Probably the same reason people keep posting the same questions in tech subs over and over and over again.
There are a lot of people who need help/need to tell the world about something great to them, but few people are capable of or care to search previous posts.
Moderators removing duplicates often results in a bad user experience, especially so for new users who haven't seen that post tens of times, so it's often allowed to a certain degree.
You are spot on and it's infuriating in the opposite direction. I sub to a small local city sub reddit and people will post the same question every day instead of just doing a quick search to find that their same question has been asked 20 times this month.
For a while, I was still using reddit to go to those small niche subs, but now they are garbage too
I’ve always found the most effective thing is to wordlessly link the oldest thread I can remember to the poster.
And that is why forums deserved better (not implying they are dead, but most people certainly moved away).
You could have some sort of organization with them, unlike most social media.
Umm, sorry, this post goes in our Comparing Software board. Please keep discussion here on topic. /typicalforummod
Or use our old ass forgotten megathread regarding this niche subject!
This makes more sense for tech subs because I would assume that people might want to post about their problems but not be interested in reading about others' problems so not be a subscriber. But I would expect that people who like books would subscribe to the sub, which means that they have already seen this all before a million times. But no, people post and comment like this is all new.
I think one of the reasons is allowing people to be one of today's lucky 10000.
It doesn't really explain why people are posting the same thing today as last week. Everyone who is posting today was alive and able to read books last week, and the vast majority was already a Reddit user. We would have to assume that nobody who posts on r/books subscribes to the sub and reads the posts ... which I wonder if it's a real possibility.
You might be right. I myself have never really thought of sharing my impressions of the books I read, so can't really say what kinds of behaviour can be expected on such a sub.
This isn't exclusive to Reddit nor is it a new thing. This has been a thing for decades
I have already seen lots of repeated stuff here on Lemmy, feels like home!
The comments have gotten just as bad too. Trolls and Bots everywhere. No moderation. Also, the voting system works well when it's mostly sane and intelligent people there. Now the dumbest comments get upvoted super high and any long critical, intelligent responses get downvoted to oblivion.
It is majority bots. I got the groundhog day feeling too. So a few years ago I started looking at the account that post rather than the posts itself. There's a simple pattern. The account is registered but lays dormant for a couple months. Then it becomes active and starts reposting top ranked post of all time from subreddits. Their comments are copy pasted out of replies to old posts.
It's inexplicable why the real human users put up with it though. At some point the zeitgeist stopped having baseline expectation of content quality.
More recently there's a newer phenomenon where clickbait stories ("My (45M) wife (18F) of 5 years left me everything but the icecube trays AITA") are posted by brand new accounts. Except all those subreddits don't allow brand new accounts to post. So it must be the mods are selectively approving them. They are farming outrage with stories (most likely fake) meant to maximize user activity.
I think the bots were always there but now they are free to run wild. There are no mods (human or bot) to regulate them. And since there's no more quality, human made content this shit bubbles up to the top instead of being buried.
Wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of them were just bots
part of the reason i left reddit.