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.
There’s quite a few but I’ll give my top 3:
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 validation.
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.
r/UnpopularOpinion became a place to either validate some truly reprehensible views or say something well liked for internet points.
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.
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.
A sub “the tenth dentist” (I forget the specific name) had a system where if you agreed with it you down vote, whereas if you disagree you upvote. I think it made moderation probably kind of tricky (they also had a way to flag things as hugely improbable/karma farming) but it at least kept the spirit of truly unpopular opinions at the forefront.
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.
Very true. The blatant inaccuracy was the worst for me. And people usually just ignored it too.
It wasn’t really one sub in particular for me, honestly. The one big thing was the ever-increasing repost comment bots: they started to show up here and there and by now they’re all over comment sections. I don’t get the point of why they were created in the first place, and to me it was very analogous to the overall decline in the site. More bots, less actual discussion.
Agreed on your point about it not just being one particular sub.
It seemed that the comment sections on most subs just devolved to lame jokes that got repeated, or spiraled into into arguments. There were obvious exceptions, but as a whole this was my experience.
The entire reason I started using RES was to filter out any comment that had the words “and my axe”, “this guy’s dead wife”, “fun at parties”, “poop knife”, etc.
This too, hugely. I went back to reddit today for a bit and the comments in askreddit were brief, some only one word as an initial reply to the post, or just jokes. I’m all for jokes but it really stood out how reddit has slowly evolved and I really was a boiled frog who didn’t notice til I came to Lemmy and it was actual(!) discussions(!) again.
/r/menslib
It became a god damn misogynist shit show.
It’s very hard finding men’s spaces that don’t quickly devolve into anti-feminism and general misogyny.
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/antiwork before say 2020 and even worse after the Fox thing, a lot of trolls came in once it got big and where before it was fun discussions on anarchist antiwork theory that coined the name, with some venting and support or discussing how a different society might look like.
Then it became the usual political battleground like many big subs, all about who to vote for in the US and a repost place for latestagecapitalism, then all the text quitting or firing screenshots and tipping battles for some reason, which I‘d also not seen before then. Oh and all the nationalist humble bragging which seemed condescending to me as EU person towards the US people and at the same time dismissive of issues in the EU too. I guess it could be summed up with: it felt more hostile to me.
Always liked r/workreform better. Even the name sounds less like “we are lazy shits” and more like the actual point of thoes subs.
Ok cool, I liked antiwork better, because in the beginning it wasn‘t about “lets just reform it a little bit”, that is just what it turned into cause I guess most people can‘t see anything between being forced to labor and not moving at all aka lazy shits.
Abolition of work is an interesting text which imagines something else entirely, a world in which the absence of money and hierarchy could lead to replacing all work with a voluntary and playful version of it, where people may still choose to spend their time doing various activities mainly for the community and the results of their labor vs just getting someone or themselves more money. Similar to how most firefighting places and other charitable organisations or open source projects are already run, despite all capitalist logic saying we shouldn‘t give our labor for free.
That‘s what it was about before it got snuffed out and turned into a harmless “lets change nothing on the hierarchy but maybe unionise to get more money and vote for little bit better” movement anyway. It‘s not like I think I can convince you or anyone anymore, so have your work reform and your politicians and fight the good fight for workers, you‘re certainly not alone with it, most everyone seems to enjoy all these conflicts to get wrapped up in just fine. I even support it to an extent, I‘m in the union too out of practicality.
I just enjoyed having a space where I could talk about this theory and the hypothetical world I would enjoy instead and am lamenting it‘s loss, that‘s all.
Not attacking that or anything but I guess I struggle to undertstand how a world without “work” would work?
What happened to antiwork was fantastic. It was created by someone who was lazy and did not wanted to work. Then it got co-opted by people who wanted to work. Finally he was kicked as a mod for sticking to the name and spirit of his sub. He had his cosy sub and he was invaded by workers.
How can you seriously claim to be pro-work but follow the banner of someone who claimed long ago to be antiwork? Why were they all shocked? Just read the sign, antiwork, it’s the name!! Don’t you listen to the people you chose to follow?
watches the TV –> “Ho no, our leader is antiwork!”
Just create your own thing.
I already elaborated enough on this from my own perspective, so instead I‘ll use this next laziness dig to conform to this view of me and lazily quote something random I like:
This struggle, for a world of free association and play, has been placed under the banner of antiwork and anarchy. Personally, I’m fond of post-work, because I think it better encapsulates my desire to both oppose and propose, to move against and beyond this detour, this phase of destruction called work, but the term antiwork does what it needs to do too. There have been attempts to co-opt and defang this liberatory project, but despite the recent online drama, this struggle is older than the Internet, and it will continue unabated, because I believe the impulse to be free is one of the defining attributes of the human experience, and this system is fundamentally unfree. Once liberated from the shackles of employment, people will be free to sloth and to slack, but also to do and to act. Humans are verbing creatures. We should fight for a world where we can verb to fulfil our needs and express ourselves instead of line pockets and destroy the Earth. All power to all the people.
Peace.
I am supremely glad you’re on the Fediverse talking about these things in such an honest and eloquent way. Thank you, and followed.