Is this new to post-blackout reddit is or has it been this way for a while. Top post of r/all is a tweet from like 2 years ago about a “current event” that no one has talked about since then and 100% of the comments are talking about this like this topic is the focus of today’s or any recent time’s 24 hour news cycle. Nearly 30K upvotes. 100 comments. Feels like ai/bot cosplaying what an actual hot reddit post would be like but in a world without people.
Have you heard of the Dead Internet Theory? When I heard that it put a name to how Reddit has felt for a while. Mostly I’m on the “avoid main subreddits” camp and a I’m in a few small communities. Wierdo communities but the wierdo feels genuine.
A long time ago Reddit used to have a rule against self-promotion. It got tricky though to get definitions. Selfposts were fine if the didn’t link out with obvious “buy my shit” type things. With selftext it sort of made sense. But then you had artists showing something they had painted… Is that self-promotion? And then there were the wars over whether theoatmeal should be banned and admin took theoatmeal’s side and pissed everyone off. So then people started to aggressively promote their content and only feared moderators. Nowadays a lot of it is “I wrote this” and “I made this video” etc. And it’s a really difficult hair to split. Some people I don’t mind doing that. But other times it’s just missing the filter of any third-party evaluating it as interesting enough to be submitted. Dunno. Lately reddit just feels like a room full of salesmen and bots a lot of places on Reddit. Even the smaller subreddits are full of people pushing YouTubers or other celebrities.