Anyone else who used to be on Reddit in the early 2010s remember how it used to be a Wild West?
Anyone else who used to be on Reddit in the early 2010s remember how it used to be a Wild West?
This comment was in a post about a guy who openly spilled secrets then got fired.
https://www.reddit.com/r/golf/comments/1dynric/rip_to_the_augusta_ama_guy_yesterday_who_was_not/
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I've been on reddit since the fall of digg. It was a wild time that's for sure.
I remember when they had reddit meetups. I stupidly brought my toddler thinking it was going to be family friendly. The places they hosted were peoples workplaces. One guy rented a limo. Beer was given away for free. Some women walked around shirtless and one creep was taking videos. Feeling unsafe, I left. Then I got a email about how the hosts were looking for the creep because he may have committed a crime, and was asking for money to pay for the broken office equipment.
Wild time.
Same. It was a really fun unique place for a long time.
I’ve been on Reddit for 15 years and haven’t really noticed any shift for the most part. The only thing I find unbearable is the amount of bots and karma whoring reposting that goes on. The culture I feel is the same.
That's wild. I've only been there 5.5 yrs and I've noticed dramatic shifts in the culture as it's become popular and profit focused
Same, I was on it for more than a decade. There's definitely been dramatic shifts. Dunno what small community that other poster stuck to to not see any changes over a decade and a half, but it must have been fun for them.
This is the other poster
I used to on for about 10 and noticed a dramatic shift but on the other hand for years I was only looking at gaming subs then started looking at the more common ones. So that could possibly be part of it but it still seemed to get worse over time to me.
I unsubscribed to all the gaming subs around gamergate, holy shit everything went downhill so quickly and never really recovered. We're seeing the effects of it to this day.
I refused to participate in gaming communities online for a long time after that, only looked at my RSS feeds for news/official announcements. The migration to Lemmy last year has me participating in them a bit more again, as long as I don't tell anyone I'm playing a Nintendo game, lol.
Gamergate??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)
Literally the event that accelerated the bullshit "Woke Video Games" pushback we see mouth breathers spewing in gaming spaces today. I believe this is what spawned r/KotakuInAction and the whole "It's About Ethics™️ in Gaming Journalism" as well, but someone correct me if I'm wrong.
These exact talking points and methods were then taken up by the alt-right to propel the culture war into the mainstream, and welcome to 2024.
The comments alone were a huge shift.
14 and change, it definitely had multiple, noticeable shifts.
And if you didn't notice, you probably only stuck to a handful of communities, because they changed how the front page works several times, and what communities are default. All of those changed the feel by a lot.
Each change may not have affected each sub equally hard, default subs turned to shit, subs that got turned off of default finally got the reality check they needed, and when they started banning entire subs, there were noticeably less shitty people from time to time as they pruned.
Again, if you stuck to smaller subs, or even mid sized ones but didn't interact a ton, or just didn't log on every day, I could see how you may not have noticed.
They definitely ramped up moderation, and the administration got a lot more heavy-handed over the last few years, clearly (in hindsight) in preparation for the big change last year.
I was never part of any of those controversial subs like fat people hate or watch people die.
I never went to /all/ either.
Just stuck to regular subs like news, fitness, some niche hobbies etc. If anything, the niche hobby subs got better since there was more people. Fitness did get overly moderated but I just moved to fitness over 30 sub instead and it was fine.
Some of the bigger subs became shit shows, but they were kind of like since their inception.
Firing Victoria was annoying since I think she did good AMA. Getting rid of third party apps is the biggest shittiest thing that I experienced which is why I came to Lemmy in the first place.
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.
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.
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.".
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.
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.
God, remember Ron Paul? Those were the good ol days
Idk man, there were real communities where folks knew each other back then. There's very little of that anymore because moderating those subs is a thankless full time job and the rest got massive. /r/CripplingAlcoholism is a good example - back around 2010 it was a close-knit group of drunks, by 2018 or so it was just a swamp.
/r/CenturyClub and the related subs were some of the best places on the internet back ~15 years ago. I deleted my old account that was in it ages ago and haven't bothered rejoining since I passed the threshold, but even what, 8 years ago when I did that it was already way different.
Game subreddits went way downhill, too.
The overall quality of the site is much worse than it used to be.
I remember when I could post to the firefly sub and banter with the same 20 or so people every week, then one day something hit the front page and a flood of people came in.
Everything turned from thought provoking discussions about what little lore we did have and overanalysing every episode, to "this is what the actors do now" and "here's an image with a quote from the show" maybe an art post of original content here and there.