That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
The quality has been dropping for years and years. I miss reddit from a decade ago, when niche little community things could happen leaving waves across the site.
Now we just get a ton of the same things over and over, hardcore advertising and mass manipulation. It’s no longer the tiny little site nobody knew about but is instead the big focus for all the businesses out there that think there’s a market to be had. Plus there’s the herd mentality that always comes from giant populations on a platform.
Don’t get me wrong, there are still niche communities but they just don’t have the same flavor of cohesion that they did in earlier times.
One thing I did on Apollo was take advantage of the powerful filtering it provided.
I keyword filtered every politician, and hot political topic. Then for years I filtered subreddits from r/all. I filtered political subs, ragebait, “look at stupid people”, Twitter hottakes, memes, and porn (yes porn eventually pops up in all if you filter the other stuff enough).
What I had created with my years of filtering was an r/all that was actually great to see. Tons of niche original content subreddits that I’d never have thought to look for popped up. It was great seeing people posting in their communities for the enjoyment of it, not caring they were getting 5000000000 upvotes. When comments complained about r/all being trash it often took me a minute to realize that my r/all was very different than what most people saw.
I’m really going to miss that specially filtered r/all.