Regional subs are the worst, for whatever reason. My theory is it's because they bring together people with nothing in common besides their geographic location.

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.

Topic Subreddits tend to be joyful, but there are things that can turn communities very toxic. It could be the demographic the topic appeals to. It could be that some moderation decision for the subreddit is festering and creating a lot of hurt feelings. It could be that there's some underlying issue that the community is uncomfortable with, or divisive, and a loud minority are dominating the discussion.

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.

> every time I go there I feel like everyone is just in constant fear or anger

Hell, HN feels like this often.

I think about this post a lot: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

Most times I read reddit it is either in context of diving or a video game. Neither make me want to hate the world.

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?

Then unsubscribe from the subreddits that cause you angst and subscribe to subreddits that you enjoy.