This may be too late for such a thread, but I had a discussion with a friend of mine that might shed some light on Reddit culture.
My friend andI have a mutual acquaintance (more of his friend, not mine) who is a moderator on a debate subreddit which typically touches on issues of religion and philosophy. As a moderator, he acts as the "fallacy police," most likely armed with a nifty chart of informal fallacies thought by those who never took a logic class to be iron clad rules. His time on this subreddit has led him to embrace New Atheism™ (he was formerly a Christian). Now his beliefs are more in line with a mid-2000's atheist middle schooler.
My friend and I were trying to figure out how this could have happened. He lives in a predominately conservative Christian area, so unlike Rhett & Link he has nothing to gain from taking such a position. If anything, he's become more alone, given that his family and in-laws - yes, he's married - are also conservative Christians. He hasn't been disowned or banished (quite the opposite), but he's more isolated than before, spending most of his free time with video games and Reddit. From what I've understood, he's always been a bit "heady" - I'm reluctant to say intelligent because I don't know him that well - and so he's drawn to intellectual-sounding topics. As I've discussed with my friend, we think that we may have found part of the reason for his "deconversion."
Reddit is structured in such a way to promote groupthink, with its system of karma and rewards that mean essentially nothing. You're encouraged to join the circlejerk so you can grow that sweet, sweet karma. Reddit also tends to attract pseudo-intellectual types. The mixture results in a deadly cocktail of group think among people with crippling Dunning-Kruger tendencies all jerking each other off and congratulating themselves with how smarter and above it all they are. As someone else mentioned, a lot of subreddits think that they are above the Reddit circlejerk, but in reality they are just as bad as everyone else on the site. While I am not saying that my acquaintance left his faith just because of Reddit, but I think it contributed to it. Reddit seems to be his "community" where he can receive validation for the intelligence that he thinks he has.
Anyway, that's that.
There is a good subreddit called
r/averageredditor that tends to highlight to insane stupidity of this site. There's a trove of exceptional goodness there.