Reddit's just increasingly making me hate people. r/atheism is bad, but so are most of the large subreddits. Even the relatively good r/askscience needs to be heavily moderated, with at least half the comments deleted.

Two or three years ago when I first joined reddit, I was impressed by the level of discussion (granted, I came from 4chan). Even then, people were complaining about how bad it had gotten, but I just didn't see it.

I just did a little experiment. Being generally disappointed with all but the top-level comments on the Kahn AMA [1], I decided to find two other popular AMAs from a couple years ago:

[2] Roger Ebert, and [3] Steve Vai

Ebert's was generally very good, with the level of discussion being decently high. Vai's, OTOH, had pretty marginal comments on it. Both were better than Khan's. Now, a sample size of two isn't much to go on, but it does suggest to me that my experience of degraded quality on reddit is at least partly due to an actual degradation, and not simply my changing tastes.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ntsco/i_am_salman_khan...

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a0zbk/roger_ebert_ask_...

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9mrtp/i_am_a_grammy_aw...

This post is so militantly, toxically out-of-place on HN I have to wonder whether it's a deliberate trap set by the moderators. If so: be more subtle next time, please.

Flagged.

It's ranking fairly highly on r/truereddit, and I see a lot of crossover between TR and HN, so I'm willing to believe that somebody cross-posted it thinking it would be of interest. That's not to say it isn't out of place, but it also doesn't mean it's a honeypot.

I'd like the story better if it had been a honeypot, so I didn't mean to cast aspersions on the poster. Sorry if I made it sound otherwise. Since you agree that it's out of place, I hope you flagged it too.

I don't think it is. When I started reading it, I was thinking, oh, man, this is just someone else who can't take a joke, then I started thinking what if I was a woman whose views weren't being taken seriously simply because I was a woman?

How awful would that be.

But, then again, this happens so often in the IT world.

Since you're new here, I'll take the opportunity to ask you to check out the site guidelines (linked at the bottom of the page).

From those same guidelines: "If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did." Being new here means (in my case) that I re-read the guidelines each time I think they might impinge on a decision to post, because I'm aware that I haven't yet absorbed them into my general thinking patterns.

Also, to which guideline were you directing gregbair's attention? I fail to grok your meaning.

Reading the comment thread on the linked post, I am struck by the sheer pervasiveness of kafkatraps. I see people literally saying "Your opinion does not matter, you are a Straight White Male".

Seeing kafkatrapping used by a community of sceptics and atheists (in theory intelligent, rational people) makes me despair for humanity.

Misogyny is not the only thing wrong here.

(Doubtless I will now collect several responses accusing me of sexism, for having the temerity to take issue with the tactics used against it. Using kafkatraps hurts you more than your target; it typically induces epistemic closure)

I have to say that this type of behavior is the exact thing that moved me from Reddit to HN. Something one of organizational behavior professors said stuck with me: anonymous online discussions have a disinhibiting effect. The point was clearly along the lines of what the post discusses.

Unfortunately Clay Shirky's post about a group being it's own worst enemy (http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html) appears to be startlingly accurate.

I am not at all disturbed by this toxic decline of a once thoughtful place because I understand why exactly it has taken place.

Gresham's law of trolls.

Trolls want to get their jollies joining thoughtful polite forums of high intellectual discourse. Trolls do not want to spend time in forums full of other trolls because the troll gets trolled. Non trolls do not want to spend time in troll infested forums.

It causes a curious cycle: Forum starts, thoughtful people join, it grows mightily, trolls join, thoughtful people decline, trolls increase, forum saturates with trolls, forum loses 90% of it's former size. A predictable cycle that happens in all forums that don't take huge efforts to stop it.