Ask Lemmy

Yeah, Reddit had its own enshittification cycle for niche topics. At first, it’s just the people who are passionate and/or experienced in the niche interest. Then as it grows, those experts slowly get drowned out by the hobbyists who know juuuust enough to activate the Dunning-Krueger effect. So now you have a bunch of people who are confidently spouting surface-level info (or even outright misinformation) as if it’s gospel. And since the majority of the users also only have a surface-level understanding, that’s what gets upvoted.

On Reddit, it’s less about what you say, and more about how you say it. If a comment is eloquent and makes the reader feel smart for understanding it, it gets upvoted. But highly technical comments will tend to get downvotes, because they make the average reader feel dumb.

I saw it all the time in my area of expertise, audio. There’s a lot of snake oil in the hobbyist audiophile circles. Lots of $1000 cables, $900 isolator boxes, etc… All will claim to make your system sound better. Meanwhile, in the professional world, we’ll use the cheapest $1/foot cable and $5 connectors, because we know they’re durable and they work just as well. We’ll set up million dollar speaker arrays for a concert, and run the signal down $15 cables and $10 isolators. Because we understand the physics of getting an electrical signal from A to B, and know that a more expensive cable won’t do that more efficiently. I can guarantee that Taylor Swift’s Eras tour was run through $1/ft cable. How can I guarantee that? Because I’ve seen the specs of their rig. I know people who worked on it. But good luck going into an audiophile subreddit and saying that; You’ll get downvoted to oblivion and called a troll. Because they don’t go to those subs to listen to actual experts; They just want to go to a place where they can have their surface-level knowledge validated.

There’s an old saying along the lines of “everyone trusts the news until they talk about your job.” Because just like Reddit, the news is targeting the broadest audience possible. And that means they can’t do deep-dives into a topic. They just skirt along the surface, giving just enough context to make viewers feel informed. Because validating the viewer is more important to audience retention than actually informing them.