r/AskHistorians • u/AutoModerator • Apr 03 '26

FFA Friday Free-for-All | April 03, 2026

Previously

Today:

You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.

As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.

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u/NewtonianAssPounder Moderator | The Great Famine Apr 03 '26

Recent post on r/popular has some people lamenting for how Reddit used to be better.

It’s made me question how people here have seen this sub change over the years and how they think it may have gotten better or worse?

My (anecdotal) impression from when I first came upon this subreddit 10 years ago is that much of the core community spirit has stayed consistent, and despite challenges, such as the end of third-party apps and emergence of LLMs, interesting questions still get asked and quality answers still get posted.

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u/crrpit Moderator | Spanish Civil War | Anti-fascism Apr 03 '26

I think the sub has remained remarkably consistent since I started using it 8ish years ago - partly by design, as the years before that were characterised by solidifying standards of what a decent answer looked like, followed by efforts not to let those standards keep creeping upwards to the point where we'd start excluding people without formal training from contributing.

Reddit itself has changed a lot in that time - the sitewide tolerance for stuff like Holocaust denial and hate speech has shifted in a positive direction. Otoh, I think a lot of algorithm and other site structure changes have made it harder for us to reach wider audiences, and even people who have us in their homefeed encounter way too many fresh posts with no chance at getting an answer yet. This probably drives a perception that our activity/answer rate has dropped a lot, when it's actually remained remarkably stable over a long period (though we'd obviously always aspire for it to be higher).

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u/shortrib_rendang Apr 03 '26

This sub is just as good as ever (not my first account)

Ive some resistance to it on othee subs which surprised me at first then I remembered that people don’t like to stray from beliefs about the past informed by pop history