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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.
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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