* feeling completely overrun with sensationalized politics;
* the new design feeling sluggish and painful even on my maxed out late-2016 MBP;
* the general community feeling more hostile and downvote-heavy than ever before;
* and the content being increasingly image-, video-, and meme-focused...
reddit has really lost a lot of its magic and appeal to me. I do still use it, but I find it almost intolerable if I'm not logged in with my very carefully curated set of subreddit subscriptions.
I don't really know what the solution is. I don't think reddit is dying, but I do think it's becoming something different, and there increasingly feels like there's space for something more like the old reddit to coexist. HN is a considerably higher quality site IMHO, but also considerably more focused and with much stronger moderation.
"HN is a considerably higher quality site IMHO, but also considerably more focused and with much stronger moderation."
I think that's the key, making a site specifically not for everyone. Community sites, built around something tangible that a semi-large group of people have an affinity for, is what I'd like to see more of. I've spent more time on atariage.com than /r/atari this month because the redesign pushed me away. I took me almost 2 weeks to get my account approved on AtariAge but I didn't mind because a) I know they're busying doing other things than worrying about how to squeeze every last dime out of my page views and b) there was plenty of quality content for me to consume in the mean time. I will eventually be buying at least $100 worth of Homebrew carts through them and, even though I don't know how much they make off that, it will likely be infinitely more than Reddit ever made off me.
I don't disagree -- I wrote as much in my own post. The site is okay once I've unsubscribed from virtually everything it throws at you by default and instead subscribed to a heavily curated selection of subreddits that I found over the years.
Even then, though, subreddits that used to be great have often degraded significantly -- in many cases simply by getting too big. Perhaps that's the primary difficulty. Even some "niche" subreddits often now have 100k+ users. The site is just so much bigger and more active than it was when I first started using it that it's very difficult to capture what it used to feel like, even with extensive subreddit curation and filtering.
I think the problems are symptomatic of a larger issue. I suspect it has to do with advertising and ultimately money. Thinking back - it might have started around the time Ellen Pao left.
* feeling completely overrun with sensationalized politics;
* the new design feeling sluggish and painful even on my maxed out late-2016 MBP;
* the general community feeling more hostile and downvote-heavy than ever before;
* and the content being increasingly image-, video-, and meme-focused...
reddit has really lost a lot of its magic and appeal to me. I do still use it, but I find it almost intolerable if I'm not logged in with my very carefully curated set of subreddit subscriptions.
I don't really know what the solution is. I don't think reddit is dying, but I do think it's becoming something different, and there increasingly feels like there's space for something more like the old reddit to coexist. HN is a considerably higher quality site IMHO, but also considerably more focused and with much stronger moderation.