
Reddit's redesign could kill discussion subreddits - Aoyagi
https://changemyview.net/2018/04/11/reddit-redesigned-its-site-and-it-could-kill-discussion-subreddits/
======
jacques_chester
Mobile phones. Again.

It's always mobile phones that ruin good websites these days.

They optimise for swipe, scroll and tap. Look, like, emoji.

They don't optimise for text. In fact they are increasingly hostile to it. The
Tinderfication of online dating has been a depressing race to the bottom.

The internet was never going to be as great as we thought it was. No other
technology has been. Folks thought the telegraph would end wars and that TVs
would have everyone soaking up a deep education. But that's not where the
money was.

But I felt it wouldn't be this shitty. At some point we're all going to look
back on that moment when Jobs held up the first iPhone that could run an app
and regret it.

~~~
Aoyagi
And yet so few of the designers consider dark/black colour themes, which are
not only more easier on the eyes, but also notably save the battery.

~~~
virmundi
Dark themes are worse for the eyes,
[https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/53264/dark-or-
white-c...](https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/53264/dark-or-white-color-
theme-is-better-for-the-eyes)

Don't know about battery life. I guess if it's AMOLED,
[https://www.greenbot.com/article/2834583/how-much-power-
does...](https://www.greenbot.com/article/2834583/how-much-power-does-a-black-
interface-really-save-on-amoled-displays.html)

~~~
shostack
Maybe, but I wonder if that is true at night with the lights off. When I read
in bed at night, I _much_ prefer light on dark text. Combined with Android's
night mode to tint things red, it is fantastic.

In fact, I wish the Kindle Paperwhite would come out with an inverted mode
already (although I think I read there were some challenges with doing so). It
can be fairly straining on my eyes to have the sidelit screen bright enough to
be legible while being as dim as possible to make reading with the lights off
comfortable.

~~~
orky56
Majority of reading is done in a brighter setting so many factors contribute
to using dark text in white background. In the case of reading in the dark or
low light settings, using a Kindle Paperwhite gets complicated since you want
to make the background darker while still maintaining sufficient contrast to
read the text which is always in a dark font color.

In the UX StackExchange post, it's stated that astigmatism is also a
contributing factor to favor dark text on white background. I do believe that
these night time settings should be toggled automatically for white text with
dark background as well as accounting for blue wavelength reduction for
screens with full colors.

~~~
Zak
I would like operating systems, browsers and websites to globally support a
"night mode" where a dark background is used. Especially with the
proliferation of mobile devices, people increasingly use technology in low-
light environments. As it stands today, I have to add external stylesheets to
websites to get this effect, and if I want to toggle them, I have to toggle
each one manually. It's similar, but worse for Android apps because the app
itself has to support themes.

I find having a significant portion of the screen white when my eyes are
relatively dark-adapted uncomfortable, even when the brightness is set fairly
low. I find a dark background with light text very preferable under those
conditions. I do not care if there is research suggesting I should not have
this preference.

From talking to others in person and online, I get the impression that my
preference is very common. Android was supposed to get something resembling
this, but the feature has been dropped or delayed.

------
StellarTabi
Two reasons why Reddit isn't "digg-ing" their own grave right now:

1\. This change is much smaller and less destructive than digg's big change
(although the long term effects can be just as destructive).

2\. When Digg's redesign caused an exodus, Reddit was extremely well known as
"that ugly digg clone" and "this digg link was on Reddit yesterday". Reddit
doesn't have a well known established "number two" the way digg did. Raddleme
is a leftist fringe site, voat is a racist fringe site, HN is a technology
fringe site. Discord servers rely on Reddit for discoverability and member
vetting. When this has been discussed before, I've never seen a viable
candidate mentioned. Since the only people who can leave are people who only
use fringe topics, Reddit won't be able to loose critical mass and then the
fringers will have to come back.

On the other hand, these changes appear to be a step into the
Twitter/Instagram/facebook market. I'm curious if Reddit will be ready in time
to take advantage of this upcoming Facebook exodus, also if there will even be
an exodus.

~~~
2bitencryption
You've painted a picture in my mind of Reddit as this massive blob connecting
Discord, so-called "fringe communities", etc.

It actually makes me appreciate Reddit a bit more -- it can be garbage, but
it's also a bit of a centralized meeting place for so many smaller
communities. Even if the bulk of those smaller communities doesn't take place
on Reddit itself, they still flow _through_ Reddit.

Reddit is like the central bazaar of discoverability. The community you end up
in might not live on Reddit, but in all likelihood, you discovered it through
Reddit.

So despite how terrible the big communities can be (which is not a Reddit-
exclusive problem), I'm still glad it exists. Maybe an alternative is needed,
but at the very least, I respect how Reddit has mostly retained this unique
ability over the years.

~~~
msla
I dislike trying to talk about "The Reddit Community" for the same reason I'd
dislike trying to talk about "The New York City Community" or "The Tokyo
Community": You don't have a million-member community. You can talk about
Dunbar's Number, you can talk about the simple fact nobody goes out and meets
a million people even if they're all on the same website/within a half-mile
radius of their home, but the result is the same.

It's possible to talk about "The Average Redditor" or "The Average New Yorker"
or "The Average Tokyo Resident", because statistics isn't about community, but
the whole reason Reddit has survived at the size it is is precisely because
subreddits allow different people to have vastly different views of "what's on
Reddit" based on subscription/unsubscription. This allows The_Donald and
EnoughTrumpSpam and dozens of other communities which would fight like cats in
a sack were they ever mixed to share the same service.

So Reddit isn't a community. It's a pre-made hosted platform to build a
community meeting point that you can largely (or completely, via invitation-
only private subreddits) insulate from all the other communities on the same
platform.

~~~
skoocda
But these community members aren't insulated entirely, ever. A new account is
always provided the same front page experience, due to default subscriptions,
and most Redditors only add subreddits to that front page, never removing any.
Even if they curate to an extreme level, the Popular feed is always the same
for everyone. You need to manually override that feed with RES filters to
eliminate content.

So I think it's valid to refer to "The Reddit Community", with some caution,
because there is a familiarity with some of the same content, and an ability
to relate in certain modes of thinking. The same way as "The Tokyo Community"
generally familiar with Shibuya crossing, the local weather patterns, and
behavioral expectations.

There's significant standard deviation, but also a commonality that enables a
stronger connection to other members of the platform / city.

~~~
curioussavage
Defaults have been gone for a while. Doesn’t affect older users but going
forward every users front page will be more different.

~~~
taylorexpander
I literally just made an account today and it subscribed me to a bunch of
defaults.

------
dgreensp
From reading Reddit threads about the redesign: pretty much everyone hates it,
especially Reddit’s most passionate users, who have been very articulate,
consistent, and aligned about exactly what they don’t like, and Reddit just
keeps brushing them off and dismissing their point of view.

Maybe the purpose of the redesign is something like monetization? Or maybe
they are just out of touch and by the time they really understood the
community’s point of view, the decisions had been made, so the Reddit
employees tasked with handling the community response can’t really say or do
much.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Of course it's about monetization. There's a difference between how Reddit-
the-company (and its investors) view the site, and how its users do.

It's like with cafés - visitors likes them quiet, and would very much enjoy
having an electrical outlet near the table (to charge up phone) and even free
Wi-Fi. But cafés aren't in business of making peoples' life better and more
enjoyable, they're in business of selling coffee - so they'll actively
_remove_ electrical outlets, remove their Wi-Fi and make the place noiser, to
increase turnover.

~~~
mprev
Genuinely interested to know where in the world the cafes are like that.

~~~
1123581321
I’m in the Midwest. All of them do _something_ to discourage staying all day.
Most don’t have many seats with access to electrical. WiFi is restricted to a
couple hours per session and not any faster than it needs to be. Most of them
are echoey on purpose. It’s been several years since one tried to make
bringing a computer at all difficult, though. I credit this to the re-
emergence of Dunkin Donuts in our area, reducing the gain from competing for
customers without much time for coffee.

------
joemi
I don't get it. What exactly is changing? From the screenshots from the reddit
post about it, it looks.... like reddit. There's posts and the posts have
upvote/downvote buttons, and there's a link to the comments that shows how
many there are. Am I missing something? The OP article doesn't actually have
any screenshots of changes, and I made it several paragraphs into the article
still not understanding what is changing.

~~~
strifey
You should be able to interact with the redesign directly at
[https://new.reddit.com](https://new.reddit.com). The main complaints I've
seen leveled at the redesign are: user profiles becoming more like Facebook
profiles, the new chat functionality missing core features, and the newly
created "best" ranking becoming the default.

~~~
joemi
Not sure why, but that link just brings me to the normal homepage (as it's
looked for years).

~~~
Fifer82
This confused me as well. See Izkata below your comment with a wired link to
screenshots.

But I see the old reddit as well.

~~~
joemi
I wonder if you have to be logged in for that link to work? I'm at work right
now and I never log in to reddit from here.

~~~
gizmo686
Nope.

I'm logged in and still getting redirected to the original.

------
vesinisa
Sadly, the reddit website has become a travesty - especially on mobile. A huge
"DOWNLOAD THE REDDIT APP" banner obscures literally 30% of the page. There is
a teeny-tiny "view on mobille site" link in small, low-contrast text that can
be used to dismiss the annoying banner. Due to its size and user-hostile
design, the Reddit banner is even worse than most news sites that try to push
their newsletter/app/subscription with similarly annoying banners.

~~~
liotier
On Android, use the "Reddit if fun" application - classic Reddit, fit for
mobile:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu.android.reddit&hl=en)

~~~
dkns
Yeah but I don't want to use another app for that. I already have app for
browsing Reddit - it's called web browser and I'd like to keep using it rather
than downloading yet another app that does basically the same.

~~~
InternetOfStuff
I get your point, but "Reddit is Fun" is really good. It's the opposite of the
stupid mobile apps which are inferior to the website proper.

I might even prefer it to the desktop site (not to speak of the mobile site).

~~~
TeMPOraL
Seconding Reddit is Fun - it has a very decent UX (about the only thing I'd
love to see improved is the comment box, especially around quoting stuff).
It's lean, bullshit-free, actively developed and offers all the features you'd
have on the website (at least all that I know of).

------
baby
A day before the re-design announcement I was explaining to a friend why Digg
died and why Reddit would never dare re-designing their page. Oh boy was I
wrong.

~~~
michel__
You make it sound like this came out of nowhere. Reddit has been letting
people beta test this for months.

~~~
anc84
And I told them it is terrible and stopped beta testing within minutes.

~~~
Kiro
And you were wrong. Time to admit it.

~~~
TremendousJudge
You're right. I love it when websites run slow and hog resources to provide
less functionality than they used to.

------
dmix
Purely from a user perspective I personally love the new Reddit design, I
don't find it detracts much from the previous design at all. BUT I use a top-
end Macbook Pro and I find the new design to be terribly slow and a
performance hog, where it simply kills the UX.

Once you open up 10 tabs (how I typically browse Reddit, by shift clicking
each thread I want to read) I can hear my CPU fans kicking in. I had to tune
Firefox to use 6 cores instead of 4 to get any decent performance. I may just
end up going back to the old design :/

I'm not sure what computers/browsers Reddit's UI/UX team has been testing on,
or if they've ever tried to open multiple pages at once, but this is a pretty
blatant issue.

~~~
orky56
Agreed. The design aesthetic actually works but the technical overhead in
implementing is the problem. HN works so well because not only does it
prioritize information density but it consumes less resources. The Reddit
redesign pushes thumbnails, infinite scroll, and a useless right sidebar.

Thumbnails waste space depending on the subreddit. Infinite scroll destroys
the idea of a discrete "front page" which is core to Reddit being the front
page of the Internet. In addition the infinite scroll makes no sense in the
comments where on Mobile you can jump between top-level parent comments
whereas on Desktop it's too busy loading child comments before you can get to
the next top-level parent comment. The right sidebar is persistent and serves
little purpose for a power user. The left sidebar which provides core
navigation for a power user is useful when persistent but loads asynchronously
with the middle, main content for it to be a consistent user experience.

------
radiorental
Top tier sites like reddit should not drop large, disruptive, releases like
this.

Take Amazon for example. If they went from the design 5-7 years ago straight
to the current design, there would be uproar, Stock price dip etc.

The incremental approach allows the site owner to both roll back bad ideas but
also condition users into where the design is heading.

(Correction: not Conde Nast) The owner, has a plan, which is clearly not
inline with the current Reddit usage, this is not the approach to get to that
goal.

I am struggling to think of big drops like this working, anyone?

~~~
542458
> I am struggling to think of big drops like this working, anyone?

Gmail has done major overhauls all in one go. So has Dropbox. Google
calendars. Google earth. Apple's main site. Most newspaper's sites. Bitbucket.
Facebook has had several. All of these have irritated some portion of users
who decried the death of the product, yet eventually people get used to it. I
think it works more often than not.

And if we went suddenly from Amazon of five years ago[1] to the Amazon of
today I don't think there would be that much of an uproar. It's basically the
same site, just with minor colour and layout changes.

[1]:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20130316112319/http://www.amazon...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130316112319/http://www.amazon.com/)

~~~
Mediterraneo10
"It's basically the same site, just with minor colour and layout changes."

The most dramatic change has been to "community" features. Amazon feels it is
enough of a monopoly now that it now longer has to attract customers through
the ability to discuss things. The discussion boards were shut down, and
similarly the ability to leave a comment under someone's product review was
restructured so that that feature no longer serves to let people maintain a
lively conversation among themselves about the author or musician. Many
listings now only show by default reviews from customers who actually brought
the product; this was done to tackle the problem of shill reviewers, but it
also eviscerated the community that had popped up to share their feelings on
even library loans because for nearly two decades Amazon had let anyone review
and discuss books and music.

The page to see your review history has been changed so that it is now an
infinite scroll. While infinite scroll is a very popular design choice these
days, I can’t help but wonder if Amazon also wanted to make it difficult for
the reviewers with 1000+ reviews to easily move their content to another site.

------
s_dev
As long as redditors can choose between the designs I don't see a problem.
Once this choice is removed though they've veered in to Digg territory. All
the power users and influencers will use the old design because they're used
to it. I can see why reddit wants a redesign -- reddit is ugly but people are
used to it that way and grew to like it. The redesign is for new users.

Reddit has already been down this path with Pao. If they don't like how the
site is being run they will depart or revolt.

~~~
gedy
> The redesign is for new users

And I suspect bigger, more visible ads/paid content

~~~
FridgeSeal
The paid content is definitely way worse (more insidious) in the new design):
it blends in far more, and equally as bad is that a lot of it seems to be just
using those trash fb-esque style clickbait titles.

Reddit's not perfect, but trash-tier clickbait titles is not something I'm
accustomed to seeing on there, nor do I want to.

------
crankylinuxuser
I unfortunately saw this weeks ago. I did the checkbox accepting being in the
Beta program.

At first, I thought something was rewriting the whole content of my browser.
And then, I realized, no, this is their "redesign". On mobile, the site is
unusable - as in a overlay bar blocks all clicks or anything - for at least 30
seconds. Being on a laptop wasn't much better. There, it was 10 seconds of
unusuability, per loaded page.

It took me 3 minutes to navigate to turn _off_ beta. From there, it went back
to the decent site I'm used to. Well, except a button in the upper left band
that states "TRY THE REDESIGN"... Uhh, no.

All good things must come to an end. There is an end to everything, to good
things as well.

~~~
Max_Mustermann
What browser are you on? new.reddit.com works just fine on updated Firefox...
biggest annoyance is the lack of sidebars on subreddits, apparently they need
to be enabled by the mods.

------
Redoubts
All I wanted to see is what the comments section now looks like. It's
literally the only thing I'm there for, and preview photos never show it. (My
biggest complaint with many HN app previews too)

Of course, when I try the preview myself, I'm greeted with this:

[https://imgur.com/a/PvRhk](https://imgur.com/a/PvRhk)

~~~
teddyfrozevelt
Here's an example.

[https://imgur.com/a/RfioM](https://imgur.com/a/RfioM)

~~~
shostack
I'm not seeing any significant differences there. Am I missing something
obvious?

------
brynjolf
Frustrating to discuss this on reddit as well. They always think we should
watch and eait but that rarely works. Especially if they already added huge
banners advertising their data collecting app and now autoplaying videos,
before people complained they also autoplayed them with sound..

------
nhangen
How can an article about a re-design not actually show or compare the two
designs?

~~~
Consultant32452
[https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-
redesign/](https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/)

This one at least has some screenshots of the new design. It feels like a
Facebook clone to me. In particular it looks like they're flattening comments
to be like FB rather than the thread? model that Reddit has today.

~~~
relin
The only significant change I've noticed re: comments are how the nested
chains collapse: instead of the intuitive [+] and [-] at the parent comment,
there's a line that runs alongside the chain. Click that line and it
collapses.

It's not as easy to figure out on your own, but it's a significant improvement
IMO.

------
adjunctme
The redesign adds a bit of lag from all the javascript and extra elements. The
old plain text + expanding comments + images/gifs is much smoother and
includes everything that's needed

------
atupis
There is certain design by committee feeling at new redesing, its like they
are putting everything there chat, share, follow, fancy sidebar, options and
more.

------
bkovacev
Reddit is pushing to become a news site rather than a community site.

~~~
mrweasel
I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption. People already view Twitter
as a source of news, no reason they wouldn't accept Reddit as a news media as
well.

------
rabboRubble
Reddit gave me the opportunity to try the new layout, and I lasted exactly 1
minute before reverting. The log in page was broken. I could see where to sign
up for a new account, but could not see area to log in for existing users.

The problem appeared to be one of resizing the old log in page correctly for
the new layout. Regardless, not my issue as a stupid user to have to debug log
in pages for a major website.

If this sort of basic thing is missing in the redesign, they have big problems
ahead.

------
dotcoma
The question is: By mistake or by design?

~~~
akerro
There are no mistakes in it. This was planned years ago, they spent a lot of
time evaluating different technologies and UI mockups. I'm interested to see
if AMA with Barak Obama will be still readable, or will start consuming
gigabytes of RAM.

------
chaoticmass
I miss being able to collapse comments by pressing the minus-sign button.

~~~
noxToken
The long bar (beneath the upvote/downvote buttons) that shows what level the
current comment is at collapses comments by clicking it. Very unintuitive, and
I only found it by accident.

~~~
chaoticmass
ah, thanks... but yes, very unintuitive.

------
spiderfarmer
The Apollo app is what official Reddit should be like right now.

~~~
FridgeSeal
Or Reddit Sync.

------
sidkhanooja
Reddit has its issues (brigading, trolling, execssive politics, 12-year old
level "memes" on serious discussions), but it was a site you could visit
without regret, and get lost in for hours.

With the new redesign, it _is_ Facebook - people share a link, you click the
comments section, it shows you the top comments, you upvote the top comments
(or the ones that agree with your view), and rinse and repeat till infinity,
because you have infinite scroll. Which is not how I want the future Reddit to
look like.

Yes, it is good for advertisers. Yes, it is good for the the new wave of
people who will arrive from Facebook.

But it is utterly disheartening for Reddit to stray so far from what I viewed
its core emphasis as - comments.

------
agumonkey
wonder what will be the next reddit .. maybe the last push before some
decentralized thing that needed some userbase.

~~~
mantas
PhpBB or vBulletin reincarnations?

~~~
agumonkey
Actually I wouldn't mind, I miss the spirit of these boards. phpbb was hell,
but it seems a lot of php things are now based on clean modules (even though a
quick googling sheds doubts on the status of phpbb over symfony modules)

~~~
mantas
Definitely didn't want to give impression that it's somehow worse. A well
moderated board is lightyears ahead of a subreddit or, god forbid, FB group.
Even half assed categorisation and search awesome. Today's forums could have
proper full text search and pimped up moderation tools, possibly with some AI
helpers on top.. Just thinking about it makes me drool.

~~~
agumonkey
I don't know if my interests shield me from bad subreddits but most of the one
I glance at are fine, at worst they're just comatose but never toxic. I like
reddit quite a bit, it has that weird organic value that overcome a lot of
weirdness and subpar features.

Still old boards were .. much more home like than most of the web 2.0 ever
dreamed of.

~~~
mantas
Not that they're bad. There's definitely a lot of subreddits with a good
charm. But they're PITA from information archive point of view. Browsing old
threads is much harder than in classic BB. Thus people keep asking same
question over and over again even more than in the old days :)

Hundreds-of-pages-over-a-decade historical threads don't happen on either of
new platforms either :( Which is one of the lovely quirks of the old boards
IMO.

~~~
agumonkey
oh that sure, reddit has no function here on most subreddits, but for non
instantaneous chat/help it's very good.

~~~
mantas
I guess I lurk on different type of classic forums. Most of them focus on
generating long-standing content on-the-spot chat is just a byproduct.

~~~
agumonkey
yeah, per 'site' moderation has still a massive influence over this.
/r/askhistorian is very strict about answers, anything that deviates from
sourced and on topic will be removed. You can read anything there and have
clear concise deep answers even years after.

this is something I liked a lot about reddit, there's no micromanagement, it's
very organic and free. I'm not always for senseless freedom but in this case I
found it to yield interesting things.

------
ra88it
Can somebody please summarize what has changed? Maybe I don't use Reddit
enough, but I just refreshed one of the subreddits that I like, and I can't
find a difference. Possibly a caching issue?

~~~
krtkush
Maybe this will help -

[http://new.reddit.com/](http://new.reddit.com/)

~~~
jvagner
is this supposed to be the new reddit?

it's the same ol' reddit for me.

------
tluyben2
The design reminds me too much of the native iOS Reddit app; fine for mobile,
but I really do not like it for desktop. It is absolutely annoying to me.

------
return1
in other news how is their new profile design going? I keep adding /overview
to mine and other profiles to be able to actually click on things . Why do
they keep breaking functionality for no apparent reason? It's becoming a theme
in many high-traffic websites (google adsense, analytics come to mind), it's
as if new managers roll in and decide to piss all around their territory.

------
digi_owl
I find the new design noisy and distracting.

------
gm-conspiracy
digg v3?

~~~
sreyaNotfilc
I thought it was digg v4 that was Digg's undoing. Which was taken over
by...Reddit. I guess its time for some other community site to take over.
Maybe those Amino apps.

------
reiichiroh
Is Fark still relevant? Their Cohen raid night thread was really long.

------
superkuh
I started using reddit in 2008. Although I doubt it was intentional reddit was
a refuge from the "Best viewed with Javascript" modern web for many years. It
worked just fine to browse and read with no JS enabled and was very snappy and
low resource usage that way. Sure, you had to toggle JS back on to vote or
post but that was easy enough.

I left just before they pushed out the redesign due their increased censorship
but from what I can see now it is a random chance that a sub will work with JS
disabled. Half the time the post content in a div that only is rendered
visible when you turn on JS. You can read it if you view source but not in the
browser's native interface.

~~~
bluedevil2k
It's 2018 and you're criticizing a site for not running well with JS disabled.
You're the one actively deciding to make websites harder to use, why should
they design the site for you?

~~~
blub
It's 2018 and web developers are still not competent enough to build simple
websites (blogs, news, reddit) without forcing visitors to use JS.

JS is the technology responsible for most of the malware infections and
spyware ad-tracking. It's not like people disable it just to piss off
developers, there are very good reasons to turn it off.

~~~
dwild
> most of the malware infections

Can you give a source for that?

I keep asking for it and never had any good response. The best I have found is
that it helps show phishing. A link that said "Install me" and trigger the
download of an executable when you click on it doesn't make HTML responsible
for malware infections.

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://labsblog.f-secure.com/2016/04/28/browser-and-
email-t...](https://labsblog.f-secure.com/2016/04/28/browser-and-email-top-
attack-channels-for-malware-delivery/)

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+malware+vector&atb=v64-...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+malware+vector&atb=v64-5_a&t=cros&ia=qa)

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=javascript%20malware%20...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=javascript%20malware%20vector&btnG=Search&as_sdt=800000000001&as_sdtp=on)

------
cup-of-tea
Reddit is terrible for discussion anyway. You can't have a discussion when
people can "downvote" your post. Nothing of value has been lost here. I say
that as someone who used reddit heavily until about a month ago when I kicked
the addiction.

~~~
ApolloFortyNine
All downvoting does is enforce 'crowd-think'. You could never picture it
today, but back in 2012, /r/politics was much more central then it was today
(still left leaning, but you could actually find differing opinions). But soon
after that election, anyone who disagreed would get downvoted into oblivion,
and eventually those people stop posting. And what you're left with is today's
/r/politics.

You can see this in a lot of topic related subreddits, if something is
extremely popular, you'll get downvoted for calling out any faults. Eventually
people just stop posting.

~~~
cup-of-tea
Indeed. Downvoting simply shouldn't exist. It lets users feel like "mini-
censors" and it turns out people really like censoring views they don't agree
with or that make them uncomfortable.

It's not just downvoting, though. Reddit also lets the moderators act like
real censors and they are completely unaccountable. There is no way to visit a
subreddit and know whether the discussion there is censored or not. So you
have to assume it is.

------
MikkoFinell
I had no idea there was "discussion subreddits" on reddit. I always thought it
was a site for hoarding karma by posting memes and puns.

~~~
slap_shot
I can't down vote your comment, but if I could, I would. It isn't constructive
to the conversation at hand.

But on a personal note, if you can't find interesting, intelligent content on
Reddit, that is a criticism of yourself, not Reddit. Reddit houses some
fascinatingly talented, smart, engaging people across a vast array of subject
matter.

~~~
gldalmaso
In order to find that interesting content, you need to learn about it. I can
imagine many new users coming to reddit, seeing just the front page and
drawing their conclusions, turning around and not look back.

Should they be criticized by that?

Maybe take the time to share some of that interesting content here to parent
to change his view instead of denouncing him.
([https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/))

------
Vovka19
What interesting?

