For example, try posting about Intel in pc building subs. Or try advocating for anything other than passive index investing in /investing. Or say you like PHP for making websites in /programming.
Any idea outside a sub's main approved-idea-space is rewarded with hate and downvotes.
Do you think that the removal of the downvote capability solves this problem? What solutions are available?
I think the main issue is that Reddit has become more mainstream. My theory is that when a new website like reddit is created, the early adopters are typically more open-minded people by their very nature. Later as the platform is recognized as successful, the mainstream population joins. These mainstream users, less likely on average to accept new ideas than the initial early-adopter user base, then begins to drag the discussion into group-think.
My most pronounced experience with this phenomenon was with r/wallstreetbets. In the early days, it was actually a very interesting and unique community with rapidly evolving conversations. With the mass influx of new users in 2018 and 2019, the comment sections slowly shifted into parroting of the subs common phrases and group think. Now in 2020, you can almost predict the comment sections before you open it up.
Perhaps due to its lack of promotion and UI, HN has been more resistant to this shift, but is not immune.
My personal solution to this problem is to keep jumping to new platforms if an old one becomes too bias. When my favorite subreddits start hitting r/all, I begin looking for new ones that follow the same topics.
It's a classic case of a variant of the WWW-Eternal-September virus that had been plaguing the interwebs since the dawn of forums. There is no solution other than quarantine and moving to unaffected places.
- A thing becomes possible. Some people enjoy the thing, get together and form a community doing the thing.
- the community quickly stratifies into "creators" - the people who actually do the thing and do it well, "community builders" - the people who don't actually do the thing very well, but are good at building the community around it, and "fans" - people who can't really do the thing, but enjoy the community and hang around in it.
- if the creator:fan ratio stays within reasonable limits, the community will continue to be enjoyable and fun
- if the community attracts more fans, though, the community is destroyed. Either the urge to monetise overwhelms and fans become customers, creators become rockstars and the community becomes an industry.
- Or it drowns in its own bile. Fans don't actually contribute to the community, they just soak up every else's contribution. If there are too many fans, they drain the energy and ability of the community to self-sustain. Community builders "burn out" and creators become reclusive, staying away from the community.
Anything that gets too popular gets either turned into an industry, or destroyed by its own popularity.
I really think that the problem is somewhat embedded in two things: human nature, and practical limits of our attention. For the former, what I mean is that essentially discussions tend to get driven towards extreme or biased views, because people with moderated, centrist, or less extreme views are less likely to say anything. As the community grows, eventually there are enough people with extreme views that the limit of how many comments you are willing to read through is saturated with them. Eventually one view becomes predominant. And I guess, the last factor would be that people enjoy seeing their beliefs echoed back to them, as a form of validation - aannd we've hit peak echo chamber.
I honestly have no real solution to this, other than trying to stay within smaller subreddits, where the middling opinions are not yet drowned out. And preferably ones that are well moderated, and have expectations of quality posts (you mention HN, and the self-moderation of the community here is a good example, jokes and other shitposts are regularly voted into oblivion, although this trend has been slowly diminishing over the years). As for specific subreddits that are great examples, it is hard to point out, because they are so specific.
You used to get downvoted for disagreement. Nowadays, you get banned from the sub altogether.
Companies/lobbyists/govs have realised a few years back that reddit was big enough/influential enough to shape some aspect of public opinion, it is now quite obviously that they are paying PR companies to defend their lobbies/brand/products on reddit.
The other day I commented on a european sub-reddit, where they were discussing the move away from coal power plants as an energy source. I pointed out that the move away from coal was great but that we should remain sceptical of the "green" "clean" energy marketing around bio-mass power plants and also natural-gas power plants.
Immediately the comment became controversial with wildly varying scores of up and downvotes. All the comments that followed where quite adversarial and flippant, mixed with bland marketing statements filled with buzzwords about how bio-mass is sustainable and 'renewable'. I doubt this situation would have occurred 6/7 years ago. In this case it was so obvious that I couldn't care less but probably for some users they would be intimidated to continue to comment on the topic after this.
It's not just Energy lobby, you could say the same thing about Pesticides, Pharma, <insert major lobby group>.
Also on the shills, I used to go to reddit as a source of legitimate product reviews and recommendations, now it's obviously that every marketing person uses the platform to name drop their product and do stealth marketing companies.
As so many others before it, reddit has become a victim of its own popularity.
There is so much dystopian doublespeak in startup marketing, and people continue to believe it, because not doing so threatens their careers. Of course there are also many startups out there that actually do improve lives, but I wouldn't say it's the majority.
HN: "php sucks because of those technical reasons". Reddit: "php sucks, period, and you are a moron".
To be fair, advocating for new PHP projects here on HN is met with ... scrutiny to put it lightly, too... same for going against the "groupthink" when it comes to libertarian capitalism, gig economy or the latest JS framework.
While group-think is real, the views that are allowed to be expressed on Reddit were not selected because a majority of users held them and pushed out those who disagreed. They were selected by the corporate owners of the site to promote their ideological beliefs, and to appease the very similar ideological beliefs of the major corporations who buy ads there.
Contrary opinions were driven off the site simply by repeatedly deleting the subreddits and users who expressed them. Down-voting or any other organic user interaction had nothing to do with it.
Placing corporate representatives as moderators is just a way of preventing the organic accrual of power to those with popular opinions that challenge the ideologies of the site owners.
But are they really massive?
If you take a look at a lot of those "massive" subs you'll find that certain posts from certain accounts always get tens of thousands of upvotes, and all of the posts from their real users get tens of.... well... tens.
If a reputation system on the internet exists, it has been exploited / manipulated.
> The delete posts about crime in case anyone notices any demographic patterns involved
Probably because, just as in every other country, demography is the confounding variable and poverty/inequality the actual predictor of blue collar crimes?
> corona gestapo
Because, after Belgium, Spain has the highest per capita Covid death rate in the world?
Is that a good reason to not be allowed to discuss the problem?
> Because, after Belgium, Spain has the highest per capita Covid death rate in the world?
We also had the strictest lock down in Europe. Children were allowed out for the first time with their parents on 5 weeks and were being shamed for standing too close by some reditors standard.
It's gone from "flatten the curve so the hospitals aren't overwhelmed" to some bizarre sort of virtue signalling where the more you complain about the actions of others the more virtuous you are. If you look at this study, outdoors doesn't seem such a problem. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.04.20053058v...
Now that the virus is out there, they are trying to make up for it retroactively with overly strict measures.
If you view social distancing as a left wing/right wing issue, you should reassess your approach to politics.
When the left says to smash capitalism Big Social suppresses it.
Go figure.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment
I usually used it for fun, and had subscribed to some innocent technical subreddits, and memes that had nothing to do with politics or relationships; but eventually got dragged into these spiteful, petty, sort of ugly side of Reddit full of bad takes, top posts awarded for repeating same things over and over, namecalling, bullying kids, censoring people, etc.
The downvote button is used as a "The hivemind disagress with you, here is your -50 karma" and is never used for it's actual purpose which goes against the purpose of that feature.
Worst subreddit you should never visit are amitheasshole, relationshipadvice, programmerhumour, cats (they only post their dead cats for karma), pewdiepiesubmissions, dankmemes, worldpolitics, to name a few.
There are lots of popular karmawhores at the top of Reddit (like a shithead called u/gallowboob) that repost/steal posts from other subreddits to get karma shamelessly and he mods popular subs so he gets a pass, and he censors people that expose him.
Really, the Reddit drama is never ending and I'm glad I decided to come out of the pettiness of it all.
Did you see the one about the guy who ate 3 feet of a 6 foot sandwich? https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/ca7bdz/aita_...
I mean, where else are you going to find something like that? Not twitter.
Dunno. I've sort of embraced the dumpster fire and am happy to warm myself with the flames. It smells pretty bad at times, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a more amusing circus.
What is that post?! Can't tell is it's satire or people are seriously buying that.
Incidentally, I was banned for saying that China would end up with less deaths due to the coronavirus than the US, as a result of their stricter interventions, which turned out to be true. The moderators of that subreddits decided that it was such an egregiously incorrect point-of-view that it had to be deleted, and the poster banned.
So no, r/geopolitics isn't really good anymore. It was interesting a few months to years back, though. But now it's mostly biased, moralistic and americentric takes with artificially limited debate, with such scathing and interesting discussion as "Western culture is the best culture, and that's why the US will be an eternal empire", or "China will be sublimated by the US just like the US beat Japan". This is a stark contrast to the more realpolitik, realist discourse of yesteryear. Non-China related threads are better, though.
Then it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff and the mods, (as much as I agree that in some subs are totally going for the echo chamber) have a lot of work to do.
Mods are typically great though. They seem to try very hard to keep the discussion academic.
It’s still great for analysis related to American foreign policy, but it’s hard to take any other analysis seriously especially when it comes to Asian countries as the quality is lacking.
The "wholesome" movement on reddit seems like an example of that.
See https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014792387-Comm...
Generally, when unmoderated, the loudest user(s) will drown out everyone else
Reddit, up until some years ago, was great for political discussion. Simply ignore low quality opinions and focus on the few people who have actual knowledge.
Then the "safe space" movement started and anything that wasn't mainstream opinion was banned all over the place.
Suddenly, political discussion became impossible, because you could not discuss any non trivial things without few of being misunderstood and your account getting banned.
Although of course they do lack civility.
But open discussion is now largely banned. Each sub only allows you to repeat their own ideology else you get banned.
I deleted Reddit when that started, around 4 years ago.
It's bad, but really understandable
Reddit was one of the few places where I occasionally found people with similar background to discuss more than just superficially.
That completely changed in 2016. Everybody with actual knowledge on the subject was banned from all related subs. Knowledge became a threat, only the "correct" ideology was allowed to remain.
Tbh, I was pretty shocked how easily people are radicalized.
Reddit is overwhelmingly populated by left-wing teenagers and college students -- so politics or economics discussions are shallow and fruitless.
HN is overwhelmingly populated by techies, heavily biased towards FAAMG and bay area, heavily biased towards web dev. Economics discussion here seems to be saner though with a massive US-centrism and anti-tax skew as people are 1%ers and many never experienced life outside the US, but if you dare criticise the big 5 companies or their products, prepare to be buried...
What data do you have to support this claim?
So ... just like HN?
On Reddit, especially in large or political subs, it's the exact opposite.
You're a racist, sexist, white, cis, male homophobic, transphobic monster until and unless you preface your thoughts with lip-service to all groups concerned, even if you're not discussing politics or social issues.
Try taking non-liberal positions e.g. try defending men in tech against the notion they're inherently sexist. You'll burn a lot of karma and get a whole lot of snarky replies "educating" you about the correctness of feminist ideology.
Even new topics like COVID are hardly better. Try making an argument and support it with evidence posted on some conservative or even just non-liberal source: about 50% of the time or more someone will reply with something of the form, "I didn't read it but your source is bad so you are bad".
After years of observing this kind of behaviour, and watching /r/ukpolitics be taken over by the same sort of extremists that trashed /r/unitedkingdom, I concluded the problem isn't really internet forums. Some of their mechanics like downvoting don't help as they conflate "I disagree" with "I think this post is low quality", something Slashdot for instance tried to avoid. But the underlying problem is liberal ideology. Specifically:
1. The belief that words are powerful and thus dangerous words need to be suppressed and replaced with enlightened words.
2. The belief that conservative views are dangerous.
The combination of these two beliefs causes them to repeatedly attempt to take over forums, often by becoming moderators, and then systematically "cleanse" those forums of conservative viewpoints. This behaviour isn't reciprocal - outside of forums specifically devoted to conservative views like maybe /r/TheDonald I practically never encounter this kind of behaviour, as the conservative mindset is that words/ideas aren't dangerous and thus free speech is to be valued and encouraged.
When one side in a conflict prioritises taking over and controlling conversation, and the other side doesn't, the natural outcome is that with enough time any forum for discussion ends up controlled by those who want to control it. Hence the widespread feeling amongst conservatives that the "mainstream" is biased against them. It's not so much an argument a specific set of groups but rather the general feeling that with time any popular forum gets taken over by people who view them as enemies.
If conservative viewpoints like that are dangerous to your health, then why shouldn't they be "cleansed"? Or did you follow those recommendations? How is it working out for you?
a) Strawman at least twice (once for bleach, once for "recommended"),
b) divide the question.
3. Paragraph 2: Assumed premise, personal attacks.
DonHopkins, for such poorly presented incorrect, biased and angry attacks (the term "argument" does not apply) you certainly have a high karma! For that reason I should examine your other posts on this forum.
Nothing is perfect but I feel more informed and otherwise safer having discussions here.
You can have good discussions, but they must be at the margins, and stay away from the subjects that HN is known to fail at discussing.
Like most HN folks, I have a few narrow interest subreddits I go to on non controversial subjects.
The rest of the site is just groupthink tribal warfare for bitter professional victims.