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It's Not a Glass House, It's a Glass Home
What makes Reddit most unique is that nobody has a positive opinion of it, least of all Reddittors. The more negative your opinion of Reddit, the more likely you fall into that very demographic you decry. Reddit's self hatred, and the collective reflex of Redditors to decry their enemies by declaring them to be the essence of Reddit, has remained persistent from the ShitRedditSays days to /r/drama and their rivals at /r/Subredditdrama to the commenters on r4r subs. I come to bury Reddit not to praise it, but I do want to drop a spoonful of sugar into the Haterade we're all drinking in this thread. Reddit remains unmatched for certain uses, or at least I have not yet figured out how to use Twitter or TikTok to achieve these goals.
-- Reddit presence and content remains stubbornly un-monetizable. Outside of edge cases like Aella and her friends in the sex work end of Reddit, or forum celebrities like Unidan, Reddit still isn't making anybody any money. ((Which is far more problematic than the userbase for ownership)) Where on Twitter, TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, even absolute Space Monkeys like our own @KulakRevolt are trying to monetize their online presence; Reddit stubbornly persists in being basically useless for capitalism. I'm sure on the margins some powermods are corrupt and direct traffic on /r/RedDevils to one blog over another in exchange for cash under the table, or people find ways to promote their own substack under different sock puppets, but for the most part Reddit is unique in that it still feels like everyone is there for the love of the game. Sometimes I hate the team they play for, sometimes I hate how they play, sometimes I just flat out hate them, but they are there because they have nothing better to do.
If I go on Twitter for NBA news, every tweet from a rando seems to be threaded to two more comments about buying NFTs or fake Jerseys or whatever. And every tweet from a journalist is trying to build their presence. If I go on Reddit for NBA news, the takes are just as terrible, but at least I know that's what these morons genuinely think. If I go on /r/weightroom, the opinions may be good and they may be bad, but they aren't followed by a link to buy supplements from the poster; on every other social media site they will be. Money makes the hot takes hotter, the politics more politically correct in the mainstream; but once you step out of the mainstream the politics must always get MORE EXTREEEEME to draw in views and cash, endless recursion from "I think the politicians might be lying to us" to "I think the politicians are alien pedophile vampires."
As long as this is the case, I will find Reddit more useful for reading NFL draft news or finding opinions on workout plans than I will find any other social media page.
-- Reddit is easier to segregate and navigate. Searching hashtags or particular users on TikTok or Twitter doesn't achieve nearly the topic specificity that going to a subreddit does. I can go on /r/nfl and be sure I'm getting nfl information, on /r/kettlebell and be sure I'm getting kettlebells. The information might not be good, but at least it is there. I can eventually curate a feed on another site so that I only get information on certain topics, but Reddit offers a superior method to segregate information by topic. The search feature has been notoriously bad forever, but google can pretty much find me what I'm looking for in a review of Super Squats or common problems with the e46 bmw 3 series in seconds.
-- Because Reddit remains stubbornly hated and unmonetizable, the conversation on Reddit remains a touch more authentic on a given topic than the conversation on Twitter which tends to be about striking a pose. Journalists use Twitter as their patsy to say "Fans are talking about X"; they tend to decry any conversation on Reddit as the CHUDs grunting at each other.
-- If your objection to Reddit is that all Redditors are losers, and the average insta or twitter user is better, you are using the wrong subreddits. /r/weightroom is full of verified strong motherfuckers, ditto /r/climbharder; go on the right subreddit and there really are hot MILFs in your area who want to meet; /r/classics has given me excellent recommendations and cogent responses to questions about translations; /r/askhistorians is full of people with fascinating degrees of domain knowledge and a deep searchable archive. Moderation standards are possible on Reddit in a way that they aren't possible on Twitter or TikTok. Private Discord or Telegram channels are superior, but one has to get into those, subreddits are viewable to everyone. Reddit retains a huge searchable back archive of content, as long as it remains searchable Reddit will remain somewhat useful even if it ultimately becomes pointless to comment on things. Every forum will ultimately suffer from users being losers, or alternatively from users presenting only their best traits, you're getting one or the other.
-- At the end of the day, I've listed a ton of non-political subreddits, and that's how most people use not just SM but everything. At core, the very marginal politics of /r/nfl , stuff like Deshaun Watson or whatever, are things I don't really care about. A minority of people will be driven away from the hordes of bad draft takes by a smidge of leftist political lean.
This is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that they (and an increasing amount) are more likely too be losers, and unusually big and strange ones at that, not that everyone are losers.
I also find some value in some niche communities but that is rapidly decreasing. It seems to me that as the relative amount of nerds decrease, they are not merely being replaced by normies, they are replaced by normie losers.
Furthermore, this is very much true of both communities I directly participate in and those that I see at a distance, this one included. This is doubly true of people hanging around just to be part of a "community" rather than engaging with the core activity of the community. People on gaming forums that don't play games or wants to talk about them, people here or in the SSC sphere that only ever talk in the wellness or fun threads or equivalent, people in book communities that don't read, people TV-show forums that don't watch the show, etc.
Everyone isn't a loser of course but a disturbing amount are. That anonymous user could be anyone but realistically they are likely either a loser being open about being a loser or a loser lying about not being a loser (or someone young lying about their age).
We have the old framework of geeks- > mops -> sociopaths for community development but now it seems more like geeks -> losers -> sociopath losers for pseudonymous forums. Its not just that the interesting core gets diluted by normies it's that they're such massive losers as well. I mean, realistically, what group has time to spend all day in these communities that aren't obsessed with the subject matter? Its not the normies. The bizarre moderators are not outliers, they are representative of their communities.
I agree. I've linked my little joke graph before, below, nerd identification is essentially negative. One identifies as a nerd socially because one is un-athletic, socially awkward, etc not necessarily because one is factually intelligent or well read. Without gatekeeping on the axis of intelligence (which no one is willing to do), Nerd becomes the catch-all category for those with no other options.
At the same time, I caution against assuming that the users of other Social Media are any better. They might just be losers along different, hidden axes rather than on obvious ones.
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Did you see Scott’s recent post on Nerds and Hipsters?
I did, and I have an effortpost percolating asking: What drives people to write essays that try to give precise definitions to slang terms that have inherently flexible meanings? See the many essays on the difference between a Geek a Dork and a Nerd, or between a Slut a Whore and a Ho, or between a Bitch and a Cunt, a Prick and a Dick, etc.
Thank you - that was exactly my thought about Scott's post. Sometimes the most intelligent conclusion you can reach when you analyze the difference in denotation and connotation between two terms is that they ultimately don't have a stable difference in meaning, and I think that's the case for geek vs. nerd - I've read many people attempt to define a difference, but nothing has ever stuck.
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