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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2838 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?

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.

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