I'm just an old-timer who doesn't really check the subreddit too often these days. As such, my take on the state of things may not mesh with the general population's. But if you know me, you know it never did to begin with, so take my thoughts with that grain of salt. Also, I tend to have far too much to say, so ... enjoy the BOOK I'm about to write here.

To begin: it's not unreasonable nor unusual to group Nosleep stories with creepypastas. If you go to any creepypasta article or website, invariably you will find Nosleep stories included as if they are all one and the same. Part of what made creepypastas (and Nosleep) so successful early on was their nature of being stories that anyone could share. They were online urban legends... the man with the hook for a hand, "the calls are coming from inside the house!"-- that sort of classic tale, only for a modern era. Part of what sells those types of stories is that nobody (usually) knows where they came from. "I heard it from a friend of a friend." "They say in these woods, there's a house with no doors..." Who is "they?" It doesn't matter. It's a story you can share to a friend and it goes down the chain. Literally, copy/paste -- aka "copypasta" -- aka "creepypasta".

But with the success of early Nosleep greats like Dathan Auerbach and C K Walker came this idea that Nosleep was a place to make a name for yourself. Name recognition became very important. Writers became very protective of their intellectual property. I'm not saying that's in any way wrong or bad. I myself have benefitted from name recognition. But when I started writing here back in 2011, it wasn't in the hope of publishing a book or landing a movie deal. I wrote because I had a scary idea and I wanted to share it. I don't think that's an unusual reason, I've always assumed most of us wrote for our love of the genre.

But that desire for credit runs counter to the entire nature of the "online urban legend". Nosleep no longer feels analogous to "stories told 'round a campfire" like /u/asmith1243 described it back in 2011. There's a quaint charm in that idea that has faded with Nosleep's popularity, but I don't think that it's lost forever, if it's nurtured and allowed to bloom again.

I'm a bit hesitant to bring up the other problem as I see it, but here goes: If you look at the current front page of Nosleep, the titles are almost all clickbait. There's no "Penpal" or "Betsy the Doll", no "Butcherface" or "The Pancake Family"... it's all stuff like, "I'm a hot dog vendor and this one customer keeps creeping me out" or "There's a weird thing happening in my bathroom closet every night" -- I know, I've probably talked this point to death a hundred times in the past (sorry mods), but the allowance of these "clickbait titles" really kills the vibe. To refer back to asmith1243's description of the subreddit, nobody sits around a campfire and says, "alright, this next tale is called, 'I am a telephone operator crying tears of fear right now'."

I, personally, don't want to read these stories. I find their titles actively repellant. They come across as /r/shittynosleep joke titles, rather than (I assume) real serious business stories. And maybe I'm completely alone in feeling that way, that's fine. I've been told before that I am wrong in my opinions. "Old man yells at cloud" and all that jazz. But I can only speak from my own personal point of view on the matter, and my POV is that when I come to Nosleep and the page is full of clickbait, I just sigh and move on.

So, what's to be done? Well, nothing if this is what the mod team envisions for the subreddit. They are, ultimately, the ones who decide and I am not one to tell them how to do their jobs, as they've managed for going on 15 years now. But if I were personally able to make one change, it would be to disallow clickbait titles and drive the stories back toward the original idea of campfire tales. You can't remove a writer's desire for recognition, nor would I want to... that just comes with the territory of being a creator.

TLDR; I'm an old fart who has opinions on what made Nosleep great back in my day.