A little something I wrote a while back for f7u12, rings true now.
So I'm resigning. I hadn't thought it would come to this but this subreddit has taken a direction I can't handle and I won't stand for the things happening here anymore.
I'll go through my reasons.
First, there are jokes, not comics on here. This place is turning into r/funny and r/jokes. No, I'm not going on about being a nazi for classic rage comics. I'm saying what happened to this place being focussed actually on funny content? Now, it seems all you have to do to gain a bit of karma is take a joke that is older than the internet itself and rehash it into comic format.
Secondly, the blatant karma whoring. First I'll talk about pandering to the common denominator, the new rage face in town! We all remember how the ForeverAlone face overtook the subreddit once, with nearly every new comic just being a variation? Well I'm not glad to say that recently it's been the ILied face. All you have to do now is to post something mildly funny with that face and it's getting upvotes, something like this. Oh yes, very funny I'm sure; but we all know this? Is it necessary to have it in one panel? I'll touch on the issue of effort later on. More karma whoring here. Oh look, a comic that panders to the new major demographic of the site. More here. This is from the funnyjunk idiocy that invaded reddit. What's one of the best ways to stop caring about something - don't tell me, it's to ignore it, right? Well, I'm glad we stopped caring about this website that many people haven't heard of before.
I'm going to stop using sarcasm and just point out that in trying to 'cover up' the funnyjunk theft of comics which are placed on the internet without any copyright was extreme in the stupidity and in the frequency of comics posted first moaning and whining about it, then all the comics pandering to the circlejerk of "we don't like funnyjunk hooray!". Comics got upvotes just for saying anything negative about funnyjunk and anything positive about reddit.
Posted Aug 13, 2011, 3:51 AM UTC
##3
Let's talk about the merging of subreddits. Recently r/DoesAnybodyElse went full on proper-modding, and starting sticking true to their policies of having only the most interesting questions asked and not idiotic stuff along the lines of "DAE use two hands to do things?". WTF, Funny, Jokes and Pics seem to now have the same content. Well, you might say this is good! Specialisation was killing reddit - or was specialisation something to help categorise and make sorting easier for users? This subreddit has lost its way and okay, some say that's good. I say that it is terrible, as the original content is now treated the same as poorly written drivel.
My moderator complaints are as thus: accounts solely for the purpose of novelty should not be moderators. It cheapens the premise and is an easy way to gain a cult of followers. Moderators do many things from cleaning the spam filter to answering modmail to changing CSS and I've said it before yet I'll say it again: in all the subreddits I mod it is usually different mods who carry out different tasks. Moderators have to be fascist on reddit nowadays in my opinion. Let's say less fascist and more benevolent yet still holding the power over submissions and reddit appearance, as that fits better into the point I want to make, which I'll embolden as to emphasise:
Users on reddit cannot govern themselves.
It's something I believe that the community needs to see, needs to hear and most importantly needs to start analysing why. User votes on this site always don't seem to say what the vocal majority are thinking. We saw this subreddit crowned as subreddit of the year then we saw the rest of reddit ask how in the hell it could happen. We saw a novelty account who was there for the last two months of a year get crowned commenter of the year last year (bozarking, anyone?). We have these 'democratic' decisions that vote in popularity and not ability. Yes, I concede popularity can be used as an effective tool for exposure of ability but mostly it is not, what with popularity almost defined as your ability to use the most topical meme.
At the same time I heard people saying that we should use upvotes/downvotes on r/science to assess quality and moderators should stay out of it, I saw just as many people if not more asking moderators to please sort out the content. I introduced many scientific moderators to the subreddit and for the most part it has been improving; we've even relaxed original policy to let more through. The problem was that reddit users in their infinite wisdom believing that upvotes/downvotes work were letting through videos of mere scientific phenomena well established yet guaranteed to get 'karma' and then asking themselves why it was on the subreddit.
On the last topic of moderator positions, we need to have a real-time area for mods to discuss things (forums do not cut it now) which I've tried to create on IRC (message me for details); and we need at least a doubling of mods on all major subreddits. For a subreddit of 500,000 subscribers we have barely 1/10,000 of those users moderating and helping the place improve.
Let's have a positive in with the negatives, shall we? Contrary to popular belief, I'd like to point out that reddit actually did bring some of the more popular faces into existence, and storylines such as the fire-spider dialogue (although many are shit), some bring original thought-lines.
Secondly, some user art is just fantastic. Artists can really shine on this subreddit despite the limitations that are artificially placed; even when original comics looked like this, which was one of the only few I saw on the front page/second page of the reddit at the time of writing this.
Do we want rage comics or do we want real life stories? Do you remember when there were those few that complained that women were using this subreddit as a way to tell us about their day? Well this seems to be the common use of the subreddit now. A way to tell someone a mildly to not at all interesting story through the use of 'funny' graphics.
More pandering. We all say that upvotes and downvotes don't matter, don't we? Well most of us. Yet we still have phrases, 'an upvote for you'. 'Upvoted from my second account!'. Upvotes and downvotes are not a way to assess the quality of something when not intended for the original purpose. They were introduced on the site as upvotes being for things that contribute and downvotes for things that don't -- now they have become glorified agree/disagree buttons to which the few that still cry about the loss of reddiquette despair over.
Lastly to bring it back down again, there is the issue of effort. As someone high up in the reddit community said to me lately, (paraphrased): "at least when comics were made in MS paint there was a small barrier to creating them" which rings true today! The less effort it takes to make something, the more the overall quality will decline. Now, with rage-makers that are all too commonplace it is easy yes to create a rage comic (and this will sound snobbish) but to give the ability to everyone who has the thought it not too smart. Some don't even put in effort in their comics. How hard would it have been to provide some more context in that particular submission, or to build any sort of suspense or story-telling feel? This waste of effort is bemoaned all over reddit now, notably I see with music. Look me in the eye and tell me you've never complained about a popular modern piece of music because you think it's auto-tuned trash, or that it's just a simple piece of music with a man or woman who has a good marketer behind them.
This is all I can think of right now. I hope you've read it in its entirety and appreciate the irony of me introducing this dramatic post to reddit as a self-professed loather of 'reddit drama'.
To kind of sum it up, I like that someone created this.
P.S. if you think that these comics I link are exceptions to the norm, in writing this I opened the front page and the one after that and selected only from those two comics that fit my points. It would be unfair to scrawl through the history of the subreddit cherry-picking only trash.