I loved Reddit for what it is, but nothing made me back out of a post faster than seeing the top 3 parent threads as a regurgitation of the same inside jokes, pun-chains, and so on.
For me, that was part of the charm.
I could still find the information I needed when it was a serious query, and I could still find sound and sensitive viewpoints on many topics. But, opening a horrible post just to see a horribly distasteful comment as the first response just kept reminding me not to take life so seriously.
I’m fine with a horribly distasteful comment, but for the love of God make it a unique horribly distasteful comment.
Same. I like it, but it belongs in more shitposty communities IMO. I like a small percentage of my feed to be shitposts, and when I dig into it it’s just people repeating twists on the same stupid jokes.
Sometimes it’s actually clever, a lot of the time it’s just people wanting reassurance they belong.
It’s annoying when it overflows and floods everywhere with the exact same joke (like Google en passant). In r/anarchychess they were constantly workshopping new jokes, because it definitely got old
@bizzwell some subreddits did have some dedicated flairs which required everyone to be serious (at the cost of being banned) - but this required the OP to deliberately think about posting the stuff under the right flair.
Maybe this could be also easily enforced here by asking people to append [Serious Discussion] at the beginning of each relevant post, on the title or content?
