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Why Reddit Just Doesn’t Work Anymore
Plus, two solutions that could make it great
Let’s face it: Reddit has always been a little controversial.
Seen as a sort of ideological meeting ground between Tumblr and the sorts of people who frequent the more unsavory parts of 4chan, the Reddit community (if one so fractured can even be called as such) has garnered a nice reputation for itself as a frustratingly contradictory group of like-minded individuals who are painfully aware of their own faults — but refuse to do anything about them.
While many events in Reddit’s past showcase this, none of them hammer the point home quite as well as the burning of Notre Dame in April. While it may seem like paying attention to what random Joes on the internet have to say about a national tragedy is a waste of time, one must remember that we live in an age where journalists cite tweets in their articles . Even if we, as regular folks, don’t care what those Joes think, people in media certainly do — which means we should probably be aware of what they’re saying, and how they’re saying it.
Reddit’s reaction to the fire was puzzling, initially, but ultimately nothing more than a symptom of a disease . Despite Reddit’s humble origins as a discussion platform, it’s no longer capable of being one. The worst part of it all is that people on Reddit know that it doesn’t work anymore, but it doesn’t really seem like anything can be done about it. User /u/jelde sums it up nicely in the comments of a specific meme type called a “starter pack”: “I’m pretty sure this starterpack summarizes exactly what I hate so much about Redditors: the pathetic self-importance, ignorance, and worst of all the smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority all rolled into one.”
Not only does this “starter pack” describe the problem, it’s part of the problem, and the problem is twofold. One, as shown through the Notre Dame fire and through this starter pack, Redditors have a tendency to make any given event about them in a quest to get “karma,” and the transition between news stories and karma-farming is alarmingly fast. Two, the subreddit system doesn’t work anymore, for a couple of reasons.
The Notre Dame fire’s story perfectly illustrates the cycle a piece of major news goes through on a…
