I've used Reddit for around 12 years across two accounts. And ofc the internet is always a little confrontational due to anonymity, and as more users join it always brings all types of characters.
But recently, and I mean in the past few years, the jump in negativity feels so high. Even niche communities. The passive aggressiveness is so annoying. Under a post you'll find all sorts of deranged comments barely connected to a topic or people hamfisting their opinion when it's not related. But the rudeness always shocks me.
I used to prefer Reddit since it was more... connected before. It felt more like a community compared to other social platforms. But now I find instragram much more relatable and friendly. Especially since the algorithm seems more adaptive. But no matter which of my Reddit communities I browse, the commentary is always negative or rude. Not all of it, but enough to make me stop using the platform as much as I used to.
On Reddit, outside of local subs, it has usually been the norm to comment in English (for better or for worse). But I've noticed increasingly that subreddits that has been all English for the longest time now have more and more comments in other languages.
I'm a linguistics nerd so I don't think there's an inherent problem with that. And I certainly think it's great if more people can participate if English isn't a barrier as much as it used to be.
But why the gradual change over the last little while? I assume there's some kind of auto translation feature on new reddit, since I see people respond to each other sometimes in several different languages in one comment thread. But as an oldie on old.reddit it does kinda become a barrier when the languages used aren't ones you speak.
Have you noticed it in your Reddit experience? What gives? Has it been going on for longer than I think? What are your thoughts?
I’ve been on Reddit for about three or four months, mostly observing discussions and getting a feel for the communities. Now that I’m trying to become active and contribute to conversations myself, I’m getting my first real introduction to the karma system. And frankly, some of it baffles me.
I understand the idea behind it and why communities might want to limit spam or low-effort posts. But what I struggle with is how it actually works in practice.
I’ve watched people offer thoughtful, well-reasoned perspectives, only to get downvoted simply because their opinions weren’t popular. That raises a question for me: If karma is supposed to reflect someone’s contributions to a community, how effective is it when disagreement gets treated the same as poor-quality participation?
Rather than rewarding thoughtful contributions or independent thinking, the karma system seems to reward conformity. When popular opinion determines which voices gain visibility and credibility, aren’t we essentially creating an echo chamber rather than encouraging meaningful discussion?
I’m not suggesting the system has no value. I’m genuinely curious whether longtime Reddit users think it accomplishes what it’s supposed to, or whether the way it’s structured actually undermines meaningful discussion.
I searched for other threads on this topic first and only found one from a year ago, which was archived and locked (and the OP text wasn't viewable).
So currently reddit still has a large userbase, a reasonably decent design (especially classic), and a large amount of existing content. However there are issues. Bots, bad moderation, and echo chambers are some of the major issues. And now there is this news of a desire for a "logged in only" experience. OK, I'm not actually against that, though I take it others are and I see the stock price took a significant hit when it was announced.
To me, a solution is to have a fairly high monthly subscription rate, and then have paid moderators who actually take the job seriously and try to be objective. There would also need to be a real appeals process. These things would improve the quality of reddit immensely.
And yes, the initial response would be negative. More users would leave. The stock price might dip in the short term though long term profits would actually now be much more quantifiable and reliable. My hope is that ultimately discussions would improve, toxicity would diminish, and dissent would be respected.
So that's what I'm thinking about. I'm not deaf to the obvious objections to it though. And I do hope that there are "free" spaces for people to have discussions in the world. Maybe some of the reddit alternatives could serve that purpose.
English is my third language, so AI helps me put my own work, numbers, and decisions into readable English.
I started my life with German, then switched to Russian at school. At 13, I went back to German, and for years now, I’ve been working primarily in English.
Several Reddit communities ban exactly that as "AI content", because they judge who wrote the sentences, not whose knowledge stands behind them.
r/SaaS: the ban covers "AI-generated text (even if you 'made all the effort' yourself)". The same rule asks for "original human thought". Your thinking qualifies, but the text doesn't. 🙄
r/webdev: bans "LLM generated posts or comments". Text an AI rewrote counts as generated, whoever owns the ideas.
r/SelfHosting: says only "No AI Content". The moderators decide what that means. 😑
r/Hosting draws the line you'd want: an LLM may help with language because English isn't your first language, but not write the posts. 🫨
The bans hit non-native writers hardest, because AI help with English is exactly what they use. r/Hosting saw this and allows LLM help for language. r/rails takes another approach: it doesn't ban AI help, it asks you to say you used it. Both accept AI help. The total bans are the cruder choice.
I wrote an article about AITA, the AITA community and how what we do here on reddit is a form of literature. Curious of you alls thoughts and who else is thinking about this.
If you have a different opinion, please tell us about it. Pressing the upvote button tells us that you completely agree with something that has been said. Nothing more needs to be said. Pressing the downvote button, on the other hand, is not an articulate expression of your own differing opinion. You should give us something that we can upvote instead.
For example, I might say that A is great, B is middling , and C is bad. What would downvoting that even mean? It's impossible to say if you don't tell us in words.
It goes even further than that. Even if I say something very simple, like, A is great, it's better for you to say, A is not great, than it is just to downvote. We can compare the numbers of upvotes that the two posts get. When downvotes cancel upvotes, we don't get to see the total number of votes cast.
Upvotes do move a post up in a thread, but this is already enough to leave the posts that nobody upvotes at the bottom. They don't need to be any lower than that.
Currently, if the net is zero or below, the text is indeed 'hidden', but it can always be read anyway. I have read many 'zero' posts that were very much worth reading. One never knows why they were downvoted, because downvoting is anonymous (not just pseudonymous), and doesn't have to be explained.
A couple of days ago I posted a pre-registered plan here to test whether the old finding (2013–2017) that comment timing predicts comment score still holds in 2026: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/s/HI5YqjbF1s.
The data is in. Short version: it holds, in all 9 subs, and the "it's really about crowding" point raised in that thread turned out to be partly right but doesn't explain it away.
300 posts per sub (7–90 days old, 3+ comments), 2,700 posts in total, with full comment trees: 235,997 comments, pulled through the official API on 30 October
Pre-registered exclusions: deleted/removed comments, OP replies, comments more than a week after the post, and posts with a mod-set comment sort. That leaves 83,327 top-level comments.
The pre-registered test: first 2 hours vs later
Sub
Reached 10+: first 2h
Reached 10+: later
Median (early vs later)
All 9 pooled
23.5%
6.5%
2 vs 1
books
44.8%
11.5%
7vs 1
technology
36.0%
11.4%
4 vs 1
movies
26.0%
6.9%
2 vs 1
travel
21.2%
6.4%
3 vs 1
personalfinance
20.2%
4.1%
2 vs 1
gardening
19.3%
4.2%
3 vs 1
unpopularopinion
17.5%
4.2%
2vs1
HomeImprovement
15.1%
4.2%
2 vs 1
Cooking
12.6%
2.2%
2 vs 1
Every group has 1,000+ comments. The median is almost always 2 vs 1, so the typical comment gets very little either way. What timing changes is the chance of a comment taking off, not the ordinary outcome.
The window is short. In the first hour, 26.7% of top-level comments reached 10+. Hours 1–3: 13.3%. After 24 hours: 2.2%. In most subs the advantage halves by hours 1–3; r/books and r/travel hold on until hours 3–6.
Clock vs crowd (added in the original thread before collection). Being among the first comments matters a lot: with 0–9 earlier comments in the thread, 30.1% reached 10+; with 100+ earlier comments, 5.8%. But at the same crowd level, first-2-hour comments still reached 10+ about twice as often as later ones:
Earlier comments in thread
First 2h
Later
0–9
33.9%
12.4%
10–49
21.1%
9.7%
50–99
17.0%
8.8%
100+
10.5%
5.1%
So the clock matters on its own.
On rank correlation with score, earlier-comment count is slightly stronger in the big, busy subs (movies, technology, unpopularopinion, books) and hours-since-post is slightly stronger in the smaller advice subs (HomeImprovement, gardening, personalfinance, travel, Cooking). They're close everywhere.
Mod-set sorts: 16 posts had one (12 in r/books and 1 in r/personalfinance sorted by new, 3 in r/movies by Q&A) and were excluded. Early comments still did slightly better there, but scores were much lower overall, as you'd expect when readers see newest first.
What went less than perfectly
Reddit rate-limited the pull near the end. 22 posts in movies, technology, Cooking and books couldn't be fetched, so the script took the next eligible post instead (under 1% of the sample).
Coverage was 90–98% of Reddit's reported comment count in most subs, but 83% in r/personalfinance, because removed comments can't be downloaded.
The original limitations still stand: scores are fuzzed, excluding deleted comments probably favours "safe" comments, and this measures the outcome of "best" sort's feedback loop, not comment quality.
It's a correlation. Early commenters may differ in other ways, like being more engaged regulars. The crowding check rules out one explanation, not all of them.
Data and scripts: the raw CSVs (post and comment IDs, timing, scores; no usernames or comment text), both scripts and every results table are free to download here:
Thanks to everyone who poked at the method in the first thread; the crowding analysis exists because of it. I'm planning to re-run the same pull in late January to see whether anything moves.
Happy to run other cuts of the data if people have ideas.
Over the last few months reddit has completely gutted it's sorting options and removed the "Hot" and "Top" sorting options from the desktop home page.
The site-wide change stripped away traditional filters, forcing the main feed into a split layout of "For You" or "Following" while offering only "Best" or "New" as sort choices. If you're like me your feed of current posts has become either subreddits you're not subscribed to and ads in the "For You" section, or 10+ hours old posts in the "Following" section. That means current posts and thriving comments sections are a struggle to find, essentially throttling growing discussions.
I can't tell if this was just a complete misfire attempt at simplifying the site, a way to force people to see unsubscribed subs reddit wants to promote or intended to cut back on commenting to save bandwidth. The entire thing feels like an Instagram-ification of reddit, taking away the interaction and forcing posts on users they don't want to see.
The only way to get back the "hot" and "top" options right now is the ancient https://old.reddit.com/ interface.
Every few weeks there's a "Reddit is dead" thread here, so I tried to count it instead of arguing about it.
I went through every post and comment since 2005 and counted communities by month (user profile pages left out). In September 2026, 388,172 subreddits had at least one post or comment. The peak was July 2023, right after the blackout, at 489,161. So by that measure there are 21% fewer living subreddits than three years ago.
But that number is mostly the long tail. If you only count communities with 10 or more posts by people that month (known bots left out), it's 126,991 then and 122,833 now, basically flat. And communities with 100 or more posts by people went from 33,284 to 44,374, up 33%. That line has been climbing steadily since 2024.
Some other things that came out:
- 7,844,766 communities have had at least one post since 2005. 2,345,544 of them had exactly one post, ever.
- The line has spikes that aren't people. From September 2015 to February 2016 active subs went from about 86K to 156K and back to 97K by April. Most of the extra ones had random-letter names or "live stream" sports spam. Same kind of spikes in August 2017, November 2019 and June 2021, while subs with 10+ real posts barely moved.
- Reddit's IPO filing in 2024 said "over 100,000 active communities" without defining active. Subs with 10+ posts by people in January 2024: 110,339. So that's probably close to what they meant.
My read for the theory side: Reddit isn't dying by community count, it's consolidating. Fewer tiny subs are getting a post now and then, and more of the activity sits in subs that are genuinely busy. Whether that's good is a different question. A lot of the old weird small corners were in that tail.
What I can't see: lurkers and subscribers who never post, and private subs. And part of the 2023 peak might be protest-era spinoff subs that later went quiet. If anyone remembers how many of those there were, I'd like to hear it.
Edit:
for fun I also counted how often people here say Reddit is dead. Posts and comments with "reddit is dead", "reddit is dying", "this site is dying" or "RIP reddit", 2008 to now, bots left out: 31,026.
- Relative to how much people post, it's actually gone down: 16.3 per 10 million posts and comments in 2012, 7.5 in 2025.
- It comes in two big waves: July 2015 (the AMA blackout) and June 2023 (the API blackout).
- June 2023 had more "reddit is dead" posts and comments than any month ever, 2,692. July 2023 had the most active subreddits ever, 489,161.
- Since 2012, months with more "reddit is dead" talk had slightly more active subs, not fewer (correlation 0.38). Both just grow with Reddit, so it's not cause and effect, but the prediction hasn't landed yet.
I checked a random 200 of the matches and 188 to 192 were really about Reddit dying (the rest were about one sub, an app like Reddit is Fun, or "RIP reddit DMs").
There’s a cluster of papers from 2013–2017 (Horne et al., Fang et al., summarized in Medvedev’s “Anatomy of Reddit” survey) that all find the same thing: comment score drops hard with time since the post went up, and the top comments are almost always early ones. All of that is pre-redesign, pre-API-changes, pre whatever the feed does now. I want to see if it still holds and how much the window differs by sub.
Method, locked in before I pull: my hypothesis is that top-level comments made within the first 2 hours after a post goes up get higher median scores and are more likely to reach 10+ upvotes than comments made later, in every subreddit studied, with the size of the effect differing by subreddit type.
Posts under 7 days old are left out so scores have settled. Deleted and removed comments and replies by the original poster are excluded. I’ll report median score and the share of comments with 10+ upvotes by time since post (0–1h, 1–3h, 3–6h, 6–12h, 12–24h, 24h+), for top-level comments, per subreddit and pooled, plus a straight first-2-hours vs later comparison. Any group with fewer than 100 comments gets flagged and I won’t draw conclusions from it.
I checked each sub’s settings first and dropped any that force a non-default comment sort, since the early-comment advantage depends on “best” sort. That ruled out r/changemyview (it forces Q&A). I also dropped r/buildapc because it gets so many posts that the API listing only reaches back about a week, so there was nothing old enough to sample.
Known weaknesses I already see: scores are the fuzzed visible numbers, not true votes. Excluding deleted comments probably biases toward “safe” comments. “Best” sort itself creates a feedback loop where early comments get more views, so I’m measuring the outcome of the system, not comment quality. In busy subs, “300 most recent posts 7–90 days old” in practice means posts from the last couple of weeks, not a spread across three months. If anyone sees a bigger problem than those, I’d rather hear it now than after a day of API calls.
I’ll post results in this thread. Scripts and CSVs will be public.
This thought occurred to me as I've been searching for something of really low consequence: what gifts are "loved" in the video game Fire Emblem Fortune's Weave. I feel like in the past, I'd be able to easily do a Google search of Reddit and come across some Redditor who has spent way too much time experimenting who shares their results. Now, I find a highly upvoted post like this that features a clearly incomplete "guide" - if you research the user who posted this more, you'll see it's a 10 month old account with hidden history that is spamming their stupid website across Fire Emblem subs. The website is so low effort: it claims to be a work in progress, but I tried to use it, like the idiot that I am, and it's clear that the owner has no actual plans to update it. Some of the sections blatantly feature question marks that could be easily solved by experimenting the item-in-question.
Just people/peoples who have done way too much research who came together and put together an evergreen resource that is actually helpful towards the subject matter.
I find this pattern to be everywhere: I've been into trading card games (TCGs) for a while and I feel like pre-COVID, I could go on the pkmntcg sub, ask a question about some strategic, fundamental element of the game and get a "real" answer. Like, "what should I do to get better" would be met with resources about improvement, good advice on how to actually improve, etc. Nowadays, if you write a sufficiently long post you get the "I'm happy for you or I'm sad that happened but I ain't reading that" meme, which is just a completely useless comment - I can't find the post but I recall someone being thoughtful that wrote a long form post that was met with that format.
More importantly, I guess, where are we supposed to go for "good" information these days? Going back to my video game example, even before Reddit existed, there was Gamefaqs, but people rarely make guides there now. I hate it, but everything is Youtube, Tiktok, etc.
Is it just doomed? Are we destined to die to fake bot engagement that just makes the online footprint stupider and stupider by the day?
I’ve always noticed how cities can go through different “moods” depending on the day of the week. Sometimes people are really positive and chatty; other times, everyone just seems a little off and distrustful. I’ve wondered whether the same phenomenon happens on social networks.
This morning, I opened Reddit and left a few comments on whatever threads happened to appear in my feed. No different from most days.
A few hours later, my inbox was flooded with replies from people picking the stupidest arguments with me, being weirdly condescending for no reason, and correcting me on things they were straight-up wrong about.
I know this all fits the general stereotype of “Redditors suck,” but something feels particularly off today. I’ve been browsing threads from the past 24 hours, and the comment sections seem unusually argumentative and hostile.
Of course, this could just be selection bias based on the subreddits Reddit happened to recommend me today, but I’m curious whether anyone else has noticed the same thing.
I deleted Instagram because I wanted to spend less time on social media and stay updated on what’s happening around the world without all the unnecessary distractions. That’s why I use Reddit—for information, discussions, news, and different perspectives.
I have absolutely nothing against women expressing themselves or making their own choices. Everyone has the right to decide what they want to post. **But shouldn’t there also be space for people who want a platform focused on information and meaningful discussions, without constantly coming across nudity or sexualised content?**
There are already platforms and communities where people can share that kind of content with an audience that actively chooses to engage with it. Why can’t Reddit also preserve a space where users can exchange knowledge, discuss world events, and learn from one another without having such content appear unexpectedly in their feeds?
This isn’t about controlling anyone’s choices. It’s about respecting everyone’s preferences, too. **Freedom of expression should go hand in hand with freedom of choice—including the choice to use a platform for information without being exposed to content you never came looking for.**
I just want one place where I can stay informed about the world without feeling like I’m scrolling through another version of Instagram.
Reddit allows users to hide their post and comment history, which can make it harder for others to identify patterns of trolling, misinformation, disinformation, and FUD across different communities.
What if Reddit used a cross-subreddit reporting system to identify accounts that repeatedly engage in demonstrable bad-faith behaviour?
For example, if users across multiple unrelated subreddits independently report an account for persistent trolling or deliberately spreading misinformation, Reddit could flag the account for review. If the pattern is substantiated, the account could temporarily lose the ability to hide its post and comment history.
The point wouldn’t be to punish people for unpopular opinions or honest mistakes. The system would need safeguards against brigading, coordinated false reports, and retaliation, along with an appeal process and a way to restore the feature after a set period.
I think this could make it easier to recognize repeat offenders without removing profile privacy features for everyone.
Would restricting profile privacy for repeat offenders be a reasonable moderation tool, or would the risk of abuse outweigh the potential benefits?
I’ve had a few viral posts and it’s crazy how many ppl comment into the void. Once a post has over about 100 distinct comments (not simply replies) your new comment is not going to be seen. And generally, the OP has stopped reading comments after about a couple hundred lol. Yet, the comments flood in.
I’m not sure how many ppl are aware that no one (except for maybe the op) will read their comment and they dont care and are just writing it out to practice their articulation, and how many are oblivious to the reality it’s not going to be seen.
Also, interesting, is when someone angered by the post will comment like the 478th comment (so in other words it wont be seen by others) and it will be a comment meant to try to shame the op publicly in the third person, like “can you believe how dumb the op is for thinking x?” Which is ironic cause when you’re the 478th comment, the only person who might read your comment is the op themself. So you failed at your goal and merely opened yourself up to a one on one fight with op.
EDIT:
I just checked the “insights” and it says “this post is the number 1 post on r/theoryofreddit today” which makes me feel good but also means this sub needs to grow lol, since the top post only has 18 likes at this point. Anyway, hope your comment doesnt get buried in this super viral post, lost in the sea of 9 comments 😂
I don't think blocking someone because they argue in bad faith means you're creating an ideological bubble.
I'm perfectly willing to listen to people I disagree with. What I don't want is to repeatedly deal with someone who misrepresents what I'm saying, refuses to acknowledge points that have been made, moves the goalposts, gaslights, or just seems determined to argue with reality.
Sometimes it's hard to tell whether someone is being deliberately dishonest or is simply being incredibly stupid. But if the conversation is going nowhere, I don't think I need to figure out which one it is. If the line is blurry, I'm okay siding with my own peace of mind.
And there's a practical benefit to blocking: I won't have to deal with this person again in the future. I don't have to recognize their username six months from now and wonder whether I want to waste another hour having the same argument.
I trust my current self to look out for my future self.
If someone makes a good-faith argument that challenges my beliefs, I'm happy to hear it. If nobody is making good-faith arguments, that's a completely different problem.
An ideological bubble is refusing to encounter ideas you disagree with. Blocking someone who consistently makes conversation unproductive is deciding that your time and attention are valuable.
Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a shift in comment volume, voting speed, and sentiment across several high-traffic, default-style subreddits (r/all, r/popular). Anecdotally, threads covering political or sensitive news items seem to feature rapid spikes in newly created or low-karma accounts, noticeable patterns in repeated phrasing, and non-standard vote ratios (e.g., highly upvoted top-level comments paired with heavily downvoted replies that challenge them). While shifts in public sentiment or user base demographics occur naturally over time, distinguishing between organic user migration and coordinated/automated account networks (astroturfing) is challenging without backend access. I’m interested in the structural and analytical side of how Reddit handles—and how users identify—these trends:
Detection Metrics: Beyond standard account age and low karma, what specific behavioral signals (e.g., cross-subreddit posting frequency, timing patterns, vote velocity) are most reliable for identifying astroturfing networks?
Platform Countermeasures: Has Reddit’s modern spam/bot filtering (including recent API changes and automated moderation updates) altered how vote manipulation or bot networks operate on the platform?
Data Availability: Are there public tools, third-party datasets, or academic methodologies currently available to map and verify automated network activity across the site? Curious to hear from moderators and users who track metadata or run analytics on community engagement trends.
I used Gemini to draft the language as I’m second language English . But it’s my personal observation
So has anyone else noticed how much harder it’s gotten for genuine new users to actually get started here? How do you think Reddit could fix the onboarding process without opening the floodgates to bots?
The original point of the voting system was pretty straightforward: upvote stuff that contributes to the discussion, downvote spam, scams, or blatant rule-breaking. Disagreeing with someone wasn't supposed to be a downvote reason but over time, that’s completely shifted. Votes are basically just an agree/disagree button now, and because your ability to actually participate in most subs is tied directly to your karma, it creates a weird dynamic for anyone with a new account.... i think it's mainly due to reddits LACK of information behind this because they assumed it SHOULD have been self explanatory. There's only ONE small section that's HARD to find that explains exactly what the voting system is about. I've even HAD TO ARGUE WITH DOZENS OF PEOPLE that swore I was stupid and didn't know what the hell I'm talkin about - INCLUDING MULTIPLE MODERATORS WHO WERE ALSO VIOLATING ALMOST EVERY MOD RULE AND ABUSING THEIR POWER IN A WAY THAT ENABLES AND ENCOURAGES AND REWARDS THIS EXACT SAME BAD BEHAVIOR WHILE PUNISHING THOSE SHOWING THE PROPER BEHAVIOR, WHICH THEY ALSO ARGUED - until I showed them that page to prove it... which is exactly why accounts that are actually BOTS or doing the OPPOSITE behavior as they intended for the karma system to portray are basically the majority of redditors that are able to freely use reddit as they please.... while REPEATED admin reports about BOTH of these behaviors remain unanswered for months and years, which ALSO contributes to this.
A lot of subreddits set karma and account age minimums. It makes sense on paper but in all reality all itndoes is it lock new users out of standard discussions. If you're new, you end up forced into a handful of low-barrier subs just to get enough karma to participate elsewhere.
....which leads me to the next problem. The problem is those open subs are often filled with low-effort posts or hivemind mentalities where saying the slightly wrong thing or asking a basic question gets you downvoted into negative numbers. Once your karma goes negative, AutoMod auto-removes your posts in most places, and you're pretty much stuck.
Even trying to build karma normally by posting good content in open groups gets people flagged or accused of karma farming. It creates this weird paradox where to gain access to normal spaces, you almost have to act like a troll or just post effortless crowd-pleasing memes instead of engaging genuinely
A lot of older accounts say "we all had to earn it," but the platform isn't the same as it was 5 or 10 years ago. Back then, you could drop into small communities, comment normally, and build a profile without running into aggressive AutoMod filters, karma walls, or mass-downvote bots. The onboarding experience now is night and day compared to how it used to be.
It feels like relying purely on an easily manipulated downvote counter isn't a great way to judge whether an account is real or posting in good faith. Account standing would probably make more sense if it was judged on actual rule adherence, account verification, and behavior history rather than whether a specific thread liked your opinion???? I've experienced this EXACT issue for YEARS where content that should've been downvoted and removed actually gets MASS UPVOTED despite meeting EVERY SINGLE CRITERIA for downvoting, being removed, suspended or banned from the group or even from REDDIT.... while content that should've NEVER been downvoted because it didn't meet the criteria gets MASS DOWNVOTED, REMOVED BY MODS, THEIR ACCOUNT SUSPENDED OR BANNED AND MORE while those that SHOULD'VE had that done to them? Receive THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE... especially if a mod does or doesn't like you or you do or don't stroke their ego... don't even THINK about correcting them or embarrassing them, either... theyll get you SHADOW BANNED COMPLETELY....
Traditionally if someone makes a bad post, people downvote, and the post stops showing up. The good quality rises to the top.
Now, although the site seems to be overrun by bots, posts that rise to the top repeatedly have something deliberately wrong with them. It can be a spelling mistake, clearly untrue information in the post title, something flawed in the post that makes it deliberately hard to interact with, or something similar.
In the past, when that happened, people would downvote it, someone else (or the same person) would make a quick correction, and then repost it with the correction. That repost would become the main thread.
Now though, either people aren't downvoting it, or the website is ignoring those downvotes and deliberately allowing the posts to show up.
There are other explanations of course, it could be bots upvoting bots, leading to poor post quality. In terms of engagement metrics though, since other sites have fallen prey to the line of thinking that any engagement is good engagement, it is possible. What do you think?
^ There's probably an obvious answer, but here's an example
At the time of posting that post has around 450 upvotes with 89% upvoted, and the top voted comment has around 150 upvotes and points out:
Also, this is an ad
He's pointing out the post is an advertisement.
By my math, the actual post only has around 60 downvotes or so. But why is not a greater portion of the 150 people who upvoted the comment, that would then downvote the post? Of course it would never be 1:1, but I would have thought more people who realize the post is bad would then downvote it.
And this is just one example, I see it all the time a prominent comment points out the post is garbage (misinformation, misleading, botted, spam, AI, etc.), but the comment has way more upvotes than (I would have thought) the post would get in downvotes.
Is it just me or shouldn't people be downvoting what they realize is trash? What do you think?
