This entire debacle and the 'communities' (the small vocal part that acted horribly) response pretty much hammered the last nail into the coffin for me when it comes to reddit.
With the exception of a few niche subreddits and the (few) incredibly moderated major subreddit's the whole place has become a negative pit with horses beaten so badly to death Findus put them in their lasagna.
Twitter often feels the same way as well (I'm pretty much at the unfollow as soon as someone acts like an idiot stage now).
Ironically the only social network I don't hate is Facebook and that's because I have about 20 people I consider true friends on there, all signal no noise.
"With the exception of a few niche subreddits and the (few) incredibly moderated major subreddit's"
Sometimes I don't recognize what y'all are talking about, and I almost want to defend reddit, then I remember: I've long since adjusted my reddit to be virtually nothing but niche. My largest is ~320,000, but it's just a "Deals" reddit. I've got two at 150,000, both very focused. And it goes down from there.
I'd hardly know this was going on except /r/blog is essentially forced on to your reddit front page.
It's just like Usenet was... subscribe to politics.vitriol.hate.anger and rec.sports.flame, and yeah, you're gonna get idiots. Subscribe to comp.lang.niche_language, get almost nothing but signal. Times never really change.
I strongly believe causality runs the other way... becoming a default reddit puts you into an Eternal September that no community could possibly survive.
AskScience is a default sub, I think, and they've survived alright. Interestingly, AskHistorians asked to not be a default sub-reddit for precisely the reasons you've given.
Maybe one of the nice things about UseNet was that you could only be signed up for a forum that you explicitly looked for? That at least forces the trolls to go out of their way to interfere with general-interest sections, not just go after them out of laziness.
What's wrong with Reddit is the "default subreddit" concept and the difficulty of subreddit discovery. Building in some form of interest based subreddit discovery would go a long way to de-emphasising defaults and (eventually) mitigate much of the vitriol.
There is also something to be said for educating users on the effects of anonymity.
I think it's unfair to compare your un-curated Reddit experience - which you admit is pretty good in a few niche subs - with your highly curated Facebook feed.
It's like saying that food in New York is awful because you reached into a trashcan and found a rancid bagel, but is awesome in Chicago because you looked up the nicest restaurant and spent $500 on a meal there.
I agree 100%. Except for certain sub-reddits, I go to reddit when I want to see what the idiots think.
There was a time when I would read a news subreddit and reminded myself that every headline should be understood exactly in reverse. I stopped doing that because it's hard to keep up the mental filter.
I think it's a little unfair towards Reddit. Any community large enough will be taken over by trolls if nothing else for the fact that they're the ones making the most noise. Subreddits are perfect way to contain those people away from others since the majority won't be posting in niché subreddits, and those few who do can be moderated.
If anything might be a lesson on community design it might be to put up a few more "barriers" between subreddits and the general population and think about how to control interaction between them.
That article is good in that it calls out the obviously bad stuff pretty well (and some of that stuff is pretty fucking vile tbh) but it doesn't really address that a biggish minority of the users are just not that nice, take out all the porn, the trolls and the 'dank memes' and the few good subreddits and you are left with a group roughly split between 'nice enough people' and 'get the fuck away from me'.
Of course a cynic would say that reddit is just a reflection of the society we live in and that might be right but it's also a reflection of the society we live in where there are few consequences to been a complete dick (I think if you could punch someone through a computer screen reddit might be a better place).
I've been on reddit >7 years and I'd love to say that it was 'better in the old days' but honestly I don't think it was I just think I've reached a point in my life where I don't feel the need to surround myself with that crap.
I'm glad that most of the communities I'm part of sat out of this mess.
The top subs I read and/or post to are /r/asktransgender, /r/ainbow, /r/comicbooks, and /r/kamenrider. None of them would've benefited from taking part in any kind of blackout (the first two of those function as support groups and any blackout could seriously hurt someone who needs help, the third is a mid-sized fandom where people care more about talking about their hobby than staging a juvenile protest, and the fourth is an extremely niche fandom so small that nobody would notice a blackout).
With the exception of a few niche subreddits and the (few) incredibly moderated major subreddit's the whole place has become a negative pit with horses beaten so badly to death Findus put them in their lasagna.
Twitter often feels the same way as well (I'm pretty much at the unfollow as soon as someone acts like an idiot stage now).
Ironically the only social network I don't hate is Facebook and that's because I have about 20 people I consider true friends on there, all signal no noise.