The way I describe Reddit to people is that you have zero clue if you’re arguing with a 13 year old who discovered $x concept this week.

(Or a bot)

If you move through the site with that understanding - and personally, using the old interface - it can still be bearable.

I’m not the biggest fan of the company itself these days and I hold out hope that something else can take off, but I’ve not been impressed so far.

I have a theory that reddit was pretty decent when it first started because the majority of the site users were at least university or college students/age.

Nowadays the average age is high school, and probably trending to grade school

These are the people who are influencing the Google search user at large now.

We’re fucked

Bang on. I deleted my account when I started to notice that I would grow older (and wiser) while the average Redditor always stayed the same age.

When I created my account more than a decade ago, I felt most people knew more than I did about the world. Now almost in my 40s, and there is the definite feeling that the average redditor you're replying to is a white, 16 year old American boy. The apex of civilisation indeed.

There was a long period where the internet was intimidating and unattractive to regular people. It acted as a strong filter for determining who the people that frequented early sites where.

Eternal summer...

I remember "Eternal September" being used to describe this behaviour on 4chan about 10 years ago (when 4chan's own userbase likely was more high schoolers).

Though the original definition seems to be about ISPs giving unfettered Usenet access in 1993, causing a similar flood of newbies everywhere.

> Nowadays the average age is high school, and probably trending to grade school

Have you ever seen one of the site surveys that subreddits typically do? The median age is almost always above college graduation (22 years old), at least for the subs I frequent. I could see the front page subs having a median in college age (18-22), but I'd be really surprised if it was below 18.

You also have no idea what country a user is in

> There are various subreddits where young people ask for advice and other young people with no experience are giving advice that might influence others negatively.

I've yet to see a relationships advice thread where the top comment isn't "get divorced immediately"

Which is scary, because these people are taking OP's comment at face value and only hearing one side of the story.

Worked for me!

It's actually good advice. If you're the sort of person who's seeking out those narcissistic writing excersise subs for relationship advice you probably should get divorced.

The real indictment here isn't that Reddit serves bad advice, it's that Google is just bad at providing you with relevant information. This is a symptom of people trying to find real humans talking about stuff by slapping "reddit" on the front of every search, because the SEO garbage that rises to the top isn't worth a read.

I’d love to see two types of upvotes on the site. One for “thanks for answering/engaging” and another for “this answer is correct and high quality”. Not sure how you’d restrict or verify the votes, but I think the issue you’re pointing out is a result of only having one metric of engagement.

Slashdot solved it more than twenty years ago.

Slashdot also had the concept of meta-moderation, where the site's users could vote on whether a particular mod's actions were appropriate/fair or not. Presumably mods that were voted as problematic stopped getting the ability to mod.

Slashdot was in many ways way ahead of their time. I think Reddit (and even HN) could benefit from this kind of check/balance.

If there's one thing I learned from reddit, it's how not to build a wooden deck lol.

>Otherwise, Reddit is great for technical stuff and niche community communication.

I used to believe this but its becoming clear to me that for just about every subbreddit for my different niche interests, a common theme emerges of a dogma endorsed by the community. This might be a concept, an idea, a tool, something sold, something not sold, but whatever it is, the community latches on it hard and doesn't let go. If you offer different experiences to the contrary of the dogma of the day people either ignore you at best or downvote and get combative.

Another huge problem is the extreme left wing political bias almost everything has on the front page. I'm a centrist but the violently left views of everything on the front page is really offputting and I used to love reddit.

r/cscareerquestions