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I always feel strange being nostalgic about a website. Like I don't feel weird being nostalgic about a classic episode of The Simpsons or a rock concert, but fo

I always feel strange being nostalgic about a website. Like I don't feel weird being nostalgic about a classic episode of The Simpsons or a rock concert, but for YouTube or Newgrounds or now Reddit, I do. I've used reddit for like 7 years. Gleamed helpful info from it. Even won a contest off that site (still got that postcard of all the admin's autographs). Yet my continuing theme with that site was their social experiments. Some of them were one time events, like the Reddit Jet Blue Travels or naming a whale Mr. Splashy Pants or the Rally For Sanity (okay, we technically tagged along for that event, but I was the ones drawn to that pilgrimage). Most of them were short lived, like Soapier or The redditor zine. However, there were successful experiments like IAMA (we finally got the President in the end after making joke IAMA requests), Secret Santa, and shit, we even got Snoop Dogg as an honorary mod of /r/trees. That was the thing with reddit, it was this general forum that various people showed up on who wanted to try new things or learn something new. Sometimes they took it too far and sometimes they had real life effects. Whatever redditors tried, it was something that broke the regular order of things. Hidden away in the subreddits, I can still see these attempts at trying something new. Try Paleo, donate a pizza, ask a scientist or historian for detailed answers, try not to jack off, meetup with like-minded people, try to be more productive with GTD, try to have this obscure politician win an election, or watch these obscure movies on netflix. Now the site has gotten so big, so many stuff has been done on there, I'm likely just skimming the surface here. Anyways, Jedberg, Raldi, if you're still on this thread, thanks for your early contributions to that site. It has brought me fond memories and even a few friends...who I can assure you are not the steretypical reddit weirdos. For reals!

astrodust 11y ago
I think a lot of people feel the same way about Reddit as they do about The Simpsons: It used to be good. Like so many mega-scale communities before it, Reddit is a case study in what happens if you let your user base grow faster than your cultural core can assimilate it. To get the good content you need to dig deeper and deeper now, hide yourself away from the deluge of garbage that is the top-level groups. /r/programming remains fairly lively, but it's still a weak substitute for what it could be given proper community oversight.
- ilovecomputers 11y ago
  Yeah, but that popularity gave us the president and celebrities. Even better, I've seen more instances where someone would post a missing person or object or ask what a mysterious bug was and you'd have high chance of someone successfully completing that request. Tapping into more people for help can be as much of blessing as it is a curse.
- TTPrograms 11y ago
  Eternal September appears to be universal property of online communities - IMO Reddit has tolerated it better than most thanks to it's ability to fractally segment itself into smaller and smaller communities that don't observe these issues. The defaults are garbage, of course, but so would be literally any other community that size, so I don't really think it should reflect significantly on the nature of Reddit. They really need to start onboarding with "What are 5 things you're interested in?" instead of the defaults, though, or else the average first-time user will have no idea that this variety in community quality exists.
  - NeutronBoy 11y ago
    > Eternal September appears to be universal property of online communities - IMO Reddit has tolerated it better than most thanks to it's ability to fractally segment itself into smaller and smaller communities that don't observe these issues. I think this is the key - Eternal September doesn't generally impact Reddit as a whole (except for the default or frontpage), but rather it impacts each individual subreddit. However, each subreddit this happens to then goes and makes a new, separate subreddit to essentially start again.
    - alttab 11y ago
      Entropy will still build up in the software, infrastructure (both human and hardware), monetization model ("my highly targeted customer base keeps moving subs, and they have ad-block!") and an accumulation of bad "federal-level" decisions that get made and held reddit-wide. The question is when this will this burden begin to stifle the creation of new "escape subs."

astrodust 11y ago

I think a lot of people feel the same way about Reddit as they do about The Simpsons: It used to be good. Like so many mega-scale communities before it, Reddit is a case study in what happens if you let your user base grow faster than your cultural core can assimilate it. To get the good content you need to dig deeper and deeper now, hide yourself away from the deluge of garbage that is the top-level groups. /r/programming remains fairly lively, but it's still a weak substitute for what it could be given proper community oversight.

ilovecomputers 11y ago
Yeah, but that popularity gave us the president and celebrities. Even better, I've seen more instances where someone would post a missing person or object or ask what a mysterious bug was and you'd have high chance of someone successfully completing that request. Tapping into more people for help can be as much of blessing as it is a curse.
TTPrograms 11y ago
Eternal September appears to be universal property of online communities - IMO Reddit has tolerated it better than most thanks to it's ability to fractally segment itself into smaller and smaller communities that don't observe these issues. The defaults are garbage, of course, but so would be literally any other community that size, so I don't really think it should reflect significantly on the nature of Reddit. They really need to start onboarding with "What are 5 things you're interested in?" instead of the defaults, though, or else the average first-time user will have no idea that this variety in community quality exists.
- NeutronBoy 11y ago
  > Eternal September appears to be universal property of online communities - IMO Reddit has tolerated it better than most thanks to it's ability to fractally segment itself into smaller and smaller communities that don't observe these issues. I think this is the key - Eternal September doesn't generally impact Reddit as a whole (except for the default or frontpage), but rather it impacts each individual subreddit. However, each subreddit this happens to then goes and makes a new, separate subreddit to essentially start again.
  - alttab 11y ago
    Entropy will still build up in the software, infrastructure (both human and hardware), monetization model ("my highly targeted customer base keeps moving subs, and they have ad-block!") and an accumulation of bad "federal-level" decisions that get made and held reddit-wide. The question is when this will this burden begin to stifle the creation of new "escape subs."