Reddit is a DOWNGRADE
Reddit sucks. Old internet forums were better. Here’s why…
There are a lot of reasons why Reddit is bad compared to old school forums. For one, Reddit has WAY more users than any classic internet forum ever had, and that makes it a target for manipulation. Can you really trust that posts ranking at the top of r/all got there because that’s what redditors want to see? How many high ranking posts got to the top because somebody paid for upvotes? Sure, any old forum could probably be manipulated just as easily as Reddit, but there’s not much risk of that happening due to the relatively small userbase of most forums. It may not seem fair to criticize Reddit for being targeted due to its popularity, but the reason Reddit is so massive is because of how it is structured.
Reddit has a lot in common with internet forums of the vBulletin or phpBB variety. Reddit consists of subreddits. Subreddits consist of posts, and posts contain comments. Similarly, most forums consisted of subforums, which consisted of threads (or topics), and each thread consisted of user comments. Since the various parts of Reddit are analogous to the various parts of a forum, it could be said that Reddit is a forum. However, it might be more accurate to say that Reddit is a database of forums. After all, forums typically focused on a particular niche, similar to how subreddits focus on a particular niche.
Another reason Reddit is worse than old internet forums is because of Reddit’s sitewide content policy. The rules making up the content policy are not particularly unfair, but the selective enforcement of the rules often is. Ultimately, the problem is that the creator, or head moderator, of a subreddit always has to answer to a higher authority – the reddit admin team. Internet forums back in the Web 2.0 days were decentralized. The creator of a forum could do whatever they wanted with that forum. They could have whatever rules they wanted, and they could enforce those rules however they wanted. In contrast, reddit mods have relatively little power to regulate their own subreddit. If the reddit admins, who are all corporate employees, don’t like how you are moderating your subreddit, they might just ban the entire subreddit.
To sum it up: Reddit is a downgrade from internet forums of the past.
If you’d like to support this channel, consider subscribing or even just clicking the Like button.
Chapters:
00:00 – Intro
00:58 – What is a forum?
03:09 – Twitter and Discord
05:30 – Reddit is big
07:44 – Reddit is a database
10:40 – Reddit, forums, and decentralization
14:13 – r/all, redditors, and reddit memes
17:13 – Unique Communities
17:40 – Forum Avatars
18:58 – Reputation Systems and Karma
20:51 – Conclusion
22:06 – Thank you for watching!
Socials:
Follow me on Twitter: / ian_decent
Email me directly: [email protected]
Credits:
Outro music: "Decisions"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...
#reddit #forums #internetnostalgia