? From what I've observed, people either don't know much about Reddit (usually over 40 y/o), or they talk about Reddit like an established site. See Bloomberg's interview with Sam Altman posted today. See the consistently incredible turn out of famous figures to Reddit's AMA series.

I mean, how can a website with 200 million users be considered a "dark corner"? Absurd.

I'm over 40 and my reddit badge looks like this:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/redditstatic/award/9_year_club-40.p...

I don't think it's an entirely absurd statement.

There are over 300,000 Subreddits. Plenty of room for dark corners, even if the thing as a whole is well known.

archagon is making the hasty generalization combined with a biased sample fallacy.

The community on reddit has changed a lot from even just a few years ago. I'm seeing a lot more trolling and overt racism in the fringe subreddits (/r/WTF /r/worldnews etc) bleed into /r/all.

What I think gets ignored often in debates like this, is the fact that every year a newly-minted set of adults graduate from teenage-hood and make their way into the world - this cyclic wave of culture is a natural phenomenon and yet it is discounted every time these kinds of articles come up. Moral pontificating about the 'underbelly of the Internet' is one thing : but it is important to recognize that this underbelly is in fact a new generation of thinkers and doers, freshly unchained from their parents' shackles, willing and able to upset the world at all cost ..

On the Internet, nobody knows your age.

Because you mentioned age, the one thing I noticed over 30 years of owning a few fast food restaurants, is that kids do a lot of growing up between the ages of 18 and 20. We might hire in someone at 18, for summer help, and just want to shoot ourselves in the head but that same kid comes back the next year, and the next, and you can see the maturity level change dramatically in that short span.

That is indeed a very insightful observation and I am rewarded by having considered it.

Those subreddits are huge. What's your definition of a mainstream subreddit?