I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.
Any real discussion is drowned out so the average post now is "bought these, new to the hobby, what do I do with them?".
The meshtastic sub is a good example of that. People buying hobbyist hardware, without doing any research. They probably saw some youtube video, hit the amazon "buy", then when it arrived, they're stumped.
Yeah, it's just consumption consumption consumption.
Post a photo of your new gizmo: 300 upvotes. Video of you using your widget: 4 votes.
And in subreddits dedicated to actually making things, it's just hustling hustling hustling. With a small percentage of self-help posts like "how I spent 4 years in my boring-ass generic video game and nobody wanted it".
> I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.
This is exactly what happened to all of the hobby reddits I enjoyed.
Any useful discussion was crowded out by 10 posts per week (or day) of people posting their newest purchase or asking a question that had been answered 1000 times already.
The useful Subreddits have mods who come down hard on these posts. They don’t proliferate as much if people don’t see them everywhere. It’s a lot of work for mods though.
My "favourite" is on the r/vandwellers subreddit with countless people posting a basic photo of a van they just bought with zero information about themselves, their build plans, how they intend to use it. It might as well be the Craigslist vehicle sales section.
>I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.
A really great (awful) example of this that I saw was on the typewriters subreddit (which is already 90% people posting pictures of the same 5 or so overhyped machines):
In the 1950s, Royal used to give out gold typewriters as part of a writing contest.[0] I saw one of these come up on Goodwill’s auction site, saved screenshots for my records and followed it closely, since I knew bids would get really stupid really fast. Sure enough, winning bid was around $1500.
About two weeks after the auction ended (about the time Goodwill’s very slow shipping takes), I saw it pop up on the subreddit, exact machine, identical scratches, blemishes, and all to the one I had screenshots of. The post title? “Found this at my local thrift store for $50. How’d I do?”
That was enough to finally make my delete my account and seriously question anyone who thinks Reddit is actually good for niche hobbies.[1]
[1] Well, that and the fact that and the fact that I was probably going to lose my mind if I earnestly gave detailed advice on repairing a machine I had personally stripped and reassembled, only for someone to get upvoted to the top for posting a confident pseudo answer about some mechanism—that may or may not even exist in that machine—that they only faintly understood from a general YouTube video that they only half watched.
Any real discussion is drowned out so the average post now is "bought these, new to the hobby, what do I do with them?".
The meshtastic sub is a good example of that. People buying hobbyist hardware, without doing any research. They probably saw some youtube video, hit the amazon "buy", then when it arrived, they're stumped.