At first it was all about presenting data in an original looking way. In the end it was about pushing political ideas in your throat using a plain bar graph. It was not about sharing something interesting you found but about taking advantage of a captive audience.
/nextfuckinglevel is so annoying when it gets to /all. Usually it’s some trivial activity that is executed well or someone just doing their job. Nothing “next level” about it at all.
Also any of the large subs that get flooded with fucking TikTok videos. In the beginning everybody pointed out the shitty songs or fake laugh tracks etc, now it seems everyone just gave up and accepted it.
That was an interesting downfall to witness that taught me a lot about how Reddit really operates. I’m the beginning, it was actually a quality alternative to the generic front page repost subs like /damnthatsinteresting.
Then the instant it hit 1 million subscribers, the whole mod team changed, people like Turtle suddenly appeared in the name of “helping out with a sub that grew too fast for existing mods,” and within a few days it was just another trash repost sun.
/r/menslib
It became a god damn misogynist shit show.
How?
It’s very hard finding men’s spaces that don’t quickly devolve into anti-feminism and general misogyny.
Why does anyone need a ‘men’s space’? I’m a man but I just would not be interested in that specifically. This is the Internet and there’s a space for everything specifically. Sounds like a ‘men’s space’ or a ‘women’s space’ are bound to be filled with intolerance for the other genders.
Sometimes people want to talk about their shit with people who can directly relate to it, and would prefer if people who can’t relate aren’t invited to the conversation.
I’m a man but I just would not be interested in that specifically.
There is a gap between “I’m not interested” and “I refuse to understand why someone else would be interested” that’s not really acknowledged here but is important to be able to engage with.
I don’t disagree that gendered spaces are primed to end up displaying a modicum of prejudice against the other, but I don’t agree that this must necessarily be the case.
There are genuine issues facing men that I think we should be allowed and even encouraged to discuss, and I think it’s important that such conversations are had with other men in particular to reduce the stigma surrounding them. So in my mind the goal of such a space isn’t to discourage women from participating, but localizing the discussion so that it’s easier for men to find.
The unfortunate truth is that too many men these days seem to think feminism is out to oppress them, which simply isn’t the case.
It made me so sad. I really enjoyed it early on because they had some real critical self reflection.
I agree that r/dataisbeautiful turned out to be very political. What I saw was that the community was rather united in its political stance and if someone made a post that was out of line with the community’s ideology they got roasted. The reaction was rarely about how the information could have been portrayed more intuitively, or how the data could have been stronger. Those reactions were for posts that were in line. Others were downright attacked. It certainly wasn’t about making data beautiful
A common sight in hyperpoliticized world.
That’s how most subs end up. They have a great idea but eventually you’ve posted all the cool things. Now, you don’t really have anything cool to post that’s on topic and the sub goes downhill. Seen it happen so many times
/r/mapporn is another one that has gone down the spiral, it has a lot of the same problems as /r/dataisbeautiful.
I think the one that frustrated me the most was /r/data_irl, where about half the people in there take the sub’s name literally for some reason and think it’s for actual data in real life, and not a data version of /r/me_irl
There’s quite a few but I’ll give my top 3:
r/TIFU and r/AITA - The former became a repository for preteen fanfiction and the latter became a place for confirmation bias/rhetorical questions looking for validation.
Then there’s r/UnpopularOpinion which ended up being an oxymoron unto itself. I honestly don’t understand how anyone thought that concept would work given that the literal point of a social media discussion platform, that utilizes an upvote/downvote system to determine visibility, is to push popular (highly upvoted) posts to the top/front. Very few people actually upvoted something that was unpopular and instead just upvoted the low hanging fruit popular opinion posts that were ‘controversial’ but still blatantly have a clear majority who support that side that OP took.
r/UnpopularOpinion became a place to either validate some truly reprehensible views or say something well liked for internet points.
Thank you! I was racking my brain trying to recall the word/term for it and self-validation was the one I was trying to think of for the r/AITA, but you’re absolutely right - it can be applied to r/UnpopularOpinion as well.
Most of AITA was fanfic too - just a deeply improbable amount of twins, pregnancies, weddings, and twin pregnancies at weddings. Once I stumbled upon a megapost that was all the ones about food, though, and it was great, because nearly no one bothers to make up a drama about lasagna.
The one silver lining was it brought us the glory that was the “everything in this sub is fake” punchline story, if anyone else remembers that one.
SO. MANY. WEDDINGS.
Imo even with how the downvote/upvote in Reddit work, theoretically speaking there could be ways for r/unpopularopinion to work with some configurations. For example, automatically delete any post that gained a certain amount of upvotes. It’s understandable that upvotes should be given to unpopular but interesting opinions that actually fits the sub, but since it’s been shown that’s not how people do it that behaviour should have been used to keep the content relevant.
A sub “the tenth dentist” (I forget the specific name) had a system where if you agreed with it you down vote, whereas if you disagree you upvote. I think it made moderation probably kind of tricky (they also had a way to flag things as hugely improbable/karma farming) but it at least kept the spirit of truly unpopular opinions at the forefront.
Change the css so that hitting the up arrow downvotes and hitting the down button up votes. The users could use the voting buttons as usual but the unpopular posts and comments would be pushed to the top.
That’d a neat idea. The only real problem I see with it is some users turn the CSS off, but I doubt that’s the majority of users.
It was /r/TIHI for me. It started out with genuinely bizarre and borderline disturbing things being posted, and devolved into half-baked memes and shitposts.
Youtubehaiku made me laugh and cry almost every post. Then it went big and tiktok, vine took that nieche spot so it went downhill. Still doesnt do it as good as that sub. Youtubehaiku is still one of the most subbed inactive subs. It nailed my mixed sense of humor and weirdness, loved it.
r/oddlysatisfying. I remember when it was actually things that were satisfying. Animations were common, and they were really good. At the end, it was just another dump for stuff that barely fit the sub.
I have a different perspective because I actually became active on Reddit for a particular lapidary marketplace - not r/gemstones. but I saw r/gemstones go from a sub extolling the science and beauty of gemstones to a marketplace full of shady dealers trying to disguise their hawking of badly cut stones with sketchy origins. posts that often had to be removed by the mods when the OP wouldn’t take no for an answer.
r/mapporn for me. Originally it was for beautiful high quality, high-resolution maps - the standard was so high that I would have been scared to post anything myself unless I found something exceptional, but eventually it became mainly low-quality (and usually inaccurate) data maps that all get mass-upvoted for some reason.
Very true. The blatant inaccuracy was the worst for me. And people usually just ignored it too.
Worse than ignore it, mostly they seemed to upvote it which is what drove me crazy. Unless there were huge numbers of upvote bots as well.
It became /r/people live-in cities
My favourite subreddit used to be /r/mildlyinteresting, then came /r/interestingasfuck and /r/damnthatsinteresting and I honestly can’t tell the difference between them any more.
Each has become a testbench to make karma in the other two.
There was a point where Ama was big enough to attract some interesting people but Reddit was still small enough that it wasn’t just media circuit. Then it just became another polished, one sided, commercial, media trained nonsense
Maybe /r/malefashionadvice?
I feel like the early days were more, “I’m a normal guy trying to learn how to dress better.” I learned a lot and it improved my wardrobe/ability to dress a bit better. But it felt like it became…something else? Like it was overrun by the kind of people who would unironically buy $100 plain white t-shirts–that sort of thing.
I worked in men’s fashion for almost a decade, and can safely say that sub was hot garbage full of lousy and unhelpful advice from people with such bad taste that I’m not convinced it isn’t a troll sub.
It’s a fashion forum on a site where the stereotypical user is a fedora wearing neckbeard, plus after a point it starts to become self-selecting. Kind of like every EDC post having a knife and flashlight, when the normal person’s “every day carry” is just “wallet, keys, phone”.
At some point in the last few years, it felt like it had become a caricature of itself. Hard to explain, but it felt like every user was the guy that was going to bring back capes.
r/MadeMeSmile devolved into constant reposts and increasing animal abuse. The number of times I would have to report posts for unsafe shit or animal cruelty was really getting to me to me at the end there.
It was by no means the only sub that went in that direction. As others have pointed out, all of Reddit was going down the crapper but that sub for me epitomised how shit Reddit became - repost bots, comment bots, karma farming, fake content that was dangerous or abusive… it had it all.
