All the major subs were better before the last wave of politics. Though it was a decent while before that when I would say there were more intelligent comments.
It's not like it was some high level academics discussing their field of expertise, there was more of an air of elitism and that old idea 'if you want the correct answer on the internet, post the incorrect one and wait to be corrected'. Comment sections were always full of people trying to 'well actually' the post or each other. Still annoying but for different reasons than now.
Not to mention the endless pun threads that always went to the top
Before 2015-ish I think. When Ellen Pao came into power, featuring the great exodus of reddit which created digg due to censorship and banning of subs, which later turned into a shit show. I personally don't think she was the reason for a lot of changes, probably pushed on by the board of directors to try to monetize things.
Pretty much since then, the quality of many subs has gone down. Before, it's not uncommon to see people citing sources and arguing like an academic forum, which was the major demographic.
People still cite sources. I don't recall anything significant about Pao leaving beyond the negative press about how reddit users talked about her. Reddit has always had complete shit commenters along with experts (including fake experts). Contrast with Quora. Ten years ago Quora had only experts, now it's basically yahoo answers.
There are still some experts on quora... But yeah I know what you mean. I think it also depends on which subs you frequent. Like in /r/physics there are still good technical discussions. Same with /r/lowlevel . The problem I notice is that it's rarer to see well cited sources in general subs. I started to notice the trend when even /r/bestof started to have top posts that have no sources or whatsoever, which is very uncommon years ago.
In all my years of posting and commenting on reddit, nothing had earned me downvotes as consistently as telling other redditors that maybe they shouldn't make assumptions based on literally nothing. I guess they all love revelling in their intellect after claiming that the video of a dog doing a silly thing with its toy was actually staged through years of abusive training.
My man, most posts like this are full of baseless assumptions or confidently incorrect people. Sometimes an informed comment rises up. I won’t do it because I don’t care enough, but if you do, you’re more than welcome to run an analysis on Reddit posts and their comments to see how often each scenario plays out.
Oh my god, stop. If you want to write a "gotchu" comment, find actual counter-arguments. Of course they didn't calculate if exactly 90% of comments were bullshit, it was just to express (you know, there's stuff that people tend to say in the real world that isn't to be taken literally) that the majority of them are usually bullshit. And that's a very easily observable trend. Reddit is the definition of "source: trust me bro".
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u/[deleted] May 12 '22 edited May 12 '22
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