Reddit is a shithole
The image is a reddit post with the following text (automatically transcribed):
I remember I got into an argument on reddit awhile ago with a person over Italian food. It got to the point they were following me into other subs to harass me. I clicked on their profile to block them and their most recent post was them drinking their own piss on r/piss. At that moment I realized I had spent so much pointless time arguing about the taste of food with someone who drinks their own piss as a hobby. This site is a shit hole.
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Reddit tended to be best where it had stolen better communities from the old web.
For example, r/Excel was always a stunningly chill place to get help with MS Excel. But notice that the community was/is tightly focused on a subject, that subject would have objectively correct answers to any questions about it, and the mods could politely but firmly discourage any spicier conversations as off-topic. You can keep that sort of place decent almost indefinitely.
Such communities would have been their own little message board before Reddit came along and hoovered them all up.
Likewise with all the other subreddits that were famously full of answers, ones you never had heard of. Just the other day I googled a question about some random piece of cable I had in my hand and guess who had answered it 4 years ago? Yeah. Those little communities tend to be really solid. They never get that big, either. You can't just fuck around in them, you have to stay on topic and the average user hates that.
But Reddit turns into a wretched, life-draining parasitic monster in any form where the public feels like they have the right to run their mouths and chatter. So, most of Reddit, really. Anywhere that gives the average schmuck a place to vent will degenerate, rapidly, usually toward an abusive groupthink. It's just populism, then, and a textbook answer to why that's bad.
It's the bane of all social media. I don't think people are generally that shitty. I've decided that social media, including Reddit, just empowers small, loud minorities of miserable, exhausting people who have nigh-fascist opinions on every single thing, and as soon as the normal-ass people see that they've joined the chat, the normal-ass people all vanish, overnight, leaving behind only shitbags who love attention, or believe they have a right to it, at everyone else's expense. There's no getting rid of them when they show up, you can only get rid of you. I hope you weren't having a nice time, because it's over now, time to move on.
Reddit always had its great little subreddits full of truly precious answers as a counterweight to all that. It would appear that they were the only thing of value that Reddit ever had, too.
Lemmy doesn't really have that. It looks like the most obnoxious parts of Reddit came here, so, you know, every computer problem is solved by installing Linux, and other mouthfuls of that flavor. Then somebody opened the floodgates and now you're arguing with Commies about every political thing. Meanwhile, no great little subLemmies full of answers for your obscure questions exist to make up for it.
Like you said, it was super chill for a month, but then, yeah. It's kinda same shit different day. It's reminding me that I've decided to view social media as a vice, almost exactly like smoking, and changing cigarette brands does not solve the problem.
pretty good assessment honestly. Those on topic niche communities are why I joined and loved reddit in the beginning.
Totally agree, I used to mod on a couple of the default subs and it made me hate reddit and view the open forum aspect of social media differently. I think I fully realized this when Glenn Greenwald did an AMA and said a mod team I was on (worldnews) was all paid Obama shills, because the sub had a rule against opinion columns which is what a lot of his content at the time was. So I got a bunch of hate mail about that, and sometimes journalists would even contact us individually for whatever reason, which I mostly ignored but occasionally would lead them on them ghost them. I had to make new accounts to deal with wanting to use the site just for the smaller niche interest subreddits.
Another thing I saw is how the most quickly digestible garbage content has such an advantage on the larger subs, and how the hivemind manipulates itself, by selecting out of a huge pool the very few posts that get to be on the front page. I blame this sort of echo chamber for some of what's happening with politics now, or at least accelerating what was already happening.
Remember when r/AMA used to be about things like researchers in fields you aren't familiar with talking about things you haven't heard of before but found interesting. Or someone who had just accomplished something interesting. Then at some point it just turned into a PR mouthpiece for actors and celebs promoting their new whatever.
I used to be on a bunch of forums and communities for niche interests. Then reddit and facebook et al destroyed them, like the wal marts of the internet destroying local communities. I was genuinely friends with many online strangers, like real actual bona fide friends, and suddenly our local digital hangouts were destroyed. End of an era. I'd love for those to pop up again but I wouldn't know where to begin finding them now.