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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2823 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 17, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What is wrong with reddit? I find that oftentimes I have a question, and I can't honestly think of any other place on the internet that I can ask that question and get an answer other than specific subreddits. But at the same time, I don't want to post on reddit because I hate it. You can't post anything there without at least half the comments being about how you're a fucking idiot for even asking the question to begin with. Every single time I'm like "I know I had bad experiences on reddit in the past, but this current post I'm about to do is so innocuous that no one could possibly take issue with it and ridicule me for it", and every time, without fail, I'm proven wrong.

Reddit just seems to me to be the judgiest place in the world. Does reddit select for this? Is this some sort of toxoplasma in action? Does half of reddit just consider themselves to be better than other people?

I think that a large part of it has been downvotes affecting your participation. If you get downvoted too much, you're restricted from commenting, so you're always incentivized to say whatever gets you upvotes, which will always be what the majority consensus is. This is also where the judginess comes from, because if you have a differing opinion, people don't want to seem like they are the ones with a minority opinion, so they will attack you to keep the consensus afloat. Contrast that to TheMotte where downvotes don't affect your participation at all.

I find that posts that get popular and rise to the top tend to have a change in the majority opinion.

My thought is there is a small group of negative, constantly online individuals who just want to ruin someone's day. These people will be the first to comment because they're always online looking for new posts.

If the posts get popular enough then the normie Reddit opinion takes over and overshadows those initial negative comments.

Some examples can be found if you browse any old popular AITA posts. A lot of times the OP will post an edit addressing initial comments, but those comments are usually the opposite of the majority of highly upvoted opinions.

This should be obvious but which subreddit you are also impacts your experience. As biased as Reddit it is still diverse in its bias and the type of people on each subreddit, especially the smaller niche ones.

Recently, I think the default UI change is a factor. Comparing new.reddit.com to old.reddit.com, you get much less text, and many fewer visible comments per post on new reddit than old. By default, it seems to "... expand to continue" long messages. Some subs now also display gif replies, which seem to only be used for snark. In general, it seems to encourage low-effort participation, and discourage thoughtful answers.

My favorite form of this on my local subreddit is the contingent that always feels the need to say, "you could do it yourself" to any question about getting any service or good locally. What's a good mechanic? You could do it in your garage. Who has the best BBQ? Smoking meat isn't that hard. Bore sight a scope? You can learn to do that. Best burger? My house, har har har.

How the fuck is this remotely helpful? Everyone is aware that it's possible to do [service] yourself, but if they're asking where to get it done, they have already considered doing it and decided they would rather pay someone that does it all the time. More to the point, what the hell is it that triggers people to give these responses? Just a desire to show off their own skills? Very weird behavior.

I do think admin and moderator decisions (some of which were absolutely necessary) have resulted in its userbase becoming more selected for midwittery, conformity and smugness over time. In 2012, Reddit was so committed to its vision of a free speech-friendly website that there was a major controversy over whether or not to ban a subreddit for photos of attractive teenagers taken without their knowledge (a rare example of a subreddit ban I fully endorse, for what it's worth).

But successive bans of subreddits for weird porn, edgy humour or anything which contradicts woke orthodoxy (most notably The_Donald, but also numerous subreddits which tolerate even the mildest scepticism of gender ideology - I expect the days are numbered for /r/detrans) have resulted in most of the witches and weirdos fleeing the coop, leaving behind only the midwits whose tastes tend toward the anodyne and who can reliably be assumed to believe that we really have always been at war with Eastasia.

The_Donald

Hard to be at all sympathetic given that they banned any criticism of Trump. Hard to complain about being banned for 'contradicting woke orthodoxy' (which I don't think is a fair representation of what happened but nevertheless) when you don't allow any contradiction of Trumpian orthodoxy.

Hard to be at all sympathetic given that they banned any criticism of Trump.

That's the deal they were offered. Pity that Reddit couldn't hold up their end.

More broadly, subjects shouldn't be (and generally aren't) held to the same standards as their rulers. Does filing a FOIA request give the government permission to wiretap you? Does skipping your court date justify the prison skipping your release date? If you lock your apartment, is your landlord justified in banning you from (otherwise-)common areas? If a student skips some homework, can a teacher skip grading their exams?

The only place pure reciprocity works at all is among peers, and even that doesn't always go the greatest.

I hope you didn't interpret my comment as to imply that I support any and all subreddits which contradict woke orthodoxy. /r/itsafetish was banned, but so was /r/GasTheKikes. My point is that the common thread underpinning the banning of most political subreddits is that they were insufficiently woke, sometimes subtly, sometimes extravagantly. I have yet to hear of a subreddit which was banned by a conservative admin for being too woke.

I don't see anything intrinsically objectionable about a political community banning all criticism of a specific political figure. It's pretty weird to go into a subreddit for supporters of Donald Trump and start ranting about how much Donald Trump sucks, especially when there are thousands of other subreddits (most of which have nothing to do with politics) in which you can do that and get a warm reception. Which is more pluralistic: a website with numerous sub-communities each enforcing their own specific orthodoxy on their members, or a website in which the members of every community have to adhere to exactly one orthodoxy?

a website with numerous sub-communities each enforcing their own specific orthodoxy on their members, or a website in which the members of every community have to adhere to exactly one orthodoxy?

Well we can make this argument one stage removed no? Reddit is simply one of many websites enforcing certain values, if you don't like them you can go to another website - it is itself a 'sub-community' of all websites.

  • -10

Ah yes, the old "if you don't like it, start your own website" argument.

Then someone does start their own website, and woke people don't like that, and immediately start hitting said website with DDoS attacks and putting pressure on their hosting providers and payment processors to drop them as clients.

You seem to be operating from the assumption that woke people, as a group, actually respect people's rights to hold and express political opinions they disagree with. I have absolutely no idea how you arrived at such a manifestly preposterous idea, when the last 10-15 years of Western politics have largely consisted of woke people loudly and explicitly announcing that they do not.

"if you don't like it, start your own website"

They could and they did! Patriots.win is still up and running. Where do you think you are now?

So you're not even going to acknowledge my point then, cool.

I was responding to you, specifically your smug mockery of 'start your own website', which was silly because that's exactly what they were able to do.

Kiwifarms, though I don't necessarily agree with Cloudflare's decision, was clearly not just banned just for its ideological proclivities.

More comments

The singer in my band is emigrating, so I'm looking for a replacement. I posted an ad on Facebook and on a local forum. I've never had any luck finding band members on Reddit, but I figured there'd be no harm in trying, so I found the subreddit for my country and posted the ad. It read something like "Looking for a lead singer for a band in [city]. Powerful vocals and good stage presence are a must. Experience in a recording studio, rhythm guitar skills and own transport are a plus, but not essential."

The first reply was "Hi, I'd like to join your band! The only thing is, I have no experience in a recording studio, don't have a car, can't play the guitar, don't live in [city] and I can't sing."

Har de har har, hilarious. I immediately remembered why (and how much) I hate Reddit, and deleted the post.

Reddit just seems to me to be the judgiest place in the world.

I guess StackOverflow really is dead.

It's full of 110 IQ misunderstood geniuses who are smart enough to signal how smart they think they are but not smart enough to actually say much that's novel or interesting, and the more a Redditor does it for free, either as a mod or as a groupthink enforcer, the larger his karma/e-peen. So it selects for midwits with nothing better to do than farm karma and play reputation games. Any subreddit about $THING with more than >100 users quickly gets swamped with these people and stops being primarily about $THING. The Iron Law strikes again.

Thanks for linking that post, it was very entertaining and perfectly encapsulates a particular type of extremely online Western male in his twenties or thirties. In the description of "second option bias" I was thinking of Scott's "intellectual hipsters and meta-contrarianism", and it's linked in one of the top comments.

There usually are other places that you can ask your questions but nowhere that offers such a broad range of topics to such a large userbase with such a low barrier to entry and all in one place. That was always a double-edged sword but it progressively swings further towards the low effort = low quality side.

In terms of content it used to be like HackerNews and now it's like Facebook. People don't go there to discuss questions, they go there to reassure each other they're in the right.

The scale of users means you get increasingly squeezed between the opposing forces of shitposters and overworked moderators. So they get a lot of idiots asking questions and a lot of replies that assume anyone asking questions is an idiot, and then the mods have to spend time cleaning it up instead of building out better tools that might help prevent those questions.

It doesn't help that Reddit's search has been shit forever. The sorting algorithm and karma system also incentivise repeating popular questions no matter how any times it's been asked before. And instead of fixing search to improve the UX for existing users Reddit prefers to chase new users by gamifying and appifying, while marginalising their smarter users (who might have contributed a lot of the better quality content but didn't represent much/any value to their revenue).

I've had the same experience many times. A lot of redditors are just itching to talk down to someone or try to prove they're smarter than you.

I don't know if reddit has changed or I have. I used to browse it daily on my commutes and I posted regularly. I had numerous comments gilded. I got in one of those mega karma subs. Then last year or so I deleted everything with a third-party app (or tried to. Reddit just wiped my name but resurrected some of my comments for some reason.) I don't know what happened but part of it I suspect is the userbase has seen a lot of old users getting quieter and new aging up users taking over. The mod nannying is uncanny--even benign comments are sometimes deleted for seemingly no reason. It's odd, I agree.

It is a microcosm of the world of man; it is a little voodoo doll of society.

As above, so bellow; and then you add in GIFT(https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies) and you get reddit.

It's not that reddit is bad, it's that social interaction is bad when you take down all the screens and rules and protections imposed by the other person being in front of you and having the ability to eg hit you with a big rock.

The karma system rewards conforming to the majority group think, so it's constantly selecting for the most banal least spicy take.

Further, the site depends on a zillion moderators to police content. This is a thankless, unpaid task, so the only people interested are Karens or proto-Karens who lust for petty power which let's them put their thumb on the scale of which lame takes win.

Reddit was braindead without Schwartz, IMHO it just took longer for everyone to notice the smell.

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