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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.
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?
This is a complete misrepresentation of early reddit. Back then, reddit wasn't the holier-than-thou leftist hellhole it is today. It was full of “grey tribe” progressives: nerdy atheists who were certainly not conservative, but also not easily offended feminist wokescolds. There was an ethos of free speech maximalism, which is why besides le epic funny subreddits like /r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu there were also 4chan-worthy subreddits like /r/WatchPeopleDie and /r/Niggers. The general attitude was that yeah, they are kinda awful, but they have just as much of a right to exist here; if you don't like it just don't subscribe to it.
Remember /u/violentacrez, the guy who created /r/Jailbait (for posting sexualized pictures of minors), and moderated /r/BeatingWomen, /r/Creepshots, /r/PicsOfDeadKids, /r/PicsOfDeadNiggers (and a bunch of other subreddits that were exactly what it said on the tin)? When Gawker reporter Adrian Chen threatened to dox him, calling him the “biggest troll on the web”, reddit rallied behind him in solidarity, and responded by banning all of Gawker media in support.
This included mainstream subs like /r/politics who wrote: “Reddit prides itself on having a subreddit for everything, and no matter how much anyone may disapprove of what another user subscribes to, that is never a reason to threaten them.” It's literally inconceivable today!
(Incidentally, did you guys see the recent Pew poll which concluded /r/politics is 97% leftwing/progressives now?)
Of course those 4chan-esque subs were always dubious if not outright illegal, so it was clear that as reddit grew into the mainstream, something had to be done about them. The problem is that the admins overcorrected and instead of just banning some of the worst offenders like /r/Jailbait or /r/CoonTown they ended up banning almost everything that violated lefist sensibilities.
Anyway, to wrap a long story up, my point is that:
...seems exactly the wrong way around. It was woke politics that grew popular around 2010 that ended up taking over reddit, not the other way around.
I think "the other way around" is right, though. They didn't take over by becoming popular, they took over by consolidating moderation in their hands (I think right now a handful of people moderates a ridiculous amount of the most popular subs, though I don't remember the numbers), and getting admins to ban opposition.
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