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‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

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Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#161

Post by belorn »

Spooky23 wrote: post #73
abnry wrote: post #17

I think there is a very important distinction that needs to be made. The popular reddit experience is vastly worse than the customized reddit. It took me a while to realize that my reddit experience was vastly improved once I was very picky about which subreddits I follow.

It’s not really relevant to what the author is trying to say at all. Actually, it’s the opposite. Because of the excess of disinterested capital that only values growth, a thing that could be a positive and productive thing is instead a cancer — it grows and grows without purpose. That’s why Reddit (and Tumblr) have massive porn sections that aren’t spoken about and Reddit is a watering hole for white supremacy and p…

Comparing porn to white supremacy is just that kind of political view that feels completely alien to me. It was not many years ago that Monty Python poked fun at a whole nations conservative view about nudity and porn, and it seems like globally we have taken a few new step backwards toward the 19th century views about those topics.

The biggest porn section in reddit is currently ranked 61 of all subreddits. Cat picture section is ranked 6 and is 18 million subscriptions vs 1.4 for the porn. Do reddit have some 18 times more sinister business relationship with cat shops, veterinarians, and cat food, or should we just conclude that reddit reader are human with human interests and as that goes most people prefer looking at a cat picture while a smaller minority goes to reddit for a dose of nudity.

Go to http://redditlist.com/all and look at what the people want to consume. Celebrate that science is where it is.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#162

Post by Woofles »

projektir wrote: post #125
abnry wrote: post #17

I think there is a very important distinction that needs to be made. The popular reddit experience is vastly worse than the customized reddit. It took me a while to realize that my reddit experience was vastly improved once I was very picky about which subreddits I follow.

This only sort of works. Reddit being a combined system, subs tend to leak into each other. If you are into something very obscure, benign, and uncontroversial, like, fountain pens, you're probably fine. If you're into anything gaming related, good luck. I've been on some subreddits of popular games and it's basically just like the rest of Reddit. In particular, Reddit's system just doesn't work well when there's a l…

This is definitely the way to handle reddit. I mostly stick to local sports subreddits and a few general interest subreddits (i.e. not /r/funny, /r/pics, etc) and I think reddit is a great tool.

I think it's the same thing with most social apps though. Small discord servers allow you to build up groups of online friends, but if you just go into the specific game ones you're going to end up with a mix of good and bad.

Overall it's just an issue of popularity bringing out the worst in people.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#163

Post by abritinthebay »

vermontdevil wrote: post #97
jamiegreen wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Favourite subs you would recommend?

/r/spacex this is a fantastic group. heavily moderated /r/askhistorians /r/apple I am forgetting a few more.

the /r/apple comments are pretty awful and incredibly overrun by Samsung and Android fans however. The quality of discussion is generally pretty weak.

Good link content however.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#164

Post by kotajacob »

opportune wrote: post #83
wvenable wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's toxic because a relatively small number of mentally ill people can effectively overrun any conversation. These people are not interested in rational discourse. You can't spin that as "the challenging of ideas". Reddit has been fully gamed at this point and engaging in the most popular areas is just frustrating.

Also because those same mentally ill people are the exact same people with the time and desire to become internet moderators (no offense to dang or anyone else here, the moderation here is good!). Reddit needs to take control of subreddits back from moderators; too many subreddits are curated echo chambers, moderators are always trying to make money through bullshit like referral links, there's no transparency, etc.…

That's certainly an option, but choosing which subreddits to replace leadership on is a very tricky task. You can't realistically say all subs and picking and choosing will cause riot if there's any possibility of political reasoning. The way I see it they'd need guidelines that are automatically enforced. Even then though some subreddits work quite well with extremely strict, almost echo chamber, levels of moderation. For example it would really be a shame if askscience or askhistorians were caught up in it even though they're very strict with what they allow.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#165

Post by MrMember »

lechiffre10 wrote: post #18

I've significantly reduced my time on Reddit. Used to pull up the website out of curiosity every day but the atmosphere is incredibly toxic. My front page was riddled with Russiagate stuff too for some reason and every time you'd bring up an argument that isn't the norm you get a mob after you.

I had a pretty well-curated list of subscribed subreddits but reddit decided some of my interests are problematic and I deleted my account. Posting links to licensed firearm dealers legally selling firearms is too taboo for a site that has subreddits organized around linking videos of people dying.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#166

Post by projektir »

alex_young wrote: post #137
cup-of-tea wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Anonymity allows you to express unpopular views that you wouldn't be able to in real life. But the existence of downvoting basically defeats that, except in unpopular echo chambers, of course.

What if your unpopular view you wouldn't express in real life is something abusive towards others? i.e. trolling.

You get banned.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#167

Post by dmix »

staplers wrote: post #70
abnry wrote: post #17

I think there is a very important distinction that needs to be made. The popular reddit experience is vastly worse than the customized reddit. It took me a while to realize that my reddit experience was vastly improved once I was very picky about which subreddits I follow.

The same could be said about the internet in general. Take a stroll away from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc and you can find some really interesting places with extremely insightful and meaningful content. The problem is that a majority of people are just absolutely manipulated by their emotions and dive head first into the feedback loop designed by social media to provide an addictive stream of never-ending enga…

Are you assuming they would have sought out longer form or higher tier content otherwise?

My dad was extremely happy using Stumbleupon for years. It was about as high-pace low-quality you could get on the internet. I showed him sites like Reddit and elsewhere but he was very content with just Stumbling.

People like to blame FB/Twitter for low quality content without considering the huge market for that stuff. People aren't the ignorant sponges who can be pushed/pulled in whatever direction other people think is better for them, which is how everyone seems to treat the average internet user or voter. Much like trying to blame the whole "obesity crisis" on some evil capitalist food producers, without considering the natural evolution of the workplace, evolving urban environments, technology, chemistry, or just standard irrational human behaviour to be lazy and knowingly make bad choices.

I'm sure quite a few ivory tower intellectuals had their way they'd ban tabloids like National Enquirer and trashy reality TV like Big Brother. But I doubt that would suddenly make these demographics any better informed or better citizens.

We can try to push back against straight up lying, at least when it goes beyond entertainment, but demand will always find supply in the marketplace...

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#168

Post by wvenable »

bfuller wrote: post #115
wvenable wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's toxic because a relatively small number of mentally ill people can effectively overrun any conversation. These people are not interested in rational discourse. You can't spin that as "the challenging of ideas". Reddit has been fully gamed at this point and engaging in the most popular areas is just frustrating.

>It's toxic because a relatively small number of mentally ill people can effectively overrun any conversation. These people are not interested in rational discourse. You can't spin that as "the challenging of ideas". you know what is truly toxic? internet armchair psychologists.

I run a forum and I've had to deal with mentally ill individuals, you don't understand frightening that can be.

They have all the time in the world to hack your software, doxx you, create entire blogs to attempt to publicly ruin your reputation, call your family, your employers, etc. You give them a podium to post their views and they will use it. Internet armchair psychologists more toxic than that? You should only hope so.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#169

Post by simias »

abnry wrote: post #17

I think there is a very important distinction that needs to be made. The popular reddit experience is vastly worse than the customized reddit. It took me a while to realize that my reddit experience was vastly improved once I was very picky about which subreddits I follow.

I don't have a Reddit account but I lurk there regularly, in my experience that only works as long as the subreddits are very niche and not well known. As soon as they get popular since there's effectively no barrier of entry for the general Reddit population you effectively get the same community everywhere.

Normally when people find a forum that interests them (like, say, HN) they need to bother creating an account, often validating an email etc... It only takes two minutes but that's enough friction to weed out the vast majority of the people who just stumble randomly on one of your posts. On Reddit once you have an account you just have to click a button to subscribe to any community you like. It's "eternal september" on steroids. 4chan had "lurk more", Reddit is "repost more".

So your post sounds a bit to me like "Twitter is great if you know the hashtags to follow" and it's probably true but at this point is it really representative of the website? If you need to filter 99% of the content to make it usable, maybe there's a bit of a problem still? I just went to /r/all and had a look at the subreddits available there, I find 16 million accounts subscribed /r/gifs, 3 millions to /r/politics, 17 millions to /r/gaming, 18 millions to /r/pics etc...

So yeah, I'd believe you if you told me that /r/common_lisp, /r/mongolia/ and /r/treepics/ are amazing communities but I don't think it's enough to redeem Reddit as a whole.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#170

Post by lazycouchpotato »

md224 wrote: post #50

I still can't get over the fact that their official mobile app stops rendering comments past a certain level of nesting. There's no indication that anything is missing, no "continue this thread" link, nothing... the comments just aren't there. I don't understand how one of the world's largest social media platforms could have a mobile app that silently hides content from the user. Just blows my mind.

Their mobile website is equally bad. A gigantic pop-up takes up half of the screen to tell you to use their app.

Third party apps make Reddit so much more usable.

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