I find it depressing when holier than thou hipsters pop up to whine about how depressing popular things are... which seems to occur with increasing frequency on HN nowadays.
I'm 27. I stopped getting mad at popular things around 22, when I realized popularity is just a side-effect of the target market appeal of a thing and does not in itself constitute something negative.
However, when you have a site with completely user-generated and user-upvoted content, the product is made by the people. So if the product is crap, it's actually because the people are crap. Combine this with the idea that this website was supposed to be a 'front page' for anyone on the internet to land on and peruse and I get a little sad. Not because someone might enjoy this crap - if you enjoy something, do it and be happy.
But the idea that a 10 year old kid might land on this site and dedicate a huge chunk of the rest of his or her childhood to generating new memes and learning to troll, when instead they could have been developing a skill, learning new exciting things or having fun with their friends... that's kind of depressing to me. But i'm probably just projecting.
My view is that it isn't the nature of the people on that site it's the nature of the frame of mind those people are in on that site. There's a link that was posted here a while ago which I think explains it.
"The human brain just seems to have a need for resting, for passing some time in a low-energy state. Computer role-playing games are perfect for that. When I fight fifty basically identical combats against darkspawn in Dragon Age or spend five hours finally getting my level 13 druid in World of Warcraft to level 14 or piled a hundred bricks on top of other bricks in Minecraft, I’ve done more than waste my time. I’ve given by brain rest that, for reasons I can’t begin to understand, it craved."
This rings incredibly true to me and I think many of the people who are reading this comment and who have read reddit & HN today are doing exactly this, they're putting their brain into a low(ish) energy state to give it a rest. I'm not implying that we're in that state all the time, if something of particular interest pops up we can be jolted out of it into something much more productive but for the most part people are grazing over the news and seeing what's going on in the particular corner of the internet they're interested in. All while not having to think too hard.
So what irritates me is people who look down on others because they like to watch reality tv, or read bad vampire romance novels or play video games when actually they themselves do similar but different "low energy" activities, only they've convinced themselves that their activities are better and more worthy and that everyone else is just wasting their time.
I agree with you that hypocritically judging a form of entertainment is wrong. But I don't see Reddit as just a low-energy activity to pass the time. I see it as something that shapes the minds, personalities and interactions of people in ways which can become a negative if started at a young age or continued for a long period of time. The content being less than inspiring is only a small part of the problem.
The big problem is that this incredibly popular site basically breeds a time-sink ethic, much like Facebook or MySpace, where you can waste hours and hours and have less to show for it than if you were watching porn. Heck, even video games at least develop quick hand-eye reflex and possibly strategy. It's like the TV generation, where kids sat for hours and hours on end staring at the "boob tube" turning their minds slowly to mush and influencing them in perhaps imperceptible ways. Except now they have peers to encourage their Reddit-inspired thoughts and actions.
And finally, as just a general representation of the Internet, it looks like a big pile of useless shit and maybe one or two nuggets of titillating but otherwise unenlightening news clips. Culturally bankrupt and moronic with a kind of perpetual recycling machine for lame content. If this was what I saw when I first got to the internet, i'd unplug the modem and go back to trying to find something good on TV.
I'd guess that most redditors would prefer a front page with fewer pics on it -- but pics proliferate anyway, because they're so easy to read and upvote. I don't think it's elitist to say that the situation is unfortunate.
You know what? YOU are the problem. The reddit type who feeds off drivel. A website might be popular because it is good, but do not ever conflate that something is good because it is popular.
HN still has not fallen into the pit of content for content's sake. The people here complain not because they are hipsters, but because we do not want to be fed drivel, meaningless content that rots the mind rather than feeds it.
I want to put it as harshly as possible, so I have one thing to say: Fuck off. We do not need content that lacks content here.
Oh sure, a bit like the endless "PHP is terrible", "No PHP is great" cycle of link bait that pops up every two months. Or "All developers are sexist", "No programmers aren't sexist!" which slips into the gap when we're not talking about php. And last week there was the fan favourite about "Everyone should be a programmer!", "No everyone shouldn't be a programmer!".
There's the endless cycle of "No I won't be your technical co-founder, here's why" which I have read on this site at least 10 times by different authors.
Now, I am not knocking any of that, that is the nature of user submitted content, what I find irritating however is people who believe that just because they are talking about their particular speciality (programming, marketing, startup, e.t.c) on this site it gives them the right to look down their nose at people who enjoy reddit.
Wow, you are so "The WELL" circa 1997. Communities grow (and thrive, even) as the swell of users come and, ultimately, go.
Besides, there are more than enough subreddits to subscribe to that are almost completely devoid of any "drivel" you refer to (r/science and r/TrueReddit being just two; and I contend that r/programming and r/coding are even more useful to hackers than HN).
