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Many years ago I mentioned here or on ASX that I think Reddit is the judgiest place in the world and I hate it, and a few people agreed but some said it was my fault. That my posts were too long for one thing so that folks would skim, miss the actual question, and answer something I hadn't asked. So I adjusted and have generally written shorter posts with minimal context. It hasn't really helped and I think Reddit itself may be the problem, but either way I just hate that place, and I think it's completely toxic and is a window into why humanity sucks.
This week it was a cymbal ID request in /r/drums. A picture, a short ask. Cut it as lean as I could. Instead of the post being too long to bother reading, it was now short enough that people filled in the missing context with their own assumptions. They started litigating a tangential detail, the cymbal's mount lacked a sleeve, as if it were the point of the post, rather than just answering the identification question in front of them. I clarified the detail wasn't relevant. I don't own the item, can't act on it, was just asking about the model. I got antagonized for that instead and downvoted to all hell.
This has happened for years now, across different subreddits, different topics. Not every time, but enough, and each time it honestly makes me pretty sad, I'm pretty sensitive to group judgement. I asked in /r/castiron once whether a small orange spot on a pan meant I needed to strip and reseason it, or whether I could just use it as is. The replies insisted the pan was covered in rust, too dry, what have you, and it quickly didn't matter what I was actually asking. The thread had already decided what it was about, and I was now the bad guy.
The failure mode isn't length. Voting and commenting systems don't reward people for engaging with what you actually wrote. They reward whoever makes click bait replies, whether or not it's the substance of the post, and they reward it even harder when the reaction is a sarcastic one liner that makes the original poster look stupid.
Karma gated participation compounds the problem. I have an older account effectively unusable now because of accumulated low karma, which means appealing to individual subreddit mods just to post at all. Predictably, that interaction comes with its own layer of judgment about the karma score itself.
I don't even really think this is really about just Reddit either. Reddit is politics with the serial numbers filed off, running at different scale and higher speed. The same mechanism that turns a cymbal thread into a pile-on is the same mechanism that turns a policy disagreement into a purity test. Nobody is actually evaluating the argument. They're pattern matching to the nearest tribal signal and reacting to that. The crowd rewards speed and conformity over comprehension and helpfulness. Even extremely smart people I know fall prey to this with baffling consistently.
If this is what human coordination looks like, of course politics suck. Orwell's boot stamping on a human face forever doesn't need a state to do the stamping. A big enough crowd with an upvote button will do it for free, gleefully. Hell is other people with a vote count and nothing to lose by using it against you.
Now I am curious to see the content of your cymbal amd castiron posts, as well as the comments.
I have the same username on reddit
It seems like lots of people identified the cymbal. Many people who replied made the reasonable assumption that you picture you posted was one that you took and that you own, are borrowing or otherwise using the cymbal. I am not a percussion expert, but it seems that their advice to take proper care of a good cymbal was correct, if misdirected.
Your heavily downvoted comment was excessively oblique and could have easily been read as you saying that you were mistreating a borrowed cymbal. But in general, no one, including you, is in thr wrong here, and who cares about karma?
Well, like I said I'm very sensitive to group judgement like that. And it really bugs me when people won't listen. And this seems to happen a lot there... At least I can confidently say that "don't post too much information" as someone told me years ago is clearly not the correct answer. People will seize on anything, gleefully, as I said before. And that seems to indicate that the problem may be with the venue, if no matter what you try, people will be like that.
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Am I missing something. Like 90% of the comments seem to be straightforwardly answering the question. There is one top level comment about the sleeve, and I don't know enough about drums to know whether or not that's a big deal. But it seems disproportionate to condemn Reddit as a platform with this as an example.
More actual helpful answers came much later after a ton of sarcastic ones, and people refusing to listen. I'd say early on it was at least 50 percent people bitching or giving otherwise unhelpful answers (like "k custom sweet" is either them being stupid or more likely trying to trick me with a name that doesn't exist, and some people said it's obviously something like a k dark ride when it clearly wasn't. And people saying "k" are probably making a joke, but still, not helpful). But then the massive downvoting of anything I tried to say about the sleeve, and the doubling down or those people antagonizing me because of it, was what really got me down. And also, as I said, this isn't an isolated incident, just the latest. I don't know if you could see some of the earlier ones, because at least some of them were on my previous account, and I also deleted some retroactively to avoid more negative karma.
The prevalence of wrong answers is because most people are non-detail-oriented morons. If you ask them to identify a drumstick, they’ll confidently reply with a wildly inaccurate guess. If you ask them to identify a guitar, they’ll declare it to be a model that it clearly isn’t. If you ask, “does anyone know where this building is,” they’ll reply with screenshots of buildings that weren’t even built in the same architectural style. If you spend enough time on sites like this one, it’s easy to forget how stupid the median person is.
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Found it, interesting. As for the "people" not listening to your comments and downvoting (cymbal sleeve), maybe it could just be bots? Dead internet theory and all that.
Interesting, I never thought about that. Maybe it'll at least help me cope with it next time.
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It has been my experience for quite a few years now that the redditors who hang out in niche subs don't do so out of the goodness of their hearts in order to help people out, but to gang up on people, correct people, talk down to people, etc. To circlejerk with other lowlives who have nothing to fill their days with. You can get a few pieces of information from them that would be hard to find elsewhere, but it will always come with 50% of the thread being jerks or trying to have a laugh at your expense. Recently, one of them even told me outright that I had to expect abuse when showing up 'ignorant'. I.e. they'll take any excuse, even the fact that someone is simply new to the Thing, as reason to abuse them.
Is that really any different than the supposed halcyon days of web 1.0 forums full of cranky grognards?
(Maybe I just haven't judged my specific audience here and you don't think of that as a golden age of online discourse, in which case, fair enough. But I feel like "lurk moar" is generally good advice, and I'd rather get good information and a bit of cranky abuse than bad or trivial information with a "hope this helps <3".).
In the Usenet days so long as some users were willing to contribute positively, all you had to do was ignore the flames. Now with the mods as gatekeepers, those useful contributors are also chased away and the flamers are all that is left.
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No, things were never 'halcyon'. But you had more variety than you see on reddit these days. They fall into this mode. And they mostly all conform to the same superficial politics.
I wasn't told to 'lurk more', I was told I deserved abuse because I had less experience with x than they did. And that I was probably trolling because how on earth could anyone not already be familiar with the niche?
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fully agreed with this. Of course you can still find occasional good posts here and there, maybe even the occasional good (small) sub. But the site overall has long since gone to hell. It rewards the worst sort of posters and drives away all decency. At this point, you just have to expect a massive circlejerk response there no matter what you write.
I just hate how you get ideology spilling into purportedly niche interest/hobby based subs. They can help but shoehorn all sorts of nonsense in everywhere, shitting everything up. There's been too much 'purity' enforcement of the correct sort of thinking on there that it makes things all but useless.
Also I get OP's frustration. People just won't answer the damn question. I kind of get why though as I get into random asides here all the time (because I find the tangent more interesting).
I was bored recently and decided to head over to /r/askhistorians. I made the mistake of sorting by "top-all time" and 5 of the top 6 posts of all time are the mods violating their own subreddit rules to engage in anti-Trump protests (the sixth is protesting Reddit's API changes). And then I compared some of the top answers from 10-15 years ago to today, and the quality of the resident academics has just cratered. The bored military history phds who enjoyed engaging with enthusiastic laymen and answering the weird little questions they had are all long gone, replaced by harridans lecturing their audience for being too interested in white men killing each other and not interested enough in what trans women of color were up to. And it finally struck me that there's nothing redeeming left about reddit. Even the best little corners if it have fallen. It's time to just let it go.
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This is why they will immediately be replaced with AI identification. About as accurate, and much, much more polite.
I agree with you in general for the long term, but right now, AIs are not good at all at figuring out cymbals, at least not your typical ones like Claude and Chat GPT. If you ask it, it'll confidently say absolutely anything. It's not able to even notice things like whether the cymbal is lathed and then only match cymbals that have that matching characteristic.
As an example, I just asked Claude the same thing I asked Reddit. While Reddit at least had some people give me a good answer without fixating on the cymbal sleeve, and those people all converged on 1 or 2 cymbals (and I do think one of those is actually the correct answer), Claude very confidently claimed it was one of the cymbals I already owned, just because it knew I owned it. This is despite the fact that the cymbal in the picture wasn't lathed, and the cymbal I owned is. When challenged on why it thought it was, it just picked a random detail and doubled down like "the hammering marks are the same as x", even if that's not true. We'd need to have a dedicated cymbal identification AI, or have LLMs start to be trained on these minute details, in order to actually have something usable, right now.
I think it's more that not much has been written about cymbals. I notice this in domains where there's a lot of tacit knowledge because the domain is physical and separated from screens. (e.g. climbing, outdoors stuff). Coding and writing document themselves by their nature, and also the keyboard is right there to jot down notes. Almost no one is taking notes at that level while they play music.
Side note: in your OP, the phrase "X with the serial numbers filed off" stood out as a red flag Claude-ism (along with the subsequent cadence) and caused me to frantically re-read the whole thing to see if I'd just been LLM-ed.
Haha. I won't say Claude didn't help me write it, and yes, that phrase was one of his contributions. I often throw a lot of loose thoughts at Claude to gather them and assemble them. But afterwards I go pretty hard on most of the generated stuff to try to keep it more my own. You could say I file the serial numbers off of Claude.
Damn. Upon reread this whole paragraph reads like a paste from LLM:
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LLMs even train with data from Reddit.
Indeed, when researching they cite Reddit as a source a concerning amount of time
I think they are correct to do so? I tend to trust Reddit commentary, flawed as it is, to give human-ish opinions on things. Maybe not as the only source, it certainly should be one.
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Leftists (and Reddit is a leftist space) have a very elaborate sense of unspoken norms. An unspoken etiquette. I often find that when people have problems talking with leftists, it’s because they’re violating those unspoken norms in all sorts of ways. It’s a bit like being autistic and finding normal social mores complicated and inexplicable. It might seem to you rude and strangely coordinated, but to them it’s because you trivially violated some basic norm.
I don’t mean this in a judgmental way. Charitably, every group polices norms, leftists are just generally hostile about explaining them to outsiders. Uncharitably, this is what Kaczynski meant when he called them “oversocialized”. Either way I don’t intend to insult our leftist posters here and I hope they can even agree with me.
For a very broad example consider what leftists mean by “empathy”. They have all sorts of phrases for it I’m sure you’ve heard before. “Being a good person,” “basic human decency,” etc. This sounds simple on the surface (putting aside that it smuggles in certain assumptions about what it means to be a good person). Don’t be racist, sexist, bigoted, etc. etc. A lot of people who aren’t leftists probably agree with this premise.
The unspoken norm comes in here. You have to imagine, at any time, whether your actions could be offensive to somebody. It doesn’t matter if they were in fact. That you failed to imagine the offense you could have caused it itself the offense.
Take dating. You’re in a library, you see a cute girl, you walk up and ask for her number, she turns you down. This used to be fairly uncontroversial. And maybe she wasn’t offended. But, in fact, how did you even know she was open to being approached? How do you know you wouldn’t make her uncomfortable? You couldn’t have known that. Therefore, in fact, you did do something wrong, because you took a risk without her consent. You have actually failed to act with the full complement of empathy.
The same logic applies in other situations. You make a joke that isn’t racist, but that someone could perceive as racist. Or sexist. You make a negative comment about your own height to a coworker, which she imagines isn’t appropriate in a work context.
Why can’t you use the n-word? There are lots of contexts where it’s objectively just a word, you’re reading dialogue or repeating lyrics from a song. You’re not using it as a slur, right? But someone could still reasonably be offended by the word itself. Better not to use the word at all then. In fact, if you then insist that it’s just a word, isn’t it?, that’s suspicious, because you’ve clearly failed to understand empathy.
Maybe you’re just not a good person.
Again I don’t say this to criticize leftists but to simply explain the unstated social norms they operate on. They can tell when you don’t understand these norms or reject them, and will begin to treat you suspiciously, even if you feel like you’ve been perfectly civil. It’s something that catches a lot of my right-wing friends when they try to pass the Turing test and fail.
So to my mind when you post on Reddit and are immediately met with hostility, it’s probably because you’re violating a similar unspoken liberal norm. Maybe you’re even polite and reasonable by other standards. But probably not like theirs.
Let me tease out another unspoken norm. I think leftists have highly-developed ideas about how to accept and receive criticism or correction. I feel somewhat confidently that this is in fact your problem.
What I mean is, leftists have an unspoken expectation that you are going to apologize. If you make a mistake, say something wrong, accidentally offend someone, it’s not actually really a cancellable offense. The problem is when you make it clear that you are unwilling to be corrected.
It doesn’t matter if you are in fact right. The fact that you are unwilling to be corrected is your sin. After all, can’t you imagine that you could be wrong? We’re all wrong about something. It’s actually toxic that you can’t admit you could be wrong. It’s immaterial if you’re right or wrong.
Your offense isn’t at the object level, it’s at the meta-level.
So you post about your rusty pans, and the community decides you’re wrong. So you reply on speech-and-debate norms and you argue for your position. Ok, now not only are you “wrong” but you’re clearly unwilling to accept criticism.
You’re an asshole! No wonder you’re getting downvoted!
In my experience, leftists are constantly applying these unspoken norms in all their interactions. It becomes second-nature for them. They’re very logical outgrowths of the simple things liberals believe. The fact that conservatives don’t understand them fuels their belief that the right-wing is actively dumb. How could you not understand basic human decency?
Then, because you’re too “dumb” to understand them it becomes their active duty to purge you. HThey can’t have any halfway intelligent conversation (as they see it) explaining their basic suppositions over and over again. It’s not just that you disagree with them. It’s that you have somehow signaled that you reject basic foundational norms, or are incapable of understanding them.
Yes, these norms operate even at the level of dissecting your rusty pans. It’s not strictly even a political thing. It’s a spiritual foundation. It’s an ethical difference. Two peoples separated by a common language.
Very insightful comment, thank you. Immediately as I was reading the phrase “read the room” came to mind. I would typically view this phrase as a subtle rebuke for not having a sophisticated social manner (appropriately, think of the classic autist nerd who blurts out truly offensive things), but you’ve given me a new lens from which to consider what this phrase actually means. And the point about this stemming from over socialization in Ted K’s framing also makes total sense.
As stupid and exhausting as these people are (who cannot extend the same courtesy and attempt to have a theory of mind for their political/social opposite), I do still consider it a sign of higher intelligence to be able to intuit and seamlessly blend in with any such space you find yourself in.
Despite my politics being unusual for a corporate PMC environment (here I am, after all), I still cringe at colleagues who cannot “read the room” and cannot help but to regard them as philistines of one sort or another. In general it’s a skill that has served me very well in life to be able to jump into most any space and blend in, despite how slimy it sometimes feels.
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It's very frustrating to have to accept this in order to get along with them, because they'll often individually or as a group be engaging in far worse actual wrongs that they'll refuse to be corrected on (they might run a loop of pretending not to know things, or quibble on meanings of words, deny things happened, or any such distraction), while demanding you accept correction on a hypothetical offense. Their modus operandi points to a reality-basing around words and abstracts rather than actual happenings.
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Stop going to reddit. It will unearth, wash off, and nurture any misanthropic tendencies you may have, in particular about anyone you suspect of being in an outgroup. The same is true more or less of Twitter.
If that was actually the case, my dislike for artists as a group wouldn’t increase so much of the time I interact with them in other venues too, including even the real world. Yet it keeps doing so over and over and over again.
Similar thing hasn’t happened with engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, nurses etc.
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Interesting observations, and definitely a lot of food for thought and merit here. I should say though, I mean, I spend every minute of every day (that I'm not on the motte) surrounded by leftists. While you are right about leftists' take on the morality of racism and sexism-adjacent activities, leftists in real life do not generally have this unhinged need for people to be absolutely correctable about benign details all the time. That's really just a reddit thing, and I'd attribute it more to the psychology of road rage; that you can't see the face of the person you're talking to. And I think that the reason modern politics sucks so damn much might also have to do with that.
Besides that, I basically agree with @newcomputerwhodis. And I'm really really good at being self-reflective in my life when it matters. At work I'm the most apologetic, willing to adapt and take criticism person, that most people have ever met, and I think that largely explains why everyone likes me at work and likes working with me, and also explains pretty much all of my promotions. I do that at work because I'm sort of creating a persona at work. We all do this in compartmented parts of our lives. I do this especially because I'm terrified of being fired because I need my job to support my family. But that really takes a toll on me. I can't keep that up when it doesn't matter, and certainly not for randos who aren't actually helpful, and seem to mostly want to assert dominance or otherwise just pick a fight. Online when there are people who are helping me in some way, I go right back to being the persona I am at work, though.
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Unwillingness to be corrected (when I'm either not wrong or have not been shown to be wrong and there's no directly injured party to appease by apologizing anyway) as the root of hostility explains... a great deal of my 'inexplicable' internet fights. It feels good as an explanation - I am right, they are being illogical. It's too good, and too tempting to apply, too easy to write off any hostility as unearned. I like it, but I hate it. Thanks?
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This is basically entirely correct. And I feel very bad for the guys who are too autismal or not experienced enough to get it. You can actually just emulate an entire reddit leftist in your head as easily as your laptop can emulate a gameboy advance (the apolitical normie you meet at the dive bar pool table is much more complex and difficult to emulate than the redditor with his Interests and Hobbies), it's not that much processing power, they're not exactly ClaudeGPT Grokopus 69.420 one zillion parameters, they're just basically normal people who are a standard deviation dumber than the average motteposter trying to do what they feel is socially expected of them to be good. They want to be good people. Their rules of being a Good Person are not particularly difficult to understand, emulate, and manipulate, and if you consider yourself a right-winger this should be table stakes to show your face in public alongside not being fat and knowing how a sport jacket should fit.
Mind giving a 100% specific example of putting up these table stakes re: the demand for allowing (perhaps unjust, as perceived) correction from the leftists?
It's not possible online. You don't have any leverage over some pseudonym on reddit, especially when you're in their space.
In real life, however, it's mostly about delivery. If you can signal (through body language, tone of voice, physical appearance) that you're confident and unthreatened, it's typically not hard to stand up for yourself and stake out an unpopular position without being ostracized. The most important thing to understand is that it's not about being right or wrong--it's about status. If you look like you care too much, or you're itching for a fight, or you come across as defensive, you're cooked. The trick in group settings is subtly baiting your interlocutor into getting ranty, then letting them win while remaining cool and slightly aloof, trying to steer the conversation back to something uncontroversial. Then you let female disapproval of spergy male political arguments do the rest of your work for you. You want to make sure that you're always positioning yourself between the person you're arguing with and the normies on the sideline, so that when the normies inevitably get bored of your stupid argument, you get to be the one who "saves" everyone from the awkwardness.
When in doubt, yeschad and deflect is always a better response than a passionate rebuttal. Never be defensive; always be the "agree to disagree, who needs another drink?" guy. Never be the most political guy in the room.
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This articulates similar thoughts I've had.
"They care way more about the hypothetical feelings of a theoretical person than the real feelings of the actual person in front of them."
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I've said it before and I'll say it again: democracy simply doesn't work.
For those not in the know.
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It's its greatest strength.
See Churchill's commentary from A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.
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I agree with most of your criticisms of reddit. But I don't know if it is particularly indicative of anything about the human condition. I think, rather, that it says something about the type of person who comments on reddit threads. The number of reads that reddit gets dwarfs the number of posts and comments by orders of magnitude. And the number of people that actually spend time reading reddit posts is just a tiny fraction of humanity.
I think there are two take aways from this. The first is that it is worth thinking about why only a tiny fraction post things. My guess is that posting takes effort, and people are very hesitant to put forth effort for no reward. The people that do end up posting are often some combination of very unusual or very unbalanced. More often than not, I think it may be the later. People who's lives are going well don't spend their time angrily yelling at people they don't know and will never know about minute differences of opinion.
Which brings me to my second point, that the culture of much of the world was dictated for about 15 years by those exact, maladjusted posters. From around 2010 up until very recently, the collective opinions that these people coalesced around were pumped into the mainstream by journalists, media companies, and news networks that couldn't resist a cheap and easy source of material that was pre-optimized to be as tribalizing and divisive as possible. While there was a culture war before then, almost all the ideas debated on this forum and across society as a whole crystalized into their modern form during this era. I guess now that bots are starting to out-post humans by wide margins, this will probably change, and we'll move back to a world where majority opinions are dictated from above rather than from the grass roots. But the scars from it will last a long time. In the end, it really makes the optimism of the early internet era look utterly absurd in hindsight. Who in their right mind thought that letting anyone message everyone would possibly lead to good outcomes?
Like @haroldbkny I also take issue with this statement firstly because I'm skeptical of the degree to which majority opinions were ever "dictated from above". IE was there a genuine consensus or merely the appearance of consensus because all the records we have come from a handful of closely-aligned sources? Secondly because even if it was possible to dictate opinions in the past, I'm not convinced that it is possible now. Back in the 90s and early 2000s people would say "pics or it didn't happen". Nobody says that anymore, because everybody knows how easy pictures are to fake.
To your point (and @haroldbkny 's ), I agree that public opinion was never completely dictated from above. The "market of ideas" so to speak, is actually more like a testing ground to see what ideas resonate with the public and what do not. But the consolidation of news papers and publishers under the likes of Hearst and Pulitzer brought about a situation where the people at the top had a large say in which of these "publicly resonant" stories were allowed to propagate. And over the following century, it largely stayed that way. Of course there were smaller publishers and other communication channels, but the majority of public discourse was under the thumb of these gatekeepers.
We have just gone through an era in which there were essentially no gatekeepers. Anything that was emotionally resonant enough "went viral" on social media and entered into the public zeitgeist. Look at what the results have been.
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All good points. My main dispute is this:
This might have some merit, to the degree bots are influenced by their system prompts. But bear in mind where the vast corpus of training data for these bots came from to begin with: Reddit. And in my experience, you can't always override the bot's natural training with specific directives.
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