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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.
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.
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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