I don't know why I decided to browse a popular sub today, r/books (logged out, I don't have an account anymore). Maybe I hoped I might learn something. As if! People make the absolute same posts over and over. Today I read a book! I read one page of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and I already know it's a masterpiece and the best book ever. I read 1984 and wow, just wow. I hate stickers in book covers. Audiobooks good. Actually audiobooks bad. I hate movie covers. The absolute same thing as yesterday, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years ago. May I remember this feeling next time I decide to browse Reddit again.
Why do old users put up with this? How can they even pretend that they haven't already read this stuff a million times before? Or are these subs 100% driven by new users and repost bots? The complete lack of new content is mind boggling.
Probably the same reason people keep posting the same questions in tech subs over and over and over again.
There are a lot of people who need help/need to tell the world about something great to them, but few people are capable of or care to search previous posts.
Moderators removing duplicates often results in a bad user experience, especially so for new users who haven't seen that post tens of times, so it's often allowed to a certain degree.
You are spot on and it's infuriating in the opposite direction. I sub to a small local city sub reddit and people will post the same question every day instead of just doing a quick search to find that their same question has been asked 20 times this month.
For a while, I was still using reddit to go to those small niche subs, but now they are garbage too
And that is why forums deserved better (not implying they are dead, but most people certainly moved away).
You could have some sort of organization with them, unlike most social media.
Umm, sorry, this post goes in our Comparing Software board. Please keep discussion here on topic. /typicalforummod
This makes more sense for tech subs because I would assume that people might want to post about their problems but not be interested in reading about others' problems so not be a subscriber. But I would expect that people who like books would subscribe to the sub, which means that they have already seen this all before a million times. But no, people post and comment like this is all new.
It is majority bots. I got the groundhog day feeling too. So a few years ago I started looking at the account that post rather than the posts itself. There's a simple pattern. The account is registered but lays dormant for a couple months. Then it becomes active and starts reposting top ranked post of all time from subreddits. Their comments are copy pasted out of replies to old posts.
It's inexplicable why the real human users put up with it though. At some point the zeitgeist stopped having baseline expectation of content quality.
More recently there's a newer phenomenon where clickbait stories ("My (45M) wife (18F) of 5 years left me everything but the icecube trays AITA") are posted by brand new accounts. Except all those subreddits don't allow brand new accounts to post. So it must be the mods are selectively approving them. They are farming outrage with stories (most likely fake) meant to maximize user activity.
I think the bots were always there but now they are free to run wild. There are no mods (human or bot) to regulate them. And since there's no more quality, human made content this shit bubbles up to the top instead of being buried.
The comments have gotten just as bad too. Trolls and Bots everywhere. No moderation. Also, the voting system works well when it's mostly sane and intelligent people there. Now the dumbest comments get upvoted super high and any long critical, intelligent responses get downvoted to oblivion.