This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

all 14 comments

[–]creesch 23 points24 points  (1 child)

I honestly don't think this is something of the last few months or the last year. The same observation has been made many times and can often be attributed to the "honeymoon effect" where at first when you discover ready it is all fun and games until you have been in there for a while and you start to notice the flaws.

However you are not completely wrong, when a group gets bigger and has a great influx of new people it becomes really difficult to stay a community and often content quality will degrade.

There is even a name for this; The fluff principle:

The most dangerous thing for the frontpage is stuff that's too easy to upvote. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. An amusing cartoon takes less. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero, because people vote it up without even reading it.

Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.

source

If you are interested in these kinds of things I strongly suggest you browse a bit in older topics, they contain a lot of information, observations and theories that is really interesting to read. In the future we hope to catalog a lot of it in a subreddit wiki, if the admins finally make them available , but for now you have to browse and explore it like this.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One idea is to depress value of front page up/downvotes, relative to the value of votes if you click into a post's comments section... like how you go to a user's personal page and votes you make on that page aren't counted after 3-4 votes.

[–][deleted] 17 points18 points  (7 children)

There should honestly be no defaults. New users should default to a NSFW-free version of /r/all and then they can select individual subs on their own.

[–]arcsesh 14 points15 points  (5 children)

Subreddit discovery and explanation of how reddit works to new users is not near good enough for this

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (3 children)

They wouldn't need to know if they could see every non-NSFW sub. And most redditors honestly don't care about subscribing or not subscribing: Most just come to the front page to look at links regardless of source.

You can always put a sidebar FAQ showing new users how to subscribe if it's that important.

[–]special2plumsfor1 -1 points0 points  (2 children)

This works. Users always notice, read and obey the sidebar.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Pretty sure the ones who won't probably don't give a shit about what they are and aren't subscribed to.

[–]Algernon_Asimov -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Actually, as I've learned recently, many reddit apps don't show sidebars for people browsing subreddits. Even the /.compact version of reddit for mobile browsers (which is how I browse reddit on the go) doesn't show sidebars. And, more and more people are browsing through apps and mobile devices.

So, it's not that they don't give a shit. Many of them just don't see the sidebars in the first place.

[–]Jay238 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Very true. I never really browsed the front page, but just typed up subreddits I already knew, or recently discovered. To a new user, it could take some time to figure out how things work. Since I have an Alien Blue app on my iPod, it was a bit easier for me.

[–]seeegma 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I agree. Also I'm pretty sure /r/all is already NSFW-free if one is not logged in.

[–]escalat0r 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I noticed this in /r/WTF too.

Many post have several hundred net upvotes and sometimes under 20 comments.

It's basically a picdump.

I think/hope many users will move to Imgur since they will/have (I actually don't know) implement a system where you can submit directly to Imgur.

Imho Reddit isn't the right place for this upvote and move on culture.

[–]joetromboni 1 point2 points  (1 child)

if you want a low upvotes to comment ratio, then I think /r/shittyadviceanimals has em all beat. Good posts get 2 or 3 hundred upvotes with maybe a handful of comments

[–]BullNiro 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Debate a communist is also up there.

[–]Chronometrics 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I do not find it at all obvious that r/funny is not funny. In fact, I find many posts on it amusing, and I often share them with my SO.

I do wish you would all stop being so elitist about the default subs. They may not be the default subs of your youth, a whole one year ago, but that doesn't make them trash heaps or valueless.

I won't discuss this in length, since I'm tired of being downvoted for saying the default subs have merit, but suffice it to say that I came to reddit for r/funny, but I stayed for ToR.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/13179a/rfunny_is_no_longer_a_community/
www.reddit.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-34
110500
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:VDBOIS5M6OXMKTEROEPSB4NKCTI3FU24
<urn:uuid:80ad4362-1d0e-4b91-af78-fb589474006c>
2017-08-20T10:11:08Z
151.101.33.140
text/html
sha1:P7SUMAFUGCM3GTCWLCUVMPJ2WEXPGVIP
<urn:uuid:451449ef-b378-4a08-acc6-66e1c73ac39a>
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/13179a/rfunny_is_no_longer_a_community/
response
<urn:uuid:881faf59-3447-4952-ad6d-03349602d0bb>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-178-27-212.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-34
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf