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.
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.