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.
I agree that r/dataisbeautiful turned out to be very political. What I saw was that the community was rather united in its political stance and if someone made a post that was out of line with the community’s ideology they got roasted. The reaction was rarely about how the information could have been portrayed more intuitively, or how the data could have been stronger. Those reactions were for posts that were in line. Others were downright attacked. It certainly wasn’t about making data beautiful
As a data junkie I loved r/dataisbeautiful at first, but it definitely became painful. It got to the point I couldn’t looks at the charts and graphs.
r/meditation. I went there for mindfulness techniques (am atheist) and guided recommendations. This past year it started to evolve into a strange mix of gatekeeping and outright fighting. Drama and argumentative attitudes in a meditation sub…
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.
That’s how most subs end up. They have a great idea but eventually you’ve posted all the cool things. Now, you don’t really have anything cool to post that’s on topic and the sub goes downhill. Seen it happen so many times
I think another big problem is that once a sub is popular enough it will start showing up on r/all or r/popular. There were a ton of posts on r/anime_irl that were just anime memes but people upvote because “haha funny meme” and not because it actually fits the sub. They aren’t paying attention to which sub it actually came from because it just pops up in the feed and they treat it like any other social media site where upvote = I like it.