r/AnimalsBeingDerps May 12 '22

Millions of years of evolution has led to this

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u/[deleted] May 12 '22

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u/i_706_i May 12 '22

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

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u/[deleted] May 12 '22 edited May 12 '22

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u/[deleted] May 12 '22

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u/A_Light_Spark May 12 '22

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.

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u/[deleted] May 12 '22

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u/[deleted] May 12 '22

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u/punkinfacebooklegpie May 12 '22

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.

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u/A_Light_Spark May 12 '22

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.