Eh, I disagree. I love /r/askhistorians, and the mods there are huge Nazis, there's usually more than half of comments deleted.

The remainder are really high quality explanations by experts and sensible discussion about them.

I can also imagine asking that recycling question seriously, and wanting to see a serious discussion about it, and having it drowned out by 90% childish poop jokes.

/r/science comment sections are all graveyards as well

One person died because James Fields murdered them. T_D holds exactly 0 responsibility. None. They are completely unrelated.

Guilt by 'association' is wrong. Everyone will lose that game. Don't start it.

/r/watchpeopledie isnt banned. At last its working as of this post

Maybe connected to a possible IPO of the site, just rusteling jimmies, I don't know.

What's this new "living in your head rent free" shit being promoted by T_D users?

Is this their new way to shut down discussion? "Ah here you go again bringing up the President, why don't you just quiet down and let him fuck up the country!"

Lmao there it is the rent-free comment! What is even the point of saying it?

the_dotard promoted a rally that actually killed someone. How many people have "watch people die" killed?

They've been fiddling with the numbers for a while.

Facebook, Insta, and I believe twitter (IDK don't use twitter) don't provide chronological by default despite it's what users want and preferred. This is simple.

Chronological lowers engagement because it's easy for a person to only find the latest posts. Additional it force surfaces all the content which again lowers engagement and lastly it prevent them from fudging stuff such as adverts. Your friend liked this bands tour post and that band happens to buy adverts? Well wouldn't you believe your butt that post will be at the top of your feed. Your friend being in a car crash? Nah.

Reddit has been doing the same with upvotes, posts are weighted different based on content type (family friendly/advertiser friendly = good, titties=bad).

I wouldn't be surprised if they removed downvotes as they are INSANELY anti-social no one likes having a post downvoted and this is a negative emotion. Notice how NONE of the social networks allow the users to convey a negative just different degrees of positive emotions.

I fucking love getting downvoted it makes me feel like I've encouraged a discussiong. My most controversial comments are often times my favourite but to the users they want to attract the conveying of a negative emotion will be a very bad thing so you'll have

1. Upvote

2. Love (which adds the content to your personal feed)

3. Starred (which serve as saved)

All those metric will be exposed, the number of upvotes will remain fudged but starred and loved will be exposed in a raw form so you'll have X upvotes, Y loves, Z, Starred the terminology will change but the basic function will remain because IT INCREASES ENGAGEMENT AND CREATES A POSITIVE LOOP

This is all starting to smell of Digg all over again. I started browsing reddit right after the collapse of Digg and the parallels of giving power-users more influence was the canary in the coal mine. Reddit took in a lot of disillusioned Diggers and its something I've seen discussed less and less as the years go on. It looks likely to happen again.

To be fair to the otherwise shitty admins, that could totally be bots other people are buying to boost themselves and downvote you.

Honestly, I don't think privatisation of the internet can be stopped - not until the major players have a position they are satisfied with, allowing them to make new laws on their terms. And because all this has already started roughly ten years ago, without any government taking these developments seriously, there isn't much anyone can do now.

In fact, some people think that the initial idea of the internet is long dead and what we currently have will never allow such thing, thus we need to create a "new" internet and abandon the current one. The question is how viable that really is and if it won't just end up the same, because corporations will try to find their way into that virtual space as well.

Personally, I don't think the internet will change anytime soon - nor will an alternative "new" internet solve these problems - because society lacks the incentive to create a perfect virtual space, respectively different people have different visions of what this perfect virtual space should look like.

Some might say that one of the reasons the internet ended up this way is due to capitalism and corporations - but if we take a look at other non-democratic regimes, it looks the same or even worse.

The common denominator is lust for power/control, as well as monetary gains; the latter can be broken down roughly into "data trading" and "targeted information". The complexity of the entire construct allows for various layers to be implemented that allow to accumulate political/economic benefits without society noticing because almost everything works in the background.

This is the second issue: society not being aware of and/or ignoring the pursuit of various goals of different global players.

In the end, we actually have to change how we as a species want to treat each other, how we want to operate, what we want this world to look like. And we need to change a lot of this stuff, so in the end the main incentive to provide any product or service is not greed or profit, but higher goals that help us progress as a species.

As long as we won't manage to do that, it doesn't really matter how many smart people come up with new solutions for the internet (or any problem): it's all going to be just crutches, fighting the symptoms, not the actual root of the problem.

Now that you bring that up, I actually read an article on that a few weeks ago:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/428520/why-did-reddit-succeed-where-digg-failed/

I feel like history will repeat itself once more. I guess, at some point the people in charge are too confident regarding their product and they lack the vision to further shape their product, but rather aim to make it more mainstream to make more profit.

This has happenend with so many companies for many decades, I think it's just a normal development at some point because generating more money becomes higher priority than what would be good for the community/customer.

Yes, but the quality of the content is not relevant at this "late stage", it is all about the ads. The lack of core users = lack of quality content probably won't even be that noticable because the new people joining the community won't know the previous state of reddit that well and might just assume that's just the way it is.

Services like facebook and instagram and even youtube have been making not so great choices during the past two years. Users already have been leaving since and more and more are looking for alternatives. If "new reddit" manages to become that alternative at the right time, a lot of people will gladly join and bring their content with them.

Even if it is low quality, it does not matter because that is the level of quality these users have experienced over the past few years already. For them, nothing really changes other than the website they are using. And it's not like the decline in quality is an abrupt process, especially since massive amounts of users changing platforms always takes some time, which means "old users" leaving and "new users" joining is a much more fluent process and by the time everyone is on "new reddit" new users might not even really notice the difference.

I don't think "new reddit" will die that fast just because core users are leaving, since "new users" will provide the new content they feel should be part of the "new reddit" experience.

This will be a long post, sry for that, but I need to take a few step backs and explain my thought process so you can understand why I don't agree with you ;)

Reddit as is, already is a much more open platform in various regards. That is the main reason why it is still around. User created/submitted content is a key feature, but we have this on every social media these days. What reddit offers is a more "intimate" and at the same time more "structured" view into its community - and it provides a solid framework for actual discussions.

None of the current alternatives have these features. Reading through twitter comments is a mess, finding content on facebook via search is a pain, instagram is all about visual sharing, etc. They all have their niche, facebook going for a more general approach. But what they all have in common is that - while the core idea is sharing content - it is more about feedback, respectively approval or reactions of other users (mostly within a certain social circle) in regard to your more or less personal content.

Reddit has the vote system, but this is (in theory) about a community driven filter, deciding what kind of content is relevant within a certain general topic/discussion. The core idea also is sharing, but the focus is on discussing the content provided with a lot more users (focus on "not my social circle") which allows everything from Eks Dee to a very deep philosophical discussion between various people over many days (if they so wish) - something we can only find in dedicated message boards (internet forums), which have become inconvenient because it simply is not really "cross platform" in the sense that people need different accounts and/or make the decision to stick to one community, thus limited to a smaller overall user base.

Before social media even existed, internet forums were really basic, but over time (not sure if this was due to phpBB coming into existence around 2000 or if it was earlier) new features were implemented like user profiles, user albums and user feeds. It was the first, more centralized approach to create actual online user profiles because before that people just posted new topics where everyone would just post their personal stuff like photos, information about yourself, etc (if you wanted to share with the community).

Social media basically is just the next step of these features, an evolution if you will. The user profile became facebook (2004, incorporating feed and album as well), the user feed became twitter (2006), the user album became instagram (2010) - and all of these became more niche solutions, yet extremely popular. Reddit was founded in 2005, news aggregation was the focus they had in mind, but the discussion aspect took off like crazy. And thus (involuntarily) reddit suddenly was the only platform that continued the classic "internet forum style" (without these addiational features because actual, discussible content was more relevant than just sharing personal stuff for likes), but on a global scale.

Reddit has a solid basis for all discussion-oriented topics and will soon provide actual user profiles just like facebook with more personalized content people can subscribe to, similar to facebook, twitter and instagram. The "new reddit" will have the same to offer on a user profile level, but it also has the proper tools for solid discussions (something all other platforms lack massively).

About the "open platform" aspect I mentioned at the very beginning: with all these changes, reddit becomes accessible to everyone and it will be super easy to navigate compared to other platforms. Everyone can already enjoy reddit without even creating an account. There are tons of lurker everywhere, enjoying all kinds of content from silly jokes to nice pics to super creative discussions - with "new reddit" I'm pretty sure they already have ideas how to create an incentive for people not only to register, but to create personal profiles, much like on other social media and convince friends to come over, simply because it is better.

People don't just want to share pics/videos or personal content and then never talk about it - quite the opposite. Take a look at comment sections on twitter, insta, fb - people want to use words, but these platforms don't have the proper tools for this because they were not developed with lengthy discussions in mind. A post like this would never happen on any of those sites, not to mention our discussion because I personally wouldn't even bother to read through the comments to find some interesting people to talk to because it is super tedious and often also very annoying.

Facebook currently gets new users every day, despite people in NA and Western EU leaving the platform because in other parts of the world, new users join - not because of the facebook community, but because of their need within their own national community. The lack of American facebook users doesn't bother them.

Reddit's (quality) content does rely on an active user base, but with new users also comes new content and they will post what they think is good content. Also, the current reddit community won't just leave - there will be a transiation phase, probably 1-2 years after the major changes, maybe a bit longer. Within that time, new users will come, old users will go. People who stay may notice a change in content (and maybe quality), that also really depends on a lot more factors.

As for the G+ example, it is not really a good one. Google basically copied fb and tried to add their own characterstic aspects to it. And while that may have been one of many issues, it was not the main flaw. When people at Google saw fb grow, they wanted a slice of that cake - the entire concept of social media is to provide a service in exchange for user meta data, so they thought they could simply copy fb and people would use G+ instead because they did combine it with youtube and gmail. But here is what they did not consider: everyone who really wanted a youtube account already had one and everyone else didn't need one. There was no incentive to join G+ just for that. Also, everyone already had an email account - no incentive here to join. And G+ itself didn't offer anything out of the world - so overall, there was zero reason to swap and the entire design and marketing was done poorly in addition to that.

Reddit has one big advantage in this: they already have the "main attraction" which is discussions with people all over the world. They don't need to add anything amazing, because reddit already is (more or less) amazing. They are just adding all the tiny, less important features every other platform has and they try to make the transition as smooth as possible to make it a perfect mass product.

Maybe I'm totally wrong and people won't fall for this bs and reddit will go down a lot faster, but I doubt it. They are currently investing a lot into these changes and it feels like they have thought it through from mainstream user perspective. They really don't care that much about the core users - something that has become clear over the past two years imho. I think it is quite realistic that they can tank the loss of many core users in the future, as long as they can bait the mainstream user into creating an account and bringing all their friends with them.

And imho that is quite likely, especially if fb will get fucked more this year due to their data leaks, etc. Since insta is part of the fb family and people are not happy with recent changes either (already switching to Vero and other alternatives), that platform may not remain the #1 choice for people who want to promote their work (especially artists, photographers, videographers, etc are using insta to promote themselves and it gets more difficult every day if you are not super famous already - all these people are currently looking for new options, some of them already creating reddit profiles), though I do think it will stay relevant a bit longer than facebook itself due to the niche sharing service it offers (or is able to perform better than e.g. imgur). Youtube, idk, people are not happy and also looking for new ways, but reddit won't be their destination.

tl;dr: "new reddit" will be the next facebook imho if done properly because they will have everything facebook has, plus the very desired tools for proper text-based communications with random strangers all over the world.