IDK what it is about reddit that makes it easy to get sucked into an argument. When I'm twitter, I just speak my mind. If you don't like it, fine, I feel little compulsion to engage. If things get nasty, I just mute or block.
I feel like I get the same amount of benefit out of each site, but twitter delivers it w/ less stress. Maybe it's just an artifact of how, on Twitter, I generally only follow 'experts' and interact w/ their followers vs the sorts of folks who camp on Reddit waiting to start arguments.
It's in part the upvote / downvote, an horrible gamification of online discourse triggering your need to win the "spectators", even if you end up not having any vote at all because no one cares.
Personally, I miss the old slashdot system. It was far from perfect, but it was still much better I think.
I use a css script to hide all karma on reddit. Upvote me, downvote me, I don't care about imaginary internet points. The only thing I loathe is posting something factually correct, but unpopular, getting downvoted, and then reddit decides 'you've been doing that too much!' and stops you from posting. No thanks. I'll just close the tab and move on with my life.
It’s really amazing how there are some simple and readily available economic stats that will get you downvoted deep into a hole in the ground, and people will call you a literal nazi. Reddit is a special place.
My first guess: comparison of wages for men and women but adjusted to take into account years of experience and occupational choices. That comparison doesn't align very well with the ever popular "census data" report about wages for all women vs all men which "proves" that woman aren't paid "equally".
Almost any data that paints a positive picture of progress in the last 40 years will get you nuked. For example, median household incomes have actually risen and Americans are generally far richer today despite healthcare and education becoming more expensive relatively.
Nah, they just rate limit you to only posting once every 10 minutes if you're getting heavily downvoted. It's irritating as heck, but not a big deal, I just close the tab.
My brother's reddit account was suspended recently. He's somewhat conservative and the last bit of posting he made (that I could find) was arguing about COVID & masks. I don't know if he posted anything controversial beyond that because I haven't had a chance to talk to him recently. He seemed to relish going into hostile subreddits and "mixing it up."
posting too much. Much like HN some reddit groups have a time out to let you cool off if you go over N posts, especially if your account is new. Happens to me a lot since I delete my account and start over ever 3 or 4 months. I don't care about karma more than say enough to not get rate limited.
Well, I'd argue Reddit is worse simply because of the topics of discussion that proliferate there, and because insulting is allowed in many subs. But the gamification part and the subtle flamewars are very present here on HN.
HN might not be different in terms of upvotes and downvotes, and wanting to get fake internet points, but I still find it qualitatively different. In particular, I have never felt the urge to read downvoted comments on reddit. On HN, if it’s an interesting thread, I find I will often intentionally read the faintest comments. I’ve found that on good threads even the quality of unpopular posts provide me with something at least worth considering.
> It's in part the upvote / downvote, an horrible gamification of online discourse triggering your need to win the "spectators", even if you end up not having any vote at all because no one cares.
Not everyone plays that game. I upvote all of my opposition in reasonable, heated arguments on Reddit to give them an advantage. That way, if my ideas truly have merit, the wisdom of the crowd will let me know. It’s a way to check myself and call BS on my own ego.
This is the way. In theory, you're only supposed to downvote comments that don't contribute to the discussion. For me, that mostly amounts to very rude/unhelpful comments or extremely flawed arguments (flat earth level, not just arguments I strongly disagree with).
On the other hand, I find it's easy to be downvoted into oblivion for no apparent reason. I find it hard to just ignore and forget about those threads, even though I know I should. Example (sorry, I have to get this off my chest): a redditor with a history of substance abuse started with winemaking (as a hobby) and asked how many glasses of wine they could safely consume. A physician (verified in that subreddit) responded that two glasses every day would be fine. I commented (as a medical layperson) that suggesting OP that it's safe to drink two glasses of wine every day (not just every now and then) might not be a good idea considering their history, at least to my knowledge. Suffice to say, that day I learned that some people seem to be easily offended when commenting about reasonable alcohol consumption considering past addictions. Or perhaps I'm vastly overestimating the risks of substance abuse disorders...
themulticaster says>"Suffice to say, that day I learned that some people seem to be easily offended when commenting about reasonable alcohol consumption considering past addictions. Or perhaps I'm vastly overestimating the risks of substance abuse disorders..."<
I agree with you. Perhaps they read your post after their second (or later) glass of wine!8-)).
> I thought that was a good idea, until I started seeing posts about stuff I knew really well.
There’s no perfect system or perfect just-world. Like you, I see mistakes like this all the time on Reddit, with some of the best examples of what you describe found on r/todayilearned. And I’ve seen lots of cognitive bias at work just like you have. For example, if multiple people downvote someone who has the correct answer, other people will often jump in and follow the downvoters just because of the bandwagon effect. When my Reddit account gets more than 100,000 karma, I will often abandon it and start over, because people tend to upvote accounts with higher karma instead of honestly appraising the content. I love starting with zero karma and watching all the dynamics play out with a fresh account to limit this kind of bias.
My current approach to the Reddit game is reportmaxxing. I'll make innocent-sounding comments with subtle triggers that will enrage some people, then pretend I have no idea what they're talking about in their furious replies, politely winding them up this way in our back-and-forth until they say something rash that I can report them for.
If I can frustrate them enough to make a violent threat, that's usually enough to get their account permanently banned. And then I win.
I got an account with an 11-year history wiped out the other day, that's my high score so far. Good times.
This is called dog whistling, and is frequently used to subtly spread racist and fascist views. If you're not doing that, arguing in bad faith is a waste of everyone's time and provides no value to the world.
I like to think of it as freeing them from the conversational prison that is Reddit. As such, I'm essentially doing them a favour. If I didn't find this so personally enjoyable, it would be a wholly selfless act.
This reminded me of a time I got into an argument on Reddit. Someone eventually chimed in that I was probably right, that my logic was sound, but "look at all the downvotes you are getting". Even as they typed it out, it never occurred to them that there could be something more important than the internet points. I explained if you never get downvoted to oblivion, you're probably not saying anything interesting.
The thing I hate most about reddit are all the little bubbles that are created by bad moderation. Sometimes, this is even automated. You can only post on certain threads if you have the right skin color (r/BlackPeopleTwitter), or ideological disposition (r/conservative) or net worth (r/fatFire).
The absolute worst are when some mod shadow bans you (all posts / comments are silently removed), and refuses to tell you why. I had that happen on my city subreddit, I guess because I said we needed a larger police presence to get property crime under control. That was the only remotely controversial thing I've ever said there.
The /r/sandiego subreddit, for instance, is controlled by a weirdo who masquerades as two moderators and who will shadowban you for merely participating in the subreddit created to escape his control(/r/sandiegan).
sometimes people want to get together and not be antagonized by contrarians and people looking for a fight on the internet. i get it, even if i think the results of something like conservative are overall negative. whats the alternative.
black people in the US have some kind of shared experience they want to discuss, conservatives maybe don't want to fight with everyone all the time. its not my place to invade then. if there are people who to engage online with multiple viewpoints there are plenty of places to do that.
i wish the city subreddits enforced residency requirement or something similar to post
If you wish to constrain participation in a sub, simply create a private one and only invite those you want to participate.
What I really disagree with is having a public sub that's basically 'read only' except for your chosen group. I will straight up filter your sub from r/all if you do that.
Some sort of meta moderation of subreddit moderators could be such an improvement over there if well implemented... I miss the old slashdot system as well.
I'm sad we 'lost' /. to the morons. I think a lot of us gave up at some point and moved on to kuro5hin, reddit, hn, etc.
It's too bad the content of a site is tied to its moderation system. It would be great if you could, say, use reddit but abide by a completely independent way of moderating.
How many adverts have you clicked on at Reddit? Or HN.
Plenty of ways to market without clickable ads. Shaping consensus and datamining reactions, in real time, is far more useful than getting the bottom 33% to click on ads which are easily blocked by modern browser plugins.
Slashdot user ID measuring contest? Okay I'm in: #130x
The last time I was in such a contest I started out very proud of my low number, but was quickly and thoroughly beaten many times by people with numbers down to the single digits...
Oh well, I was an early user of the WWW too, using Mosaic. Before that: nn and gopher.
Twitter is a megaphone at best, and a series of bumper stickers at worst. Reddit is a cocktail party. If you want to say your piece, and can’t handle criticism, Twitter is the place. If you care about context and nuance, Reddit is much better.
The problem with Reddit is the same problem with cocktail parties — you really need to read the room before spouting of something that will be unpopular.
I think its wrong to speak about Reddit as a whole. There a lot of small moderated communities where you can discuss anything without "noise". Just ignore most popular sabs.
This type of flip generalization is exactly the type of “I’m going to tell you how it is” that might drive someone away from Reddit and toward Twitter.
I’m not talking about /r/politics or any of the other massive subreddits, I’m talking about tiny subreddits like /r/bikewrench or /r/hats. Subreddits narrowed to the point that conversation is actually reasonable. The discussion in /r/neoliberal and /r/socialdemocracy both have me subscribed.
The problem with political subreddits is they have gigantic blind spots due to heavy groupthink and constant obsession with semantics and labeling.
I've never seen a discussion of why some political idea is better than another getting in depth political theory with wide coverage outside of the current groupthink on reddit. It's always varying forms of appeals to popularity, authority, or someones favorite confirmation bias study that they are trying to shove down your throat to get a sweet dunk. The way the political subs differ is just rhetorical window dressing. Totally useless.
The other kinds of subs can be nice for a time. But i've always seen them to either die, become popular/overrun, and/or get a cancerous mod that makes everyone miserable.
Not just that, but the moderator's bias is often responsible for culling any deliberative participation. I mean, r/conservative can almost be as bad as r/pyongyang.
I mean... you refer to the groupthink as some sort of force on the discussion, when in reality, you have a bunch of people who think a specific political or economic policy is sensible.
This obviously has it's limits when the group has diverse views about the policies.
The strangest, and often most interesting conversations that take place in /r/socialdemocracy when the socialists or communists who see social democracy as a stepping stone toward socialism are forced to deal with the other social democrats that firmly think some/many markets are good for society as a whole. There is a ton of nuance in those conversations, while at the same time, anyone suggesting that we shouldn't have some form of socialized health-care will be laughed out of the room.
Another example of this is the Strong Towns movement and their various subreddits. It seems to be a very serious, very cross-party neo-urbanism community which puts Bernie Sanders voters in the same subs as Mitt Romney voters, all discussing the merits of walkable cities and the inefficiencies and concerns about municipal bond debt capacity.
These niche political subs can get pretty interesting.
In my experience on reddit every interaction starts from 0 with minimal if any shared knowledge.
You speak of people debating communism vs socialism vs pro-market democrats, etc. etc. are these debates rich with historical and philosophical examples, building on a canon and discussing the ethics of how these ideas would actually play out? Or is it news articles, rhetorical games, semantics, and confirmation bias studies?
The real significance of the difference there is the sincerity of the curiosity to find a solution. If someone has dedicated their time (reading serious, old, important books or doing REAL research) to understanding they have very few original thoughts and observing what came before them so they can say something productive. From what I have seen, that sincerity is stuck at a high school level pretty much site wide.
For example, here on HN you can actually find people who have pretty deep knowledge in their fields and they don't need an online debate to show that. They just contribute and people often ask questions of them not as an infallible source or to test them but out of curiosity. The 'debates' that do happen here assume a much different character from reddit most of the time. There's a much healthier dynamic and its as realistic as I think it can get for what is possible on a text based social media platform.
Even the smaller subreddits tend to have lots of groupthink. There’s usually a prevailing viewpoint on any given sub and anything contrary is downvoted to oblivion.
Maybe I’m not looking at the right subreddits though, who knows.
To add on a little: There are tiny subs that feel like HackerNews, but all the giant subs that the app and the normal site (not https://old.reddit.com ) funnel you into are complete cesspools
The natural cycle of communities on reddit is being overrun by r/all and becoming popular enough for some careerist mod to seek a position there and play politics, eventually bending it to some commercial or ideological interest personal or otherwise.
There's a bunch of communities I enjoyed for a while. All of them are polluted now.
What kind of interactions are you expecting to have? People on any social media are either career self promoters, or they are on the toilet, waiting impatiently somewhere or procrastinating small snippets of time. It's only ever going to have superficial exchanges of information.
This is what frustrates me about the idea that social media promotes connection. It's more like standing in a crowded room and listening to snippets of other people's conversations. It's only once you've been there a while you realise everyone is talking to themselves
Reddit of 10+ years ago wasn't terrible even if naive. HN is fine. Just interactions that aren't mostly oppressive in favor of a groupthink. Twitter is unironically better for discourse than reddit, particularly now. There is no reigning ideology there.
If you get deep into many established subjects on reddit, most of the highest quality posts are all 8+ years old. That's not a coincidence. My usecase was the classics, but I noticed it to be true for many other topics. It has become a know-it-all facebook thats gamed by corpo and national interests now.
I wish it was only about avoiding unpopular topics. You get downvoted even for asking what makes a good coffee or any other questions that people will happily engage with in real life interactions.
Again, this is why I bring up reading the room. You're likely to find a subreddit for discussion making coffee, even if it's been asked 100 times before, but it probably won't be /r/coffee.
In /r/sanfrancisco, yea, asking "hey, i'm visting SF so what should I do?" is misunderstanding the subreddit. It's for locals.
Even for locals, many do not like the regular discussion of the very real socio-cultural issues facing the city. There is a regular push to "make this subreddit something that creates content for me" but that's not really what reddit is about. It's a place for people to share created content, it's not a curated news feed for users.
Just to add my 5 cents: spend few minutes reading sub rules and some popular posts. For example on subs about care about exotic animals you usually will get heavy downvoted while asking medical advice about your animal. Which is contrintuitive but logical - newcomers ask such questions everytime, whild most users of the sub is not exotic animal veterinar, and can't diagnose.
Given the downvotes to my comment (the irony), I have to add some context. When I talk about getting downvotes for asking what makes a good coffee, or other conversational topics like that, I mean doing so in the appropriate place, such as a sub's daily "cafe thread", where one can talk about anything within reason. The same comment made by another user or another time is received differently.
It's tiring and one of the reason I don't interact so much on the web anymore.
Reddit has the petty bonus of people going down your comment chain and downvoting it.
The site would benefit from listing who upvotes and downvotes each post/comment. That would sort out a lot of the abuse issues long before other ideas such as real identities.
You are not able to go through a persons profile and downvote on people's posts. It looks like it from the UI, however it doesn't persist those votes. It may be capturing your attempt though.
To do that you have to visit each and every post and downvote it.
And even if you click through to the actual posts, there's a fairly low limit on the number of times you can downvote a specific person per day before it stops counting.
I would love to read through a source code leak. I have wasted so much of my 20s on that god forsaken site. Now im in my mid 30s and occasionally reminiscence about how innocent I thought it was back in 2010. It is garbage now and it was garbage back than, we just didn't know. In my mind, I actually hold Digg in higher regard just because they never made it to the point where it became a net negative on the world. You know what they say: you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain or something like that.
I'd argue this code is so old that it probably bears little resemblance to current Reddit. I know this was used by right wingers when they made that alternative Trump Reddit. That Reddit was awesome (minus the actual content) because it took me back in time to the "good ol days" of Reddit.
I really want to see the current algorithms being used in the codebase. The rest is just shitty code written by overpaid monkeys.
> The site would benefit from listing who upvotes and downvotes each post/comment.
I used site with this rule few years ago. It results in immediate downvote of other post/comments (or group of posts/comments) of user that downvoted your comment. And also public shaming, and long comment threads with arguments "why you downvoted me?".
I started to think that its really very hard to fix social issue with some technological solution.
I think it's downvoting. It's one thing to see (what you think is) a really bad reply to you get some likes, it's another to see a negative number next to your comment, I feel much more compulsion to defend myself for the latter.
yeah.. my solution is to use old.reddit, and click "disable inbox replies" on everything I say
Then when I'm REALLY bored I'll go click my own history and see what the peanut gallery thought of my various comments. I get a lot of mega-downvotes for really innocuous stuff for no apparent reason, along with the occasional angry response, so it's best to keep my stress levels down by keeping that stuff isolated.
I'd be a nervous wreck if my phone/watch were buzzing at me every time some dickhead online decides to rip into me. I don't know how people can stand it.
Redditors' opinions are almost completely worthless measures of comment quality.. if you want a huge karma score, you can just repost the top stuff from a couple of years ago into popular subs and repost popular comments from months/years earlier on posts that pick up traction in /r/rising
Some niche subs never downvote people, and some downvote almost everything
I think your best bet is to ignore karma altogether on that site
I assume it can be generalized with votes being a proxy for social reputation, and internet users, being the humans they are, likely (consciously or not) adjusting their interaction depending on that surrogate cue.
My favorite trope on Reddit is when you explain something clearly and people respond that you haven't given an example or explained or whatever. It's not that you haven't explained, they just don't accept your explanation and demand more.
I've taken to increasingly absurd responses to this trope. I often explain with perverse metaphors involving their mothers. Highly recommend finding your own flavor of fun responses to this ludicrous bad faith response.
And an obsession with sources. Which makes sense sometimes, but you can tell someone your favorite color is orange and they're not happy unless there's a Reuters article about what color you like.
Reddit has a massive hard-on for external authority in any conceivable context so it shouldn't be surprising that they want a citation if you say the sky is blue.
A request for a source should include an argument for why a bit of information needs a source (what facts are in question, and how they impact the broader argument). A lazy “sources please!” should be treated as bad faith attempt to DDOS the other participant.
I see nothing wrong with an "obsession" with sources.
The www was very much built on sharing http links as a form of citation, no reason not to make use of such an fundamental and established function.
Imho the opposite has become a much worse issue; People casually claiming the most extraordinary things, far outside the realm of opinions, with not even an attempt to source it.
A bad-faith request for a source is just an attempt to waste the other person’s time. If a source is requested, it should be obvious or explained where the source fits into the over-arching argument, it might require just as much work on the asker’s side, to establish why it is necessary.
There’s also the risk that the request for a source just devolves into an argument about the quality of the source, which basically torpedos the discussion.
> A bad-faith request for a source is just an attempt to waste the other person’s time.
Why not add a source to begin with, so others don't have to "waste" their time asking for one/looking one up?
With anything that's citing numbers, or statements by some official person or institution, that's imho a no-brainer.
Particularly as a Google search can yield wildly different results based on location, search history, and wording of the search request. So assuming everybody else can "Just Google it", is often not very useful.
> There’s also the risk that the request for a source just devolves into an argument about the quality of the source, which basically torpedos the discussion.
You call it a risk, I call it an opportunity to fact-check if the original claim is actually true, or just one of the many headlines that take liberties for sensationalism.
It's also an opportunity to establish a "base truth" that people can agree on as a premise, to start a discussion from.
That's not a given when people from often vastly different educational, socio-economic, cultural and language backgrounds interact with each other, as it constantly happens online.
If you actually care to inform, then you can add a source to give the information some third party background and more details.
Expecting others to put in the work to authenticate your claims, by sending them on wild goose chases on Google that might or might nor yield the same results you got, is a recipe for getting overwhelming amounts of disinformation.
As it's way easier to casually claim an unsourced falsehood, than it is to research a topic and debunk that falsehood with credible sources.
It's this way of thinking that has made requesting a source the new "Nuh-uh."
A better response is, "I see it different, here's a source I'm providing or story of personal experience that suggests why. Do you have other context or information that could help me understand your position?"
> If there's a back and forth and I feel like the person replying is not commenting in good faith then I'll just block them.
I do this regularly on Reddit, it's the only way to stay sane.
But get this: I had one person get so enraged they logged in with a second account just to reply to me saying I was dumb for blocking them, then they blocked me! I guess some people really need the last word.
Don't block, it's so cheap and is equally in bad faith. It means they can't see your comments, it means they can't reply to people who reply to your comments, it's the worst mechanism Reddit has ever implemented.
Block used to be a mute. You "block someone" you no longer see them nor get pinged by them. But they can still reply to you and I believe you can still respond to them if you go out of your way to find the comment.
This was how it was until ~2 years ago. Then it turned into some intermediate step where you opted out of interacting with them at all but you can still see the comment chain by default. The blocked user was simply collapsed, but you can expand it and see everything. i.e. it ruined the point of a "mute".
Then almost a year ago it became what you describe. You still see collapsed blocked users, and you still can't respond, but the user can no longer respond to you nor any child in your chain.
I hate it and simply want a "mute". I don't care if someone wants to yell at a wall. The announcement seemed poorly revceived by comments, but they still kept it around to this day.
> IDK what it is about reddit that makes it easy to get sucked into an argument
Agreed that Reddit is particularly bad, but some of the worst flamebait arguments I've had were here on HN. One person insisted on having the last word, here on HN, no matter what. At the end he (I don't know why I think it was a "he") was simply mirroring back what I just said, which is more or less the way I argued with my brother when I was 10.
I always do a quick scan of a user’s history before responding to someone I think might be debating in bad faith. More often than not, I’ll see they aren’t the kind of person it’s worth tangling with. Never wrestle a pig…
Arguments feel more public, like people are watching. Similar to forum threads in the past. When people are watching, I feel the need to defend myself (or "The Truth" as I see it).
It's the upvote/downvote mechanism. If you know you're right but you've been downvoted, you tend to try and redeem the argument. But because of herd mentality you'll never win.
The worst new tactic I've seen people use is replying to you and then blocking you so you can't see or reply to their comment, or any direct children of that comment. It's sooo petty and annoying, but Reddit has decided that's how blocking works. Which is ridiculous.
In my experience: Twitter is a flood. At some point you just disengage because there's so many responses coming in and you can't answer them all. So you answer none.
Unless you get in early on a reddit thread that explodes, you will generally only get 2-3 replies per comment at most. Usually none, sometimes 1. And that's how you get into arguments.
For me, I think it's because most of the trolls aren't just like "no you!" they'll write a wall of text full of half lies that you feel like you should at least repudiate for future redditors to know that you're right, and the troll is wrong.
some sort of thing about the community I guess. I feel the same way, I'll catch myself trying to argue with people here occasionally, then be like, wait, this isn't reddit, nevermind.
I think maybe it's not just about writing content directly in response to someone else, but writing response that I think will be useful to the community who stumbles across and reads it? Not that I'm always perfect about that.
Nope. Pseudo on both. I do feel like I have more of a persona on Twitter though, with some high profile accounts following me back and such. I regularly burn my reddit accounts every year and start fresh. It's not like the karma is good for anything.
In general though, I feel like... 25% of my reddit comments get replies from folks with questionable reasoning skills and entrenched positions vs maybe 5% on Twitter where it's more conversational and exploratory.
blocking is even better because everyone else can read it too, so it just looks like the blocked person had no response to the comment and accepted “defeat”
> You can probably extend this to "Never get the first word."
Amen. From about 1999 to ~2010, I was a practitioner of "don't wait up: somebody's wrong on the internet."
It gradually dawned on me that it was better for my mental health if I just avoided arguments as much as possible. I'm not perfect about it, but I rarely get into pissing matches these days.
My life improved when I learned to detect these situations and walk away.
A good sign that I need to is if I am upset and a particular comment keeps popping back into my mind.
The best way I've found to walk away is delete all my comments and close all the tabs. If the thread is gone, I can't respond to it. If the tabs are gone, I won't have any reminders that the discussion existed.
Possibly I'll be perceived as losing the argument, but my pride is not more important than my mental well-being.
The thing which I've found helps me with this is to just delete my account. Besides some subreddit-specific accounts, I generally delete my one main account and start a new one every few months, usually after some nasty interaction with someone on reddit, especially when people start to follow me around. I've had multiple occasions where people start commenting about a disagreement on an unrelated thread/comment I make, even in a completely unrelated subreddit sometimes!
It's such a weird place, if it wasn't for some niche subs I enjoy participating in which I don't think have any parallels elsewhere, I would really prefer to just stop using it entirely.
Man you must be so good and interesting enough that you live rent free in peoples head. I can only dream of being that important to someone's life stranger or otherwise. As it stands, the best I could muster up is people tend to block me over time(I can't prove it but I can see patterns in reduced responses & upvote/downvote counts). Both on Reddit and in real life.
People are so argumentative on Reddit, I don't find it's worth commenting most of the time. Same with Twitter. I like to engage on HN, but the rest of the internet I've mostly decided to only browse. Even then, I've seriously reduced how much I allow myself to do that.
The further I withdraw myself from it all, the stranger it looks when I return to it. I never regret not participating in these places.
