I've near completely stopped using it due to this. Now I just spend way too much time on YouTube instead. It may be a terrible waste of time, but at least it's less angry and fearful.

Even subs that should be neutral, fun or supportive have attitude problems. One about a game I'm playing, for instance, consists mainly of dramatic complaints with a feeling of impending doom.

I have two examples of this from otherwise extremely positive communities. /r/factorio and /r/satisfactory (same genra, but I like this genre)

/r/factorio initially had no issue with self promotion of videos and series. This caused a ton of consternation and all kinds of other subjects turned very very negative. Moderators created another subreddit dedicated for self promotion of series, and the community stayed angry about everything for about 2 months, before things regressed to /r/factorio's mean, which was very positive.

I saw a similar thing happen in /r/satisfactory. Before the game was released people on the subreddit had nothing to talk about for the most part, and satisfactory announced that it was going to be epic exclusive for 6 months before release. Given that many people really hated Epic, and because we didn't actually get to play the game, anything that didn't talk about the Epic exclusivity, was subject to the conversation. Eventually moderators placed dedicated threads for epic exclusivity discussion but still, the whole subreddits tone was extremely vitriolic. Even on things that didn't have anything to do with Epic Exclusivity.

Then the game released. And that toxic discussion was totally wiped out by people actually playing the game. The subreddits snapped to positive tone instantly.

Hell, HN feels like this often.

In particular, the rim world subreddit is great. That kind of game makes for a lot of crazy situations, and much of it is captured there.

When games has game breaking bugs, reddit is often a common search results with people discussing it and providing solutions. In many way it serve the same purpose for gaming as stackoverflow does for programming.

Is this just because the way I am reading reddit, or the subject matter?

Mainstream reddits could be junk ..

Technology-wise, NewPipe builds off of the back of youtube-dl and a custom page parser, and SponsorBlock uses a user-built database of timestamps.

TikTok regularly leaves me inspired, and across many different creative realms: Amazing makeup, mindblowing parkour, beautiful original music and eye opening covers. Oh and some of the short comedy sketches have left me thoroughly incapacitated due to laughter. The list goes on for me.

In general, I'm happier after viewing, even when the "you should stop watching too much TikTok guy" comes on.

It's on TikTok too but the TikTok algorithm quickly learns I'm not interested in political outrage and actually directs me toward content I'm interested in.

Also, what subreddits/communmities are you in on Reddit that make you hate the world after 20 minutes? Are you on /r/popular or /r/all, or filtered down to your niche interests?

All of Reddit makes me hate the world. No sub doesn't. If it does just visit it one or two times more and bingo.

Even niche reddit communities end up being full of newbies and self promotion spam. There are exceptions (/r/steroids comes to mind back when I was into that) but programming/tech subreddits are just noise.

I spend time on HN if a post I read also results in a meaningful conversation among the commenters. Usually I will try to add a comment as well, so there can be a bit of back and forth. It's not all one-way the way it is on TT.

Of course it's not always that way. I know to steer clear of posts related to H1B visas, because the exact same conversation plays out each time.

I'm not sure humans, flesh and blood, should be handing control of our emotional state to corporations with highly-tuned algorithms.

- John Lennon