run amok on that platform. Usually there is no getting hold of a real human moderator. Other times they’re so checked out they themselves get trolled into banning anyone but the griefers.

Because reddit is largely devoid of expertise by now. This is talking in circles. The point is that the user base well stocked with a healthy breadth of knowledge is able to call out bad posts. We both agree subreddits aren’t working. It is for these reasons. Relying on sole expert moderators doesn’t work.

The user base was supposed to be the main arbiter of such things.

Mods weren’t ever supposed to anybody but janitors. That isn’t in a derogatory tone. The anonymous userbase was the original value proposition of reddit. The expertise came from random nobodies. Usernames didn’t matter on reddit because nobody looked at it. It seems this is long forgotten history from a time when the internet was primarily IT nerds.

By the time mods were becoming somebodies, reddit was past its prime. Once the power structures started forming it was over. As we’re seeing now reddit is hinges on single point of failure. The expertise among the userbase has gradually left the platform long before this API stuff. A long slow process years in the making.

Internet janitors are a dirty but necessary job not unlike the real world. Somebody has to scrub toilets and pick produce. People are a-holes on the internet who need to be put in their place. Reddit has long since become too hoity-toity for that. Now mods are supposed to be experts in their field. Too high to be digital toilet scrubbers. Too scared of “muh free speech” to janitor the Greater Fuckwads anymore. So reddit is an asylum run by the inmates. Expertise can’t be assed to contribute to a dumpster.

On another note. The imgur purge has also contributed to the barren wasteland of reddit content history. So many dead posts.