A sad thing is that semc will never know why they failed. In this context, decisions like closing their forums seem bewilderingly incomprehensible … until you know the wise and terrible words of a mister John Cleese. “If you are absolutely hopeless at something,” he once said, “You lack the exact skills you need to know whether or not you are absolutely hopeless at it. It creates a terrible blind spot.”
How much of the forums shares this view that the subreddit is a “scumhole?”
Please, as a moderator, I’m curious to hear what your opinions are. What could be done to improve the community?
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@ThreeBlindMice_7 honestly for me nothing short of separation out of Reddit can help. Every subreddit I have ever been on seems worse in trolling than 4chan /b
Specifically what about it? We’ve been making efforts recently to cut down on low-quality content and low-effort memes.
The biggest thing that gets me is low quality trolls, while I enjoy trolls occasionally as they can be pretty funny, it’s the quality of them that makes or breaks an environment.
The Reddit community? It’s unredeemable. Or rather, the “fanboi or meme” dynamic is inherent in the Reddit function. It’s not how actual conversations do or can work.
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There are some great people on reddit. Orkinson puts out quality. Some ex-formers are still great posters. The issue is the game is pretty stagnant so crap posts are going to outweigh quality.
The subreddits off the main page are deserts. I would consider merging some and using tags for content to search easier. Instead of limiting “crap posts” encourage people to tag them. Mods don’t get push back for censorship and users can determine what experience they want.
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I’m sure there are. But an ordinary person cannot have an ordinary conversation there. Hence the old Reddit expression it’s for “memes and reddit bros”. If you aren’t a known person any post is instantly buried under all else. It’s an inherently flawed system.
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Agreed. This works great as an advertising model, but is ultimately unhelpful when it comes to figuring out where there are actual issues often. It can end up being the equivalent of being in a room full of yes-men, and in worst case scenarios, can become an echo chamber of biased negativity even when things aren’t that bad. I like reddit in theory, but I’ve never been a fan in practice. It isn’t the best way to garner fresh or useful ideas because those are often the most unpopular, at least at first, though if they’re honest and true, they end up growing on people in gamechanging ways.
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Unfortunately, I cannot deal with the subreddits that diverged off of the main subreddit, those are under the control of people completely outside of our moderator team.
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At least in my personal experience, I don’t find that whether a user is known or not to have much bearing on how upvoted their reply is, barring developers or extremely well known content creators like Excoundrel and FlashX, although I recall most dev responses on the forums being showered with positive ratings as well.
I often do not recognize the names of users I am upvoting. The quality of their reply is far more important. Of course, I can’t necessarily speak to the rest of the subreddit, but most quality comments, even controversial ones, are upvoted and given proper visibility, with some exceptions.
That being said, I do, of course, know that the reddit hive mind does exist and that it is detrimental. Wish I could mitigate that, but I unfortunately can’t. 
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Only way to do that is force Reddit to self destruct and rule the wasteland with an iron fist and a huge banhammer
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Those are my impressions as well. It seems somewhat rare that people are actually downvoted by reputation alone (unless they’ve making villains of themselves for months). The opposite feels more frequent. There’s definitely a dev bump (almost) everytime, regardless of platform. Probably some for casters, because of their dev-colored reddit handles, although their comments tend to be strong/structured well. And there’s definitely upvoting/taste-making by celebrating community joke patterns and identities.
I wish people would stop bagging on the place though. It is what it is, and what it is isn’t as bad as some say… It’s not my preferred spot, but whatever, there’s no reason we can’t all use multiple platforms for slightly different things. As for reddit specifically, I most dislike the work of checking back into threads after I’ve read them once before. Is there a way to filter unread content out? Maybe a css rule that dims old comments to half transparency or something?
This is all super off-topic… hmm…
edit to add: I’ve split these replies into a new thread! Hooray moderation tools!
I know this is a week late, so excuse me for possibly performing necromancy on a thread, but I need to say this even if it has little impact.
The subreddit is pretty awful, honestly. I have zero reason to visit or post anymore, save for maybe the possibility that a Dev speaks up.
I witness a lot of mass downvoting/user favoritism/trolling. On that second point, that users collectively seem to dislike other users for whatever reason and will downvote just because you, as another user, have an opinion - regardless of whether that opinion deviates from theirs, or the norm, etc. Low-effort trolling is a pretty intense thing there too.
I used to frequent the subreddit and post as much as I could, tried to post high-quality content and partake in discussion, and over time it just slowly decayed into a festering mess. And that’s not to say that the whole subreddit is like that, that’s not to say that every user is bad - but it’s just not worth visiting or being a part of anymore.
Also, the memes are way out of hand.
Visiting the subreddit feels sour. I don’t feel as if I can contribute without it being downvoted to oblivion, dissed, and frowned upon. They just want the same people to post the same stuff. It’s a circlejerk.
I miss the subreddit.
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