Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nymag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 618 posts

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

#211

Post by everdev »

psychometry wrote: post #72
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.

True, but The_Donald is always leaking. I've seen plenty of sexist/racist content on subreddits for cities, sports teams, memes, etc. Reddit has allowed itself to be a platform used in part for really despicable content, and the despicable people who generate that content regularly venture outside their cesspools.

Isn't this a symptom of a site growing to reflect the broader population? When communities are small, they typically cater to a niche audience, who invites their friends who are directly or tangentially related to that niche.

Once the site grows beyond those 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections, you get exposed to those 4th, 5th and 6th degree connections that might have some values and opinions that are shocking to you because they don't run in your orbit.

I feel bad that the author contributes his time to making a world a worse place. I see Reddit as giving more visibility to the world. It's true there's some crazy stuff from some loud people, but my guess is if it was quantified it would still be a small percentage of actual content on Reddit. But just like in life, a rare shocking event dominates our consciousness much more than persistent normal events.

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

#212

Post by projektir »

Woofles wrote: post #162
projektir wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really agree, it's the issue of aggregating everything relevant to a subject, which makes the popularity relevant.

BBS were not aggregated by subject. They're aggregated by the BBS itself. For a given game, there may be 10 BBS. That's how it was before. You'd go to the BBS with the community style you prefer. You have a choice.

Now, you're just stuck with one subreddit/Discord server/etc., which just reduces the quality of it all. And given the poor organizational ability of those services, it becomes entirely driven by a mix of popularity and posting speed.

[also no skin in the game for the BBS owner, as there is no BBS owner. No BBS competition]

It's the same with most "social apps", yes, because discussion shouldn't occur on "social apps", it should occur on private moderated spaces.

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

#213

Post by FeepingCreature »

crowbahr wrote: post #187
simias wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

/r/Polandball being a shining example to the contrary. There's a whole other discussion to be had about the importance of strict moderation and rules to improving a subreddit's quality.

Note that this is how Reddit is fundamentally supposed to work - there's a reason that founders get full control over rules and banning.

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

#214

Post by tedunangst »

foobaw wrote: post #180

One thing that really annoys me from Reddit is the mob mentality. For instance, a person will make a seemingly "logical" argument and everyone will just keep adding their own "opinion" agreeing with this argument to be part of this mob. Later, even if this argument is proven wrong, you will get insulted, downvoted and threatened if you make any sort of counter-argument. I hate generalizing but my experience was that…

Not unique to reddit. Once a forum comment has been accepted as right, it will always be the top post. Child comments only ever see fewer views. The correction will never be as popular.

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

#215

Post by gcbw2 »

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.

reddit cannot be customized.

You can subscribe to X subforums. and only ever see those same X subforums.

But you can NOT see "All" excluding only things racist subforums for example. So it is either your little bubble, or the full blown promoted/paid xenophobic posts.

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

#216

Post by komali2 »

wvenable wrote: post #90
psychometry wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but The_Donald is always leaking. I've seen plenty of sexist/racist content on subreddits for cities, sports teams, memes, etc. Reddit has allowed itself to be a platform used in part for really despicable content, and the despicable people who generate that content regularly venture outside their cesspools.

It seems like a right-wing contingent has taken over the moderation of a lot of smaller subreddits, specifically city/country subreddits, and both the content posted and the commentary reflects that. It's a dangerous trend for both society and reddit itself.

People are challenging this "undocumented" claim

Here's a lot of users talking about how it happened to /r/canada

https://www.reddit.com/r/onguardforthee/comments/7z1wap/forg...

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7z706y/whats_...

My suspicion is that whatever entity is behind massive twitter troll farms of far-right content (as well as inflammatory far-left content) is also doing everything it can to stir the shitpot over at reddit. /r/conspiracy is another one "lost" to the far-right. I even catch whiffs of it in the bay area subreddits sometimes.

I'd say the same for /r/shitredditsays but for the far-left, except it's been that way for as long as I can remember (LONG before any of the bot farm stuff).

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

#217

Post by agumonkey »

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…

Last month I was kicked from twitter, since I was trying to be more productive I didn't trigger the reset process.

I did spend less time refreshing some timeline. But

1) I did miss some of my "audience" (feels like an audience more than friends, but I'm twisted)

2) I'm now way less aware of lots of news. Two days ago was the first time in years that I thought to myself "what ? I didn't know that" about an event. Not sure if this is bad or good, but it's an important difference.

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

#218

Post by FeepingCreature »

slg wrote: post #186
psychometry wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but The_Donald is always leaking. I've seen plenty of sexist/racist content on subreddits for cities, sports teams, memes, etc. Reddit has allowed itself to be a platform used in part for really despicable content, and the despicable people who generate that content regularly venture outside their cesspools.

This is the problem that so many people miss when they extol the virtues of a customized Reddit. If you make a site that is attractive to racists, bigots, sexists, and homophobes, those people are going to be using the whole site and not just their tiny vile corners. This phenomenon might be easier to understand with a specific example like the recent Ghostbusters remake. It was by most accounts a bad movie. If you b…

That's a lot of bad words to express "people I don't like have a social life."

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

#219

Post by quadrangle »

slg wrote: post #186
psychometry wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but The_Donald is always leaking. I've seen plenty of sexist/racist content on subreddits for cities, sports teams, memes, etc. Reddit has allowed itself to be a platform used in part for really despicable content, and the despicable people who generate that content regularly venture outside their cesspools.

This is the problem that so many people miss when they extol the virtues of a customized Reddit. If you make a site that is attractive to racists, bigots, sexists, and homophobes, those people are going to be using the whole site and not just their tiny vile corners. This phenomenon might be easier to understand with a specific example like the recent Ghostbusters remake. It was by most accounts a bad movie. If you b…

I kinda think if the balance can be maintained instead of reaching a tipping point that the interactions between those bigots etc. and the rest of us may actually ward off their bigotry. A bigot having a conversation with a non-bigot in a context that doesn't start off adversarial is probably the best context we can get for people to slowly drop their bigotry.

Sure, it can go the other way too, and that's scary.

I was pretty much in the sunlight-best-disinfectant camp until I heard https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/epis...

Now, I dunno. Clearly we can't expect independent well-meaning anti-racists to be as effective as extremely carefully crafted propaganda appealing to baser tribalist instincts. It's already uphill battle to get people to be open-minded. Those who argue for reinforcing people's existing biases have it easier.

But if there's any chance of getting the bigots to change their views, it seems it will be in respectful conversation with others, which Reddit at least is capable of, though I guess it doesn't seem the trend, unfortunately…

Post reply on HN