It's toxic because a relatively small number of mentally ill people can effectively overrun any conversation. These people are not interested in rational discourse. You can't spin that as "the challenging of ideas".

Reddit has been fully gamed at this point and engaging in the most popular areas is just frustrating.

Also because those same mentally ill people are the exact same people with the time and desire to become internet moderators (no offense to dang or anyone else here, the moderation here is good!). Reddit needs to take control of subreddits back from moderators; too many subreddits are curated echo chambers, moderators are always trying to make money through bullshit like referral links, there's no transparency, etc.

Keep in mind that reddit skews younger than here, and probably considerably less educated as well. It's just too big to have the kinds of discussion you can have here

That's certainly an option, but choosing which subreddits to replace leadership on is a very tricky task. You can't realistically say all subs and picking and choosing will cause riot if there's any possibility of political reasoning. The way I see it they'd need guidelines that are automatically enforced. Even then though some subreddits work quite well with extremely strict, almost echo chamber, levels of moderation. For example it would really be a shame if askscience or askhistorians were caught up in it even though they're very strict with what they allow.

>It's toxic because a relatively small number of mentally ill people can effectively overrun any conversation. These people are not interested in rational discourse. You can't spin that as "the challenging of ideas".

you know what is truly toxic? internet armchair psychologists.

I run a forum and I've had to deal with mentally ill individuals, you don't understand frightening that can be.

They have all the time in the world to hack your software, doxx you, create entire blogs to attempt to publicly ruin your reputation, call your family, your employers, etc. You give them a podium to post their views and they will use it. Internet armchair psychologists more toxic than that? You should only hope so.

QED

>Reddit is the only popular website where rational discourse can actually happen, thanks to the infinitely threaded conversations and complete markdown.

Except comments people don't like can be downvoted to oblivion, causing no one to see them (unless they purposely sort by controversial).

Downvoted is ok (and usually, when it happens, completely warranted). My problem is when they're deleted entirely by unaccountable moderators with their own agendas.

Exactly. It's rather revealing that Facebook is his example of a well functioning forum for the exchange of ideas.

Not sure how markdown improves rational discourse but I'd like to be enlightened here.

> where rational discourse can actually happen

There are many, many topics that are completely untouchable there - I wouldn't say that rational discourse can happen there, but I would say that reddit comes closer than anything/anywhere else.