At first it was all about presenting data in an original looking way. In the end it was about pushing political ideas in your throat using a plain bar graph. It was not about sharing something interesting you found but about taking advantage of a captive audience.
r/DataIsBeautiful, RIP. It was one of several -- actually, MANY -- subreddits that astounded me at first but quickly became a bore, as the quality of the posts collapsed like me without my walker. Something about the upvote/downvote system seems to encourage crap, or maybe (my increasing suspicion) the people on Reddit are now outnumbered by the bots.
r/conspiracy, it always had it fair share of nutjobs but it also had some awesome posts every once in a while in which someone would take a theory and break it down in points with good sources. The comments been even better, the top comment almost always was. Point 3, 4 and 7 have been disproven here, here and here, but 5 and 6 are solid further info here.
Over the years those high quality posts became less frequent and after the ban of td it fully turned into a right wing misinformation campaign with topics like the paradise papers completely ignored.
It was /r/TIHI for me. It started out with genuinely bizarre and borderline disturbing things being posted, and devolved into half-baked memes and shitposts.
r/oddlysatisfying. I remember when it was actually things that were satisfying. Animations were common, and they were really good. At the end, it was just another dump for stuff that barely fit the sub.
/nextfuckinglevel is so annoying when it gets to /all. Usually it's some trivial activity that is executed well or someone just doing their job. Nothing "next level" about it at all.
Also any of the large subs that get flooded with fucking TikTok videos. In the beginning everybody pointed out the shitty songs or fake laugh tracks etc, now it seems everyone just gave up and accepted it.
That was an interesting downfall to witness that taught me a lot about how Reddit really operates. I'm the beginning, it was actually a quality alternative to the generic front page repost subs like /damnthatsinteresting.
Then the instant it hit 1 million subscribers, the whole mod team changed, people like Turtle suddenly appeared in the name of "helping out with a sub that grew too fast for existing mods," and within a few days it was just another trash repost sun.
My favourite subreddit used to be /r/mildlyinteresting, then came /r/interestingasfuck and /r/damnthatsinteresting and I honestly can't tell the difference between them any more.
I feel like the early days were more, "I'm a normal guy trying to learn how to dress better." I learned a lot and it improved my wardrobe/ability to dress a bit better. But it felt like it became...something else? Like it was overrun by the kind of people who would unironically buy $100 plain white t-shirts--that sort of thing.
I worked in men's fashion for almost a decade, and can safely say that sub was hot garbage full of lousy and unhelpful advice from people with such bad taste that I'm not convinced it isn't a troll sub.
It's a fashion forum on a site where the stereotypical user is a fedora wearing neckbeard, plus after a point it starts to become self-selecting. Kind of like every EDC post having a knife and flashlight, when the normal person's "every day carry" is just "wallet, keys, phone".
At some point in the last few years, it felt like it had become a caricature of itself. Hard to explain, but it felt like every user was the guy that was going to bring back capes.
r/MadeMeSmile devolved into constant reposts and increasing animal abuse. The number of times I would have to report posts for unsafe shit or animal cruelty was really getting to me to me at the end there.
It was by no means the only sub that went in that direction. As others have pointed out, all of Reddit was going down the crapper but that sub for me epitomised how shit Reddit became - repost bots, comment bots, karma farming, fake content that was dangerous or abusive... it had it all.
There was a point where Ama was big enough to attract some interesting people but Reddit was still small enough that it wasn't just media circuit. Then it just became another polished, one sided, commercial, media trained nonsense
r/mapporn for me. Originally it was for beautiful high quality, high-resolution maps - the standard was so high that I would have been scared to post anything myself unless I found something exceptional, but eventually it became mainly low-quality (and usually inaccurate) data maps that all get mass-upvoted for some reason.
I have a different perspective because I actually became active on Reddit for a particular lapidary marketplace - not r/gemstones. but I saw r/gemstones go from a sub extolling the science and beauty of gemstones to a marketplace full of shady dealers trying to disguise their hawking of badly cut stones with sketchy origins. posts that often had to be removed by the mods when the OP wouldn't take no for an answer.
Youtubehaiku made me laugh and cry almost every post. Then it went big and tiktok, vine took that nieche spot so it went downhill. Still thoes apps doesnt do it as good as that sub did. Youtubehaiku is still one of the most subbed inactive subs. It nailed my mixed sense of humor and weirdness, loved it.
Why does anyone need a 'men's space'? I'm a man but I just would not be interested in that specifically. This is the Internet and there's a space for everything specifically. Sounds like a 'men's space' or a 'women's space' are bound to be filled with intolerance for the other genders.
Sometimes people want to talk about their shit with people who can directly relate to it, and would prefer if people who can't relate aren't invited to the conversation.
I'm a man but I just would not be interested in that specifically.
There is a gap between "I'm not interested" and "I refuse to understand why someone else would be interested" that's not really acknowledged here but is important to be able to engage with.
I don't disagree that gendered spaces are primed to end up displaying a modicum of prejudice against the other, but I don't agree that this must necessarily be the case.
There are genuine issues facing men that I think we should be allowed and even encouraged to discuss, and I think it's important that such conversations are had with other men in particular to reduce the stigma surrounding them. So in my mind the goal of such a space isn't to discourage women from participating, but localizing the discussion so that it's easier for men to find.
The unfortunate truth is that too many men these days seem to think feminism is out to oppress them, which simply isn't the case.
r/TIFU and r/AITA - The former became a repository for preteen fanfiction and the latter became a place for confirmation bias/rhetorical questions looking for vindication.
Then there's r/UnpopularOpinion which ended up being an oxymoron unto itself. I honestly don't understand how anyone thought that concept would work given that the literal point of a social media discussion platform, that utilizes an upvote/downvote system to determine visibility, is to push popular (highly upvoted) posts to the top/front. Very few people actually upvoted something that was unpopular and instead just upvoted the low hanging fruit popular opinion posts that were 'controversial' but still blatantly have a clear majority who support that side that OP took.
Thank you! I was racking my brain trying to recall the word/term for it and self-validation was the one I was trying to think of for the r/AITA, but you're absolutely right - it can be applied to r/UnpopularOpinion as well.
Imo even with how the downvote/upvote in Reddit work, theoretically speaking there could be ways for r/unpopularopinion to work with some configurations. For example, automatically delete any post that gained a certain amount of upvotes. It's understandable that upvotes should be given to unpopular but interesting opinions that actually fits the sub, but since it's been shown that's not how people do it that behaviour should have been used to keep the content relevant.
Change the css so that hitting the up arrow downvotes and hitting the down button up votes. The users could use the voting buttons as usual but the unpopular posts and comments would be pushed to the top.
Most of AITA was fanfic too - just a deeply improbable amount of twins, pregnancies, weddings, and twin pregnancies at weddings. Once I stumbled upon a megapost that was all the ones about food, though, and it was great, because nearly no one bothers to make up a drama about lasagna.
The one silver lining was it brought us the glory that was the “everything in this sub is fake” punchline story, if anyone else remembers that one.
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