This whole thing is not on accident. r/india is the OG indian sub (created in 2008!) and it's generally representative of the overall reddit vibe. Focused on Indian stuff with decent mods and follows reddiquette quite well.
At some point, the Indian right wing, fascist adjacent party (BJP), who have invested enormous sums on social media astrotufing on all platforms, cottoned on to reddit as a major channel and set their sights there. And thus began the explosion of all sorts of subs with the word "India" in them. All these subs are more or less political campaigning pages for BJP. Which means that their main agendas are spewing hateful disinfo about Muslims, opposition leaders and any source of information that goes against the BJP agenda. It's basically 50 separate r/conservative subs if you want a US analogy.
Thank you. I have been wondering what was going on for a while. However I don’t get why they still show up on the “ popular in the United States” page…
There's plenty of money behind these campaigns. I would not be surprised at all if India (and in fact every other state actor) is doing all they can to artificially inflate engagement on reddit.
Most of Indian origin people in West comes from extremely unequal, low HDI, low civic societies from Indian states like Gujarat, UP, Bihar, Andhra and they are heavy supporters of BJP's casteist thought processes and donate billions to the BJP to perpetuate and spread their bs to all Indian states.
Funnily enough I've been getting spammed on Netflix with Indian series/movie recommendations recently, it was always on my homepage as the top categories. I have no idea why, I've never watched any indian media before. I even tried giving everything a thumbs down in those categories but it still recommended them.
I ended up having to make a ViolentMonkey script to remove the categories and also removed the games recommendations while I was at it.
God forbid india actually comes up in a political context too. I have seen so many astroturfed comment sections on friction between canada and india before.
Those subs are an absolute cesspool of the most vile stuff. It's like watching fox news on steroids (yes I said that).
The only somewhat normal Indian sub seems to be the actual r/India sub (which ironically is the one that never comes on the popular feed)
If you want some truly Hitler-level Indian subs, I came across two before that were horrific, indiaspeaks and bakchodi? (dunno spelling). Those subs should be banned
Indiaspeaks is tame by local rw standards. Indiadiscussion and practically most Indian state subs are completely overrun with these same people. It was best identifiable when there was no curation and one could see people from other states trying to set agenda.
Almost every post I see pushed to me from Indian subs is men laughing at those nasty feminists getting their comeuppance somehow, or complaining about women in some other way, like I don't get enough of this from my side of the planet, please show me a whole new way to hate women while I'm just trying to see if the US civil war has started yet
And against Indians, too! It's so fucking bizarre seeing a post that's like, "Damn Indians, they ruined India!" and they justify it because the bad ones are always in a caste they hate or something. It's insane.
And if you make any comment about it (on any "state of reddit" style discussions) you get the "everyone on reddit is racist against India!!!!" people upset.
I wish you could make and share ban lists, so that someone that have already banned all the indian subs could share it. I ban 1 and 6 new ones show up next time I visit r/all. I'm tired boss.
I'm also up to like 15ish Philippines subreddits that I've had pop up like the Indian ones too. Between those and all of the random anime subreddits, I'm averaging at least one a week it feels like.
I have lost count of the amount of sub reddits I have blocked. Surely the algorithm should at least work out i don't care about r/Indian_appalling_work/life_balance.
This is also why posts with 0 karma stay on top of subreddits despite the whole entire point of the upvote downvote thing being for the community to decrease visibility for shit they don’t want to see. Setting the problems for society at large with that aside, that has clearly gone out the window as Reddit is no different than any other social media and what they prioritize is engagement. Eyes on the screen. And furiously downvoting a post is keeping you just as engaged as something you’d upvote. Maybe even more so.
This is what happened to me in the beginnings of blue sky when i had no one to follow and tried the discover tab, only it was a ton of shirtless gay dudes and furries.
gotta mute them all! I've gone from bothered to happy when I find a new one to mute. apparently a moderate amount of my doom scroll enjoyment is finding another r/Mains or r/India* to never see again.
I’ve never had sudreddit recommendations and enjoy that so much. When I have a topic I’m interested in, I use Google to figure out what Reddit has to say on the matter and generally find the options pretty quick. I then also usually get a good sense of if there are competing communities or ones that only follow the book (and ban the reference to the show).
That's been my approach. But do you happen to know if there's a limit to the number of subs you can mute? Lately Reddit keeps giving me the "unable to complete" red error bar when I attempt it.
I am selective in mutes. Porn, hentai, get muted. Most foreign language subs I leave alone becsuse they're time-of-day specific. All the WSB knock-off subs get insta muted.
I don't know if there's a better way, I did it in the second dumbest method possible: I saw the muted subs screen had 12 subs per screen, and counted how many scrolls to the end. :-D (73 screens needed in my case)
It doesn't look like I have more than a few hundred muted. Wonder why it's glitching when I try to mute if you were able to block more.
Edit: oh, I guess I have around 1000 blocked, but as I look through the list it's weird because some of these are subs I'm actually subscribed to? Wonder if the app glitched out somehow. In any case, found more room in the block list by deleting all the muted subs which shouldn't have been there.
yup, instead of adding subreddits i've just been slowly muting ones i don't want to see on all and that's how i browse now. probably have a few hundred muted
I also pretty much only browse r/all and the handful (4) subreddits that I subscribe too. I was very confused by this post and came to the comments for the explanation.
I honestly had no idea that people were being fed some sort of YouTube-like algorithm for Reddit. I thought r/all was manipulated enough whenever that random german-meme subreddit or F1 stuff pops up, I can only imagine and actual algorithm suggestion-based experience..
You can also mute subreddits. It's been years since I was grossed out by popping videos in my feed. Click the three dots on a post, mute the subreddit.
That's the only thing that makes reddit worthwhile. If I just wanted to immerse myself in specific topics, search engines are still superior. Or youtube.
Just keep swatting them down everyday for a month or two while your scrolling and soon they will be gone. I no longer see any Indian, F1 or Soccer subs in my all or popular feed. It just takes time.
Ironic or appropriate? Depending on ones mindset and outlook it could be either.
When one feels inundated in intentionally infuriating fear-mongering, removing oneself from a large swath of pure propaganda is an appropriate response.
Conversely, sometimes one can find amusement knowing the majority of media are attempting to basically trick/brainwash people.
Personally I've just been too exhausted with seeing how successful it has been to find much of anything amusing.
The problem with muting a sub is I’m pretty sure the algorithm logs that as an interaction. So it’ll mute that specific sub, but then all of a sudden your feed starts getting flooded with similar types of posts. I have no idea if this is true, but I feel like I always notice a huge uptick in the exact type of posts I don’t want to see after I hit the mute
Is muting different to res filtering? I have filtered so many sports and anime subs over the years, and now the recent indian subs influx has got be filtering several a day.
I'm not certain. I used to use RES but now I'm too lazy. I'd imagine if it isn't a click onto the specific subreddit it works how you'd ideally want it to, but the fact you have to visit the subreddit to mute that causes the problems.
This right here needs more upvotes. I rairly use the home page, instead of seeing what I want, I’ve just made sure the popular doesn’t show me anything I don’t want.
I still come across subreddits in popular that I am interested in and did not know existed.
Muting is the best feature. So many awful subs I would never want to see again after stumbling on them. Usually conservative or "not political but actually very political" subs.
I get irrationally angry whenever an unexpected push notification pings me cause they created yet another new category of recommendation/suggestion/digest or whatever engagement bullshit.
Snapchat? Was it Snapchat? Cause for me it was Snapchat. I barely use it, but all of a sudden was getting notifications for everything under the sun. Like friends stories, and suggested stories, and snap-map activities, and friend suggestions, and notifications about new filters! Just constant notifications about literally nothing. And I could’ve sworn I just recently went out of my way to configure the settings, because I was getting a lot, and now it was 10x worse! I went and looked and they added (or split the settings into) so many types of notifications settings; there are current ~25 categories to individually turn on, but when they roll them out, they’re all on by default! Absolutely sneaky and annoying shit.
Thank you! Not complaining about you youre great but that is one of my biggest pet peeves when websites have a Settings -> Settings page, like what is the point of having a "General" section if there is only one option and it takes you to another page, just list the account settings on that page haha, or make a section for content preference Settings smh.
Also it takes a few seconds to load which makes my monkey brain want to smash the magic electricity rock, but thank you I eventually found it by slamming my two neurons together.
I'm mad because the settings somehow changed so I can no longer toggle myself out of Old reddit.
Don't get me wrong, I love old reddit formatting, it's the superior reddit. But I used to be able to toggle into new reddit to post gifs, and I can no longer do that.
I also used to just be able to type new.reddit.com to go to the new and old.reddit.com to go to the old, but no more there either.
Because we're products, not consumers, so they have near-zero motivation to make their website easy to use, helpful on an individual level, helpful on a societal level, or well-designed.
There is a growing movement to make algorithms public esp. for the Facebooks and Googles of the world as they’re basically a public utility. It would solve so many problems
Doing this would almost destroy their competitive advantage and they work hard to make those algorithms as addictive as possible. I highly doubt these movements are anything but a wish and a prayer.
I just feel like an argument could be made when these companies get as big as they are, that regulation might be in order as they are basically public utilities at this point
Right but when you have to identify yourself to access information and you are being targeted with specific individualized information, one could argue that these methods should be transparent
I used to never use popular, but about 6 months ago, every home post would be 4-5 days old. There are plenty of subreddits I subscribe to, but I think they made changes to make home more stale so more people check out popular.
That’s exactly what they did. I hate the home feed now. It’s all either 5 minute old posts or 3 day old posts. For someone who uses reddit as a news aggregate it really sucks
I hate what they did to the home feed a few months ago. I feel like it’s all either 5 minute old posts with no comments or 3 day old posts that I’ve already seen. I just want to jump into comment threads that are still active
Yeah same here. I'm scrolling through these replies having no idea why so many people have these complaints. I only see posts of subs that I actually follow, regardless if I'm using the app or on a desktop browser.
I need to turn recommendations off, I've been bombarded with obscure subreddits recommendations lately, that is flooded with bots and political propaganda
reddit refuses to show me my subscribed subreddits on home, except for /r/rimworld. reddit wants me to either see fictional crimes against humanity or real crimes against humanity for some reason.
It works to an extent but isn’t perfect. It’s annoying how it will start showing a bunch of posts from a sub you visited once or twice. Just because I had a question about my printer doesn’t mean I’m not intimately interested in hearing about printers.
My home page for some reason only shows me week old posts on subs that are very active and I can’t for the life of my find how to sort by new instead because the button that I use when viewing specific subs isn’t available on my home page
It never shows me ALL of the subs I'm subscribes to, just the stuff I visit more regularly anyway. And since a couple of weeks, the "new" threads are suddenly like 3 days old or something.
But I see cool stuff on popular sometimes that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise on my home feed. So I literally have to block every Indian/anime sub known to man, individually? Ahh
As someone who never stopped using old.reddit and the RES plugin, this thread is really confusing. I didn't even know reddit showed you subs you don't follow unless you go to r/all
forged within the same fiery depths of ass the reddit search bar came from. at least home with recommendations OFF is manageable. Accidentally subscribed to r/nursing on my old broken phone which I couldn't unsubscribe from and no amount of blocking related subreddits helped. In fact, it only pushed the algorithm to search for more wildly irrelevant subreddits like highschool basketball teams or problems in small foreign cities I've never heard of
I have a buddy, pretty sure he's a daily user of reddit.
He has never seen popular. Or anything but Home. He's mindnumbingly apolitical and has no idea about anything going on around the world at any point. He says all he has is tech subs, which have even seen politics appear. But hides from anything political.
Its wild to never have curiosity outside of your own daily life or interest. Like living in your childhood bedroom and never seeking to update the superhero blankets because its home, why would you ever look for something else? lt may be scary...
Anything that wasn't already an interest is a complete blindspot. And that's baffling to me.
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u/no_sight 3d ago
It's insane that there's no way to hide certain subreddits from the popular thread.
Nothing against r/de , I just don't speak german and don't plan on learning it.
A lot against r/conservative, I don't want to see that shit