• Buelldozer
    14•6 months ago

    I’ve been on Reddit for 15 years and haven’t really noticed any shift for the most part.

    That simply isn’t possible. Reddit changed dramatically since the Digg V4 exodus. The site itself has been constantly updated and redesigned / re-engineered adding and removing tons of functionality at least three times. The politics have literally swung all over the place from “tech-bro libertarian” to “conservative” to “progressive”. Content has changed radically in both scope and focus (AMAs are out while corporate run subreddits are in) and leadership has been all over the place.

    • @[email protected]
      0•6 months ago

      Politics themselves have changed a lot over the past 15 years - I’m not sure if that has anything to do with the sub. Hell, even I changed from Republican to Democrat in that time frame.

      I still use old.reddit and it’s pretty much been the exact same except for a few ads that RES takes care of anyway.

      Definitely agree with the AMAs. That’s not going to change no matter the platform however and not exclusive to Reddit.

      • Buelldozer
        8•6 months ago

        I still use old.reddit and it’s pretty much been the exact same

        15 years ago there was no karma system. 15 years ago there was no Reddit rewards like Gold. Neither of those two things are related to old.reddit.com but they both had major impacts on the website but yeah, sure, “Nothing has changed in 15 years.”.

        • @[email protected]
          0•6 months ago

          Karma has been on Reddit since I created my account. In fact, it’s been part of Reddit almost from the very start. How did you come by your information?

          As for Reddit gold, it was introduced in 2010. But what relevance does gold have to content? It seems pointless and neither adds nor detracts from the anything other than people’s bank accounts.

          • Buelldozer
            8•6 months ago

            How did you come by your information?

            I should have specified Comment Karma. You’re correct that Post Karma has existed from Day 1.

            Bringing in Comment Karma had a downside, it fed the trolls. You can see in this post here, from about 9 years ago, when Reddit had finally had enough of negative karma trolls (people trying to get the lowest comment karma possible) and stopped tallying it after a certain point.

            Things sometimes get a bit blurry for me after all these years. I’d been on there so long I remember when Reddit added the ability for users to create sub-reddits!

            But what relevance does gold have to content?

            Reddit Rewards, like Gold, provided a visibility boost to both Posts and Comments. The_Donald famously abused this to keep the Reddit front page full of MAGA content. It eventually got so bad that Reddit Inc had to introduce emergency FP content filtering, something they’d resisted doing for years, while they rejiggered the algorithm in order to stop it. It was subsequently abused on comments all over reddit to keep something visible that otherwise would have been auto-collapsed due to downvotes. It was famously abused again because it was possible to send messages to someone, even someone who had blocked you, if you sent them a Reddit Reward.

            Speaking of changes there’s another one. User blocking. Reddit didn’t have that 15 years ago either.

            Reddit was a long and wild ride and a lot of things changed after I showed up in April of 2008.