I’ve had an unsubstantiated sense that the quality of Reddit content has been declining since I first started to peruse the site. I had heard an offhand comment that a significant percentage of American internet users browse Reddit, which is merely anecdotal hearsay. I now have statistical evidence to support this conclusion, however. First, according to Hacker News, Reddit has been scaling dramatically in user visits recently, up to something like 1 billion per month. Second, an easy check of Google Trends shows that searches for Reddit-related terms have risen dramatically in the last two years.

Call me what you will, but it seems to me that the news-worthy and intellectually-interesting content of the site has degraded in favor of self-serving meme-posts and other assorted dreck.