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I don’t think Reddit can be salvaged as unless you’re pretty far-left, there’s nothing really there for you. Even if you’re fairly middle of the road centrist, the pile on that comes from suggesting things that would be absolutely normal in the offline world is incredibly huge. And so if you try to simply allow crime think, not even supporting it, you’ll drive off the existing user base who think communist ideology and radical woke are normal discourse. So you’d buy it, make the changes, demod as necessary to allow freer discussion, and all the users flee to something that suits their tastes.
The other thing about fora that big is that it’s actually really hard to have a real discussion unless the topic is really niche. If you aren’t commenting on a popular topic within ten minutes of it being posted, save yourself the effort because nobody is going to read past the first 50, and you’re likely number 10,000. That’s not nearly as conducive to conversation as a place like this or other small fora where even if I come upon a thread I care about later, it’s still at least plausible that I can do something other than shout into the void.
Finally, outside of product reviews (which I suspect are likely bots anyway) most of the comments are just not that insightful. I attribute a lot of this to the speed necessary to get a post actually read. The time it takes to compose and edit a post to say something interesting means that you can get swamped out of the top 50-100 (the zone people will read) by the time you finish writing the post. This leads directly to a lot of stupid one-line “dad jokes” and puns, a ton of “this. Came here to say this, I agree with this,” threads that are just painful to read. Add in that the majority of the population of Reddit is college students who think they’re intellectuals, often with no real insight into anything they’re reading (and again, the speed of comment-writing necessary to actually be read at all means nobody actually reads the linked article) means that what you get is whatever you’d find in a freshman college course at best. No an interpretation, but actually pretty much what you’d find in a freshman class textbook with no understanding of what it means.
It's still alright for some small subs. That's the main thing for quality discussions on reddit (with the downside that you'll have to wait much longer for replies). As soon as the masses of idiots start piling in, it's over.
Even with small subs, they’re a bit better, except that for the most part, the population of Reddit is heavily skewed towards college-aged liberals who think they’re highly intelligent but in main are midwits who don’t understand the difference between their knowledge of a subject from their introduction to [subject] course and real knowledge.
On most subjects, I would absolutely advise against taking advice from Reddit unless you’re running it through an actual expert first, because most of them are basically wrong with great confidence on anything more complicated than the very basics. And the other thing is that people often misrepresent who they are. They’ll give legal advice like they’re a lawyer in legal threads and when you dig into their history they’re either 18-21 and in college, work in a completely unrelated field, or maybe don’t have a job at all. Most of the “tech” people are basically working the help desk, not high level security or programming or anything of the sort.
And this also comes with the problem that you have to find the extremely niche places on Reddit that aren’t full of bots, trolls and people fighting for credit.
They seem to think that acquiring some bits of knowledge has actually made them smarter than they were before. And they think that the confident reproduction of some knowledge, or the appearance of knowledge, will get them the status of an intellectual or professional. They fricking love confident-sounding posts. And it seems like the upvote/downvote system (with instantly visible vote counts in most subs) funnels a lot of activity into circle-jerks.
Maybe I've been lucky in that one of my main interests is hard to fake experience in, so the subs for it are kinda good most of the time.
But as a whole reddit has gone down the drain.
I don’t mind it much as a place to jack around. But all this concern about reclaiming Reddit seems to be based on the idea that there’s something inherently important about Reddit to save or reclaim. It just hasn’t been my experience with the site that it’s anything much more interesting than Tumblr except for left leaning college aged males. All of these places are essentially created as circle jerky places and really are easily taken by entryists.
I’m thinking it’s probably better to simply create a separate set of fora that speak to your interests than trying to save a site that doesn’t offer much value.
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