In accordance with Reddit’s general decline in quality
| January 27th, 2011I’ve been cleaning up my subreddit subscriptions. As with any social news aggregator, Reddit started out as a shining beacon in the world of geek/tech news, but since it has grown, attracting the masses, the quality has only gone downhill.
First off of the list: I unsubscribed from /r/pics. /r/pics happens to be the #1 most popular subreddit, even more than reddit.com, which is either a cause or result of it sucking. Either way, it sucks. Once in a while you’ll see a real gem, but otherwise it’s just a bunch of recycled shit and images that really aren’t that entertaining to be worth it. I’m better off without this stupid subreddit. See ya, pics.
Second to be removed from my subscriptions: /r/atheism. The atheism subreddit used to be a very thoughtful forum filled with intelligent people, and I learned a lot from it while coming to terms with my belief in rationality. While some intelligent discussions still exist within, it has mostly de-evolved into a massive atheist circlejerk. I got tired of seeing the same sensationalist, atheist, circlejerk headlines making it to my front page. I finally decided to unsubscribe, and in it’s place, I subscribed to both /r/skeptic and /r/freethought. By now the quality of my front page has shot up by 300%.
Third of all, I unsubscribed from /r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu. When rage comics originally developed as a meme on 4chan a few years ago, they were simple 4-panel illustrations with everyday anecdotes and pitfalls that everyone could relate to. It wasn’t until just in the past year when the subreddit dedicated to these comics decided to whore them out into these huge elaborate graphic novels detailing people’s life-stories, and it was then that they lost their charm. Also, as with any other popular subreddit, the almost total lack of intellectualism put me off. I finally said goodbye to /r/f7u12. Of course there are sometimes still a few gems in there, just as with /r/pics, but the bad outweighs the good. I don’t need to look there for humor anymore.
I think those are the three main ones. There might have been one or two others, but I can’t remember. I know I unsubscribed from /r/music, not because of quality, but simply because none of the articles interested me. Now I am subscribed to /r/electronicmusic and /r/trance which are both much more specific and relevant to my interests.