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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2472 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 13, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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anyone else notice that quality of online discussion has nosedived over the past year, or just me? controlling for topic and community, it seems like just the quality of debate has gone downhill so much. whether reddit, hacker news, or elsewhere, I have observed many attempts at discussion met with curt dismissals, failures to understand, misconstructions, etc. this is why I have been spending less time on forums and reddit. Is it just me? Things could not have changed that much over past year. Maybe elon and twitter has something to do with it. or worse political climate.

I noticed a recent trend where someone will start an invite only Discord or subreddit and start siphoning the smart/desirable members from public subreddits/spaces. The private subs look for people that contribute value to the public spaces and that fit with the private sub's desired culture. Then they just private message them to join the more exclusive space.

The private sub benefits by getting quality contributions and the new member benefits by not having to deal with all the garbage comments in the public sub. This trend reduces the quality of the public spaces because many of the good posters have moved to a private gated community.

I have also noticed I enjoy less some of the places for online discussion I used to frequent. I have asked myself whether it was the discussions that have changed or my perception of them. A general trend of declining quality does match my experiences I think, but again I cannot tell whether I might be a bit burned out with online discussions or whether the discussions are burning out.

For Twitter and reddit specifically, the last year has seen a lot of disruption that has caused a lot of the higher-quality participants to leave. I've never been a big Twitter user so I can't really comment there, but the reddit API/3rd party app debacle cleaved off a huge proportion of the more experienced userbase. I've checked out a couple of subs I used to frequent since the purge at the end of June and the quality of discussion has taken a dive off a cliff.

My impression was that it's steadily getting worse, haven't noticed anything special in the last year.

Then again I abandoned mainstream forums a while ago.

Same here. Many niche nerd interests have turned into mainstream hobbies, and correspondingly volume has gone up and quality has gone down. Additionally cultures and attitudes have changed dramatically in many place towards homogenisation and a certain kind of professional inoffensiveness that is often mistaken for quality.

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