As I see it, post quality declined massively starting from when the smartphone became the device most users were browsing from. No matter how proficient people claim to be with a phone keyboard, it is a medium that discourages longform text. The blackout made no difference with regard to that, the damage was already done.
Post quality also declined after the 2017 redesign. The old design had a sidebar where subreddits kept a FAQ and wiki. Today, the same questions get asked again and again on many subreddits. Mods can't lock those posts and direct the author to the FAQ, because most users can't even see the FAQ. Mods who try to ensure a firm hand regularly get excoriated by the community, even by regulars on the sub, as "gatekeepers".
That is still the default. People backlashed against excessive modding and power abuse. Top commenters are still top commenters and guide the conversations with authority. They are still in most threads with the most upvotes.
Communities are defined by the content contributors first and for most. That's something Reddit forgot.
Reddit started with a little bit of modding to clean up the mess which is always needed (how it works on HN). Then every year it seemed to grow and grow, mods were now self-annoited editors of their own pet magazines. A hundred plus mods were added to major subs, where in some 50% of comments can get removed in major threads. r/science has many many threads where 75% of comments were removed, almost entirely as they didn't fit some idea of what should be discussed, what was acceptable.
That's a big difference from RTFM culture on forums.
No, people don't backlash against just "excessive modding". I have witnessed on several subs a belief that mods should never be able to lock a post of a question that comes up several times a week. The thinking goes, for example, that a person posting a discussed-to-death question isn't just looking for an answer to the question, but rather he/she is trying to socialize and feel part of a community. Therefore, mods who lock such posts are cruelly denying a person an outlet for socializing.
You write about developments on major subs, but those are just that, the major subs. Niche hobby subs, on the other hand, often don't see the level of moderation they actually need in order to retain knowledgeable contributors. People with a certain level of proficiency in a hobby will bail if the discussion is predominantly newbie questions or repetitive arguments.
I mean, everyone's going to have different moderation patterns, and experienced with moderation. And you can't please everyone.
I actually don't like locking posts either; the concept is fine, but in execution it felt more like a band-aid for when a moderator was tired of moderating, often because of 1-2 specific chains of comment and everything else was perfectly civil. Rotten apple ruins the barrel, and the feeling of mod laziness means they throw out the apples and the barrel instead of pruning the fruit.
>You write about developments on major subs, but those are just that, the major subs.
which is what proportionately most people will experience. moderating 100 people and 10m people are different problem spaces, similar to sorting 100 items and 10m items. They need different solutions and approaches to perform them optimally even if the end result is the same.
It's interesting to compare r/c_programming and r/cpp. C_programming has a lot of newbie questions, cpp less so. I assumed it was due to C's larger use in education, but now I wonder if it's something to do with moderation.
Post quality also declined after the 2017 redesign. The old design had a sidebar where subreddits kept a FAQ and wiki. Today, the same questions get asked again and again on many subreddits. Mods can't lock those posts and direct the author to the FAQ, because most users can't even see the FAQ. Mods who try to ensure a firm hand regularly get excoriated by the community, even by regulars on the sub, as "gatekeepers".