Reddit's main problem is that they spent years building their user base as a site to find 'jailbait' porn (it was by far the largest search result that brought people to Reddit for a long time).
That created a toxic culture, which allowed stormfront and similar groups to use it as a recruitment ground for racists.
Reddit still refuses to do anything about it. The 'quarantined' a bunch of truly vile subreddits but all that does is give them a place where they can coordinate brigades of the public subs out of view.
This isn't how I remember the culture years ago. I looked at reddit every now and then, but I really came over six years ago during the big Digg v4 revolt when Digg fucked up their site. At the time, I remember being really impressed how many of the comments on reddit were more personally supportive, which I rarely saw elsewhere - for example, I learned a ton from r/fitness back then.
Yes, there were the more odious subreddits, but it was perfectly possible to surf around reddit and never be bothered by those.
The culture of reddit definitely seems to have gotten much worse over the past 5 years - to me, it just generally seems meaner, and there feels like there is more trolling overall. Even simple, seemingly straightforward posts seem more likely to spark some sort of vitriolic debate. Perhaps it was inevitable as reddit grew, but it still kind of sucks.
The very nature of Reddit is that each person will have different experience & memories: the truth of Reddit is that thre is no Reddit - there are only subreddits.
So, unsubscribe from most default subreddits, choose your communities and you'll be like me - having a 99% positive experience !
> (it was by far the largest search result that brought people to Reddit for a long time)
I'm pretty skeptical of this. I can maybe see my way to believing that googling "jailbait" beats out any single one of ["pic" "pics" "funny" "joke" ...], but the normal SFW subreddits have always been vastly bigger than the porn subs. I'm also really skeptical of the causation chain that leads from jailbait -> Stormfront -> general toxic culture. Do you have any harder evidence of this?
That's a pretty big stretch -- reddit's original audience and content were pretty similar to the hacker news audience (with more tolerance for silliness). The introduction of sub-reddit's expanded (and diluted) the audience, but it's not like reddit's origins were sketchy.
Every single thing you said is incorrect. Reddit ranked high when searching for jailbait, that does not mean jailbait was the largest search that brought people to reddit. The "toxic culture" predates the jailbait sub. And stormfront does not recruit on reddit, reddit recruits for stormfront. The insane, dishonest, censorious leftism that runs rampant on reddit is driving people to become racist, and sexist, and homophobic, etc etc. If you are going to be accused of it no matter what, you tend to start resenting the people you are constantly accused of hating. And they ban subs that brigade. Quarantines kill subs constantly, it doesn't help them. Also many of the subs being punished are in no way vile. They are just too popular and not leftist.
> Also many of the subs being punished are in no way vile. They are just too popular and not leftist.
You mean subreddits like /r/european and /r/truecels? Where death threats against women in interracial relationships were common? Where it was common to wish rape on women who don't hate Muslims? Where the former subreddit routinely called for ethnic cleansing and the latter subreddit talked about how western women are part of a corrupt plot to deny sex to men? Where AutoModerator was set up to respond to the word "entitled" by saying that constant access to sex is a fundamental need for men and should be considered a human right?
Everyone: I'd recommend popping onto /r/againsthatesubreddits and checking out the myriad posts on /r/european and /r/truecels AHS has linked to. You might have to dig through the archives, though, because both of those places were quarantined a while back.
That created a toxic culture, which allowed stormfront and similar groups to use it as a recruitment ground for racists.
Reddit still refuses to do anything about it. The 'quarantined' a bunch of truly vile subreddits but all that does is give them a place where they can coordinate brigades of the public subs out of view.