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I hardly know anything about Reddit and had no idea what "SRS" meant. I googled and found this page https://www.reddit.com/r/SRSsucks/comments/yxvu9/an_explana
by bshimmin 10y ago
I hardly know anything about Reddit and had no idea what "SRS" meant. I googled and found this page https://www.reddit.com/r/SRSsucks/comments/yxvu9/an_explanation_of_what_srs_is_and_why_they_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SRSsucks/comments/yxvu9/an_explanat... which left me feeling very content to leave the Reddit people to it. For all the complaints I see about the relative toxicity of HN and its comments, it seems vastly less insane than Reddit.
- unethical_ban 10y agoMy #1 advice for non-internet-addicts is to create a reddit account (no email address required!) and remove every subreddit from your defaults. Then, add back subs based on your interests. Maybe a default or two is acceptable, as some are better moderated than others. But non-defaults tend to have much friendlier, less insulting users. (adding entropy for my identity here) but the minecraft, sailing, and networking subs are good examples of midsize communities that are fun to be in. politics and the_donald and worldnews are examples of garbage. /r/politics really is in the pocket of Hillary Clinton. I say that as a non-Trump voter... the overt bias and suppression of anti-Clinton discussion is staggering.
- ythl 10y ago/r/politics used to be extremely anti-Clinton not too long ago... instead strongly favoring Sanders. But yeah, you'll never see a single pro-conservative story on /r/politics
- Yhippa 10y agoHow on earth did the polarity flip on that one? Amazing.
- mordocai 10y agoIt didn't really. Sanders lost the nomination and a large chunk of his supporters are supporting Clinton now as the "less bad" option.
- bbctol 10y agoAs the election approaches, many more ordinary people start paying attention to politics. In the year before an election, political forums are filled with die-hard supporters of candidates that inspire the most passion; now, the vast contingent of people who prefer Hillary have entered the discussion.
- MrZongle2 10y agoIt's almost as if there were a group of people who felt that the record needed correcting in /r/politics. So to speak. Mission accomplished, by the looks of it today.
- ufo 10y agoIt just means that the sub is more "anti-trump" than "pro-clinton" right now, even though the end result in both cases is similar.
- erics32 10y agoThrough the magic of money and super PACs http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac-spends-1-million-to-correct-commenters-on-reddit-and-facebook.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac...
- debacle 10y agoHillary is spending 6mm+ on Internet astroturfing. In most of the anti-Trump things I am seeing on /r/politics, the top comment(s) are generally anti-Clinton, or at least more rational about a dislike for Trump based on things he has actually done or said.
- hackinthebochs 10y agoIt's not hard to understand at all. Dominating the voting in the new-queue takes a lot of effort. When Bernie was in the race such efforts had a potential pay off. Now that Bernie is gone there's no longer any reward. The reward has now shifted to getting Clinton elected and/or keeping Trump from being elected. Incentives drive behavior.
- dionidium 10y agoThe pro-Sanders bias was so extreme that it was actually pretty amusing to watch. He'd lose 6 primaries in a night but win, say, Wisconsin, and every front-page post would be about his win. The users there made the same mistake Trump makes after a well-attended rally. If you're surrounded by supporters, then it's hard to reason about how broad your support really is.
- jackmott 10y agoThe GOP has a lot of work to do for pro-conservative stories to exist again.
- ythl 10y agoWell now, yes. But /r/politics has almost always been this way, even when GOP had fairly good candidates (Romney)
- EpicEng 10y agoThey're certainly in a worse state right now, but there's plenty of ammo to use against either side. /r/politics is very much a biased, liberal operation. Forget pro conservative; you'll never see anything on there which suggests any level of impropriety against a democrat (well, aside from the Hillary bashing when Bernie was still in contention.)
- alexophile 10y agoThe demographics of reddit users probably do lean towards a more liberal/libertarian group, but r/politics certainly has no problem with bashing Democratic party members, employees, or appointees. A quick search proves this out: there are tons of highly upvoted posts calling out Obama, Holder, both Clintons, Spitzer, Geithner etc. This is actually what fueled a lot of the fervor for Sanders - he brought together the disenchanted Paulite libertarians, lefter-than-Obama liberals, and anti-establishment independents.
- EpicEng 10y agoDid those posts crop up around the time Bernie was throwing his hat into the ring, or well before?
- alexophile 10y agoMany long before. Prior to Bernie, the classic stereotype of a redditor was a Ron Paul supporter and I'm sure it would still be skewing much more conservative if western conservatism hadn't completely degraded into nonsense. The demographics are evening out, but the dominant viewpoint is still a straight, white, college-educated male, which has traditionally been a strong predictor of conservative tendencies.
- ZeroGravitas 10y agoReddit's userbase is relatively young. And even young, white, males aren't really feeling the GOP these days, so it's not really unexpected for r/politics to skew a bit left of the nation as a whole. Of course these things are all relative, as some people (again, probably younger) would consider pro-Clinton and pro-conservative to be the same thing from their perspective.
- dingo_bat 10y agoExcept it's not a "bit left". It's literally full of anti trump and pro clinton posts. No ideology involved.
- ZeroGravitas 10y agoI've seen polls with Trump coming 4th for people in the younger age groups, so again, on the face of it, that doesn't seem unexpected to me.
- sf_rob 10y agoUp until shortly before Clinton won the nomination, you would find a mix of anti-Trump, anti-Clinton, and a bit of pro-Clinton stories on /r/politics, but that quickly shifted to be almost exclusively anti-Trump and pro-Clinton stories. I'm genuinely not sure why that happened; perhaps former Bernie supporters getting on board, perhaps brigading.
- exolymph 10y agoThe makeup subreddits are great (although of course they have their own micro-dramas too). /r/MakeupAddiction, /r/BeautyGuruChat, etc, etc.
- MisterBastahrd 10y ago/r/politics has always been left leaning. It's not "in the pocket of Hillary Clinton." It was full of Bernie Sanders supporters who hated Clinton before they realized they had no alternative but to vote for her. There's no suppression of anti-Clinton discussion. It just so happens that most of the pro-Trump sources are not only mind-blowingly stupid but easily proven as falsifiable. Provide bad content, get downvoted.
- Brakenshire 10y agoReddit's algorithm is excellent for curating small self-moderating communities, it's less good for curating large, controversial communities that require a lot of moderation. It is really bad for curating a single front page from multiple different large controversial communities competing against one another for prominence. That's the ultimate reality of it. I think reddit should try to focus on what it does best.
- throwaway1892 10y agoI only go to specific subreddits and rarely experienced any toxicity (and most of the time for off-topic problems)
- burkaman 10y agoA lot of Reddit users don't know what SRS is either. That's part of what makes it great, it's pretty easy to completely avoid the shitty parts.
- wlesieutre 10y agoThe problem with SRS wasn't that there were idiots off in their own private subreddit, it was that they took their opinions and vote-brigaded them across the rest of the site. You don't have to go to the shitty parts, the shitty parts come to you.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoNot if you unsub from the defaults, which are garbage.
- digi_owl 10y agoAnyone can link anything to SRS, and that in turn makes the SRS come to you...
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoBut outside of the garbage subs, people don't.
- ubernostrum 10y agoAs a moderator of a medium-sized (~170k subscribers, cyclically reaching 1M pageviews/day because of the topic matter) subreddit, I wish all the people who frequent the meta/drama subreddits would have a big meetup that gets hit by a meteor while they're all there. It's impossible to know what will trigger one of them to come invading, but when one does they all do. If KiA decides they don't like something, Ghazi will inevitably follow to counter them, then SRD will link it up and send their users charging in, SRS will start cherry-picking the worst of the invaders screaming at each other and then... Oh, and there's no good (as in, works consistently) tool I'm aware of to mass-nuke entire threads of comments as a moderator, so I've had plenty of exercises in deleting a couple hundred posts one by one.
- raverbashing 10y agoSRS = "Crap Reddit Says" (you can guess what the 1st word is substituting for)
- nicky0 10y agoShit
- vijayr 10y agoI don't disagree but there are lots of sub reddits without drama and toxicity. Opendata, datasets, babyelephantgifs etc etc. If you choose to ignore subs that have anything to do with politics, religion etc, Reddit can be quite enjoyable
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoThat's also true of 4chan. And the internet in general.
- DarkLinkXXXX 10y agoTrue, but /pol/lacks tend to ruin derail discussions outside of their space. This is not only true of 4chan, but a metaphor for the internet in general.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago/pol/itical maniacs don't always have a way in: I've never seen that kind of nonsense on boards like /tg/, or /g/ for that matter (although I'm only on /g/ quite rarely: I have a kind of low bile tolerance for a 4chan user).
- VLM 10y agoHe means on HN (the internet as a whole) and so forth. You and I know that /DIY/ (what it sounds like) and /OUT/ (as in outdoors, camping and stuff) have nothing to do with /POL/ the venn diagram is a near perfect non-overlap. Also /hc/ and /s/ (both NSFW) are supposedly politics free. /DIY/ and /OUT/ are possibly the last refuge on the entire internet from marketing shills and paid reviews and all that kind of corruption near omnipresent on the internet.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoI haven't seen to many marketing shills on HN. Outside of the dedicated marketing shill startup threads, that is.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoWhat's the deal with SRS, for those of us who have got reddit blocked?
- ZeroGravitas 10y agoSome bits of reddit are dedicated to mocking or shaming other bits of reddit that are at the opposite end of the political spectrum. I read a book called Reality is Broken recently, and it talked about what people want from games, and it struck me that a lot of this behaviour fitted the description perfectly. They make social connections with other users, they feel like they're making a difference in the world, and every post has points attached to keep score.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoAh. Now it all makes sense...
- EpicEng 10y agoThe level of discourse on HN is a trove if intellectual splendor compared to reddit. I spend time on both, but I try not to comment on reddit because all you tend to get in response is know it all 20 year olds calling you an idiot. Here, even if/when I get into a disagreement, it's mostly fact based and not personal.
- DannyBee 10y agoYeah, it's kind of sad. the only forums i browse on reddit are things like "college football", etc, where it's not really a serious intellectual discussion. Even something like "hey, did i waterproof this shower correctly" on reddit turns into a massive crapfest. https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/58tl1w/did_i_mess_up_my_shower_install_by_not/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/58tl1w/did_i_mess_up_m... Though, staring at it days later, the top level comments ended up roughly okay. But until everyone mostly moved on, ... (IE if you stared at this thread 2 days ago, it would make you not have any desire to participate in an online forum ever)
- mancerayder 10y agoWhat kills me on sites like reddit are the 'quippy one-liners' in response to arguments. You might write something rationally-crafted, careful to support your conclusion, and someone will respond with a funny-to-them sarcastic sentence, intended to totally obliterate the argument. People fancy themselves cocky and clever enough that reason isn't necessary. A few rofl's in response is all you need (or Likes on another popular service). That's really why HN is the only place I comment.
- Semaphor 10y ago> For all the complaints I see about the relative toxicity of HN and its comments, it seems vastly less insane than Reddit. Well, of course. In the subs I subscribe to every once in a while an HN discussion gets linked because of the quality of the comments. The defaults on Reddit have a ton of SRS/SJWs vs. MensRights/Red Pillers. Also memes and general herd behavior. But there are also subs for pretty much every TV show and game out there. Frameworks and programming languages have subs devoted to them. In general many, many interests have their own subreddits. That's where you can often have intelligent discussions with mostly sensible people. And of course, let's not forget heavily moderated places like the shining star /r/AskHistorians What I mean to say is, you can't compare Reddit to HN, comparing HN to a specific subreddit would be more appropriate.
- detaro 10y agoEven in smaller subs, there often is a quite bad signal-noise ratio, with common posts repeated all the times, meme/joke comments, ... HN isn't perfect on the first point (especially political discussions get repeated over and over as well), but still better. That is something traditional forums often do a lot better, since a hot topic stays active for a long time instead of falling off and being replaced with a new one that discusses all the same points over again. Especially for common questions or product discussions, traditional boards tend to point people to search and existing topics instead of repeating them.
- flukus 10y agoSRS provides a great service of linking to some of the best comments and jokes on reddit. And they don't realize they're doing it.