Usenet was all about longform text. People posting to it were seated comfortably at a chair and typing on a keyboard. Reddit is today mainly browsed by people on their phones, a medium that discourages longform text no matter how much people claim to be just as proficient on a touchscreen keyboard as a real one. Moreover, Reddit’s redesign discourages substantial discussion, and even if one chooses to use old.reddit.com, you still suffer from the overall culture of the site being set by the new interface.
Nothing to stop a subreddit running a bot to enforce minimum post length and detect obvious attempts at padding to bypass it, I guess? The effects of the UI are still a problem though as you say.
I view reddit less as a site, more a collection of lots of subs that vary a lot in how they feel.
How about forum software that enforces that top-level comments must be at least 500 characters, and replies need to be at least 140 characters? Also, enforce a max thread depth of 7. Anything past that is usually bickering.
Mods on any decently popular subreddits will tell you that they feel limited in what rules they can enforce. Reddit users get used to the sitewide culture, so if they come onto a subreddit and run up against strange rules, they hassle the mods. I’ve seen whole mobs, drawing in even the sub’s regulars, harangue mods as “gatekeepers”, with few or none standing up for the traditional rules.
Also, I’m not sure if it was true or a conspiracy theory, but I recall once hearing that mods of the most popular subs cannot institute any rules that would reduce “engagement” (and thereby profit), as Reddit would then replace them.
It's not only time-consuming, it is dispiriting. Moderating is an unpaid job, and it sucks to be the target of abuse, and then to watch all the regulars on your sub attack you as the bad guy, when they side with the newbies that you are "gatekeeping".
