Why is this subreddit now just askreddit for movies?
Some time in the last few months, r/movies has been entirely consumed by askreddit-style questions like "What's your favorite hidden gem??" or "What actor fell off the map??"
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What is now causing all these unique, seemingly-non-bot posters to suddenly start flooding this particular subreddit with their discussion posts, instead of going to askreddit? Did the whole reddit protest shit change the moderation rules? Has the subreddit been infiltrated by a secret Buzzfeed content farming cabal? I unsubscribed from r/askreddit because I got sick of this shit, but now it's back on r/movies!
What is going on??
I think the comments are most interesting though
Because the audience for reddit has dwindled since July. Reddits offial site and app push controversial posts over just well yovkted ones. Most controversial posts asks inane questions. Then there's bots reposting those questions for karma and then websites juicing social media for content to get crammed down your throat via SEO.
They should make a second internet just for people
This all started with the boycott.
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I’d assumed things would go back to “normal” after the boycott, but it looks like a lot of power users really did take their ball and go home. (I wonder what they’re doing with their time instead? Hopefully some new hobbies? Time with friends?) Maybe reddit will regret removing the 3rd party apps, after all? Maybe we’ll just accept a future where niche subs become little more than BuzzFeed polls, but we get paid if our poll does well, so users won’t care?
It's because Reddit is trying to drive engagement. I don't know if you noticed, but since the purge of third-party apps, the comment sections have been kind of meager, and things don't get as many upvotes as they used to. Heck, half the comments act like bots anyway. It seems like reddit has been distilled down to those most addicted to it and has taken a hard lean into all the most extreme views.
When Reddit killed third party apps, the quality fell off all over the place. It took me about a month to realize the timing and why r/all had so much AITA rage bait stories and celebrity gossip and stuff now. I think a lot of the quality posters and people who liked more high brow discussions just left Reddit.
This makes me sad. Not just because of what happened with reddit, but because I'm still missing that high-brow discussion. Most of my reddit comments were replies to other people, rather than top-level comments, and I spent more time reading comment sections than I did looking at the content they were discussing.
I like it here, but I don't feel like I come across the depth of content I did on reddit. I don't mind the lower quantity - that's expected on a small platform - but I'm definitely not enjoying the lower quality. Most of the activity seems to be around memes and American politics, neither of which particularly interest me, and most of the comments across most posts feel fairly unsubstantial. It's so much rarer for me to find something I want to reply to on here than it was on reddit.
While I don't think Reddit is going to collapse anytime soon or anything, any moderators that chose to stay after seeing how little Reddit cares about them, are not going to be the sorts of people with a bold vision on what they want to see in a community. What remains of the culture is just going to get more and more generic as evidenced here.
looks like a lot of power users really did take their ball and go home. (I wonder what they’re doing with their time instead? Hopefully some new hobbies? Time with friends?)
The entire subreddit becoming thematic "AskReddit" with a constant loop of the same borderline braindead questions is actually what happens to every single Reddit subreddit, unless heavily moderated.
I moderated three Brazilian subreddits: a CasualConversation equivalent, a Fitness equivalent, and a AMA equivalent. Guess what? Those questions were 80% of all new posts, and we of course had rules and threads to deal with them - which meant a looooooooot of time wasted removing posts, explaining why they have been removed, redirecting users to existing threads, getting cursed at for removing the post, and so on. The few times we experimented with not removing them, they flooded the subreddit, hid new and interesting content, and people complained.
So if moderators are leaving, this is what will happen.
When you monetize karma, this is the result. Reddit will be Buzzfeed / WatchMojo / Snapchat Top 10 lists in a couple months. But number 1 will shock you!
Reddit has been dying for a decade or longer, it's just now the people who saw it through all the previous crap, and tried to make it have some semblance of the site it once was, have up and left, leaving it to the brainless hordes.
It never was about the quantity of users leaving reddit, but the quality. Those that didn't care about the changes were not those who were posting the most. They weren't the moderators, the power users, people making original shit. Those all cared about the site and about the changes.
/r/movies has always had tons of those generic hidden/underrated gem/actor threads about huge blockbuster films that everyone has seen. It's in no way a new phenomenon. The /r/moviescirclejerk subreddit has existed for years, and lives off those posts.
Reddit has long paid mods to be “Community Builders”. Ostensibly they’re there to help other mods build their subreddits, but actually what seems to happen is they spam low effort posts like the ones described (the “question style” post is very popular) in lots of subreddits.
I’ve posted this before but here’s more info:
Have a look at this user’s posts prior to the blackouts: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/ Lots and lots of low-effort posts in various UK subreddits.
Discussion quality in the whole platform went down. It isn't just r/movies, or large subs - it's everywhere. Specially jarring if you stopped going to reddit since the revolts, and then checked it "randomly".
They used to farm kharma to sell accounts to other parties. This resulted in a WHOLE lot of karma-farming bots that just reposted old content. Now they're going to just pay those bots directly instead. Now do we think things will get better or worse?
Maybe I should go back there and make my fourth Reddit comment in three months. (Down from ~6 per day.) Would be nice to bring more Reddit people over.
Having the niche communities again would be nice. The benefit Reddit had there is that it was the default for so long, people would proactively search out the community for their new hobby. !league@lemmy.ml is just starting to come back.
I bet it's fucking Collider again. If you go to Google news and search "reddit", then unless reddit has done some recent fuckery, well over half the results are Collider listicles of 10 Best/Worst , according to reddit. [A bunch of the rest are sites writing articles about bullshit posts on AITA and similar creative writing subreddits.]
Reddit has been going downhill for years, this year was just accelerated. Current movies are also pretty bad lately. I haven’t been to a theater in years.
My question is this: Does Spez know? And how? Do they have analytics tracking the same decline we are aware of via anecdotal evidence but they are looking at in in a graph that resembles the Hindenburg’s last landing?
It’s driven by engagement. More comments usually means more users are staying to leave them and others are staying to read. I noticed it on a few other popular subs too, and it’s a large reason why rave bait has become so common.
I don’t post in Reddit anymore. But I think we should be realistic, the quality of comments in Lemmy/Kbin is general below that of the even diminished Reddit