Reddit and why is such a cesspool

[The Noise]

I expect I am echoing sentiments from others in the thread, but here is my analysis:

Reddit was severely flawed from the design stage. Promoting popular (i.e le upboated) comments to the top of the comment section in a given thread incentivises one of two posting styles (And also makes the "first post" exceedingly important).

A: Epic Dunks ("Ratio", etc)
B: GroupThink.

Posts that don't subscribe to one of these two formats are unlikely to be popular, and so are unlikely to reach the top of the page. Worse: posts that are sufficiently unpopular are outright hidden without manually unfurling them. The only way around this is to be a power user, which brings me to another point; Karma. Karma (and similar accolades like Leddit Gold) is a sign of status, and implies that one is "in tune" with the userbase. This allows such users to be afforded the ability to shape other users' opinions ("This is a popular/high-Karma user... He must be correct!"). This of course further incentivises Epic Dunks and Groupthink, along with sob stories/fabrications in order to farm Karma in order to one day become a power user oneself.

People always talk about reddit powerusers but I cannot for the life of me see what the big deal is. Unless you go out of your way to view a user's profile, you cannot see their comment karma and people only learn of powerusers when they're assholes (gallowboob and that one r/AgainstHateSubreddits mod who spams child porn I can't remember the name of to name a few examples.)

I think the more likely answer is that powerusers--the ones that control thousands of subreddits at a time, for instance--are shell accounts used to control narratives through post deletions and bans and promote certain viewpoints through the use of botnets.

Anyone remember u/IrlOurPresident? Dude was top mod of several subs that would barely eke out a couple of posts per day and get a modest amount of upvotes, but when he posted to those aforementioned nearly dead subs, his posts would rocket to the top of r/all with hundreds of thousands of upvotes, all promoting or blatantly advertising for democratic politicans with socialist tendencies like Bernie or AOC.

He eventually DID get suspended, but that was after many months of clear-as-day vote manipulation and point-pushing going on. And to this day it's probably still happening everywhere, just more subtly.

 

[John Titor]

Speaking as someone who used to hang out at YTMND, anything with an updoot/downdoot system inevitably turns into a popularity contest. Who needs discourse when you can flaunt how many people like your post?

 

[Candlelight Desolation]

Speaking as someone who used to hang out at YTMND, anything with an updoot/downdoot system inevitably turns into a popularity contest. Who needs discourse when you can flaunt how many people like your post?

Reddit states in their official policies that they want to use upvotes and downvotes to get rid of posts that don't add to the discussion, but absolutely everyone on the site uses it as an agree/disagree button.

 

[Secret Messages]

Just browsing reddit it’s shocking how obviously young the “real users” are. On the front page it’s exclusively lefty politics posts, twitter screenshots and GPT-3 bots posting zingers in a 10k deep comments section, but when you get past the bots and find the “core userbase” it quickly becomes “hi im 14 and reddit is so cool lol!! ”

Reddit is nice because it allows small hobby communities a way to freely host a discussion board, and it’s good for Q&A because every question about everything has been asked on there once before, but any subreddit that regularly gets posts with <600 upvotes is not worth reading.

 

[skjora]

I like using reddit as a search engine for topics where shill-sites, aggressive SEO and the death of forums have rendered google completely unusable. Like technical questions, product reviews and such.

 

[RougeRed]

Speaking as someone who used to hang out at YTMND, anything with an updoot/downdoot system inevitably turns into a popularity contest. Who needs discourse when you can flaunt how many people like your post?

If it was used as intended, it would be different, but Reddit is/was retarded for thinking it would be different. You were supposed to upvote stuff that fit and contributed, and downvote shit that didn't. They really thought people would give points to people they disagreed with because they were furthering the discussion. Like you said, it will always boil down to hivemind "It has more points, they must be right" and "Less points means it is badthink that I must disagree with".

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

I thought Reddit has the shittiest text formatting I've ever seen. I didn't think about the more sinister elements of it.

 

[Wasbenzine]

I like using reddit as a search engine for topics where shill-sites, aggressive SEO and the death of forums have rendered google completely unusable. Like technical questions, product reviews and such.

The death of forums didn't just happen for some unknown reason, it happened because search engines stopped promoting UGC (user-generated content). It's hard to police the entire internet so they just limit how much you can see, and reddit is only allowed because it's a squeaky clean kosher shithole. Go and search 'ugly jew' (check images), 'stormfront' or any other politically sensitive term in both Google and Yandex and compare the results. The fucking RUSSIAN search engine has zero censorship, and the american one is censored to uselessness. Fuck america.

Fuck plebbit as well, I can always sniff out a redditor whenever one is near. They fear bans so they adjust their behavior and thinking to align with what the site tells them to, so they don't lose all of their precious karma. It is conditioning in action.

 

[ロボ﹏§¤r﹏h¶rœ]

The death of forums didn't just happen for some unknown reason, it happened because search engines stopped promoting UGC (user-generated content). It's hard to police the entire internet so they just limit how much you can see, and reddit is only allowed because it's a squeaky clean kosher shithole. Go and search 'ugly jew' (check images), 'stormfront' or any other politically sensitive term in both Google and Yandex and compare the results. The fucking RUSSIAN search engine has zero censorship, and the american one is censored to uselessness. Fuck america.

Fuck plebbit as well, I can always sniff out a redditor whenever one is near. They fear bans so they adjust their behavior and thinking to align with what the site tells them to, so they don't lose all of their precious karma. It is conditioning in action.

Yandex censors different things, just like Google Search censors others. You should never trust a single search engine - use several, depending on what exactly you're looking for. And Google Search is trash-tier these days in general.

Twitter may be botted to hell and back, but it doesn't even hold a candle to Plebbit.

 

[std::string]

If it was used as intended, it would be different, but Reddit is/was retarded for thinking it would be different. You were supposed to upvote stuff that fit and contributed, and downvote shit that didn't. They really thought people would give points to people they disagreed with because they were furthering the discussion. Like you said, it will always boil down to hivemind "It has more points, they must be right" and "Less points means it is badthink that I must disagree with".

It was based on Slashdot, where, hey, guess what, it actually worked like intended.

You'd hit the comment button on a post and there was a chance you'd get selected as a mod. It was just random anonymous mods for each post. Old jokes, trolling, flamebait, whatever caught downvotes and got hidden.

Informative posts from people who knew what they were talking about got upvoted, and I saw many comment chains where there was an interesting argument going on and everyone participating got upvotes for making good points.

Reddit is so, so far away from this that it's depressing. You give a horde of greasy autists down arrows for badthought and they're gonna hammer that shit harder than John Bonham

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

There's also something very fake about reddit's meme culture but it's hard to explain why.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

There's also something very fake about reddit's meme culture but it's hard to explain why.

Meme culture has been fake for a while. Corpos realized they can 'hijack' memes and advertise their movies. That's why, whenever a new movie comes out, You will see 1-2 memes appear on top page. It's all marketing now.