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Am I the only person who found Reddit generally quite unpleasant? It really is heart-warming to hear of all the good that those on Reddit have done. But I can'

by tav 16y ago

Am I the only person who found Reddit generally quite unpleasant? It really is heart-warming to hear of all the good that those on Reddit have done. But I can't help feel that it's the exact same mob mentality which made me want to leave Reddit in the first place — discussions got extremely polarised very quickly and there seemed to be very little room for reasoned dialogue. The article makes it sound like a good thing that "comments are generally downvoted by dozens or even hundreds of people with remarkable speed, pushing their noxious posts down into obscurity within minutes". But, since everyone can downvote — hell, I have even see non-controversial statements get downvoted heavily — the quality of dialogue often ends up being at the level of the lowest common denominator.

Lewisham 16y ago
Reddit is not a place to have dialogue. Community-moderated areas just aren't very good at it. Even HN has been accused from suffering groupthink. If you want dialogue, forums, mailing lists or better yet, the real world (if you can find the community you need to discuss things with), is a better place to have it.
- heyitsnick 16y ago
  > If you want dialogue, forums, mailing lists or better yet, the real world (if you can find the community you need to discuss things with), is a better place to have it. Why?
  - jewbacca 16y ago
    Hmm... more specialized fora will have the more concentrated focus of intentionally-informed people who've gathered explicitly to discuss a topic. Too much off-topic noise will get you shunned, because people come there for the signal (Reddit, though I love it, is noise incarnate). With far fewer threads, people maintain a discussion rather than post and run. In far smaller communities, with active posters within Dunbar's number[0], will call you out on your shit or for bailing whenever you get shut down. --- [0] Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
  - Lewisham 16y ago
    Because groupthink is inherent in the upvoting/downvoting system. Perhaps only Slashdot is the only community I've seen where points are awarded to comments not based on agreement, but on general merit. Admit it: you've downvoted people you don't agree with. When enough people do it, you get groupthink. Forums/mailing lists don't have that problem. Every post is given equal merit in the number of eyeballs that read it. Those comments that are not interesting can get ignored, those that are interesting will either merit a "yeah, I agree" response, or a "you're wrong for [x,y,z]". That is a dialogue. Community moderated upvoted/downvoted discussions are not a dialogue. They are a "here's what we all think" metric.
    - jrockway 16y ago
      In real life people just don't talk to you. There are people I don't like, and when they say something like "want to go get beer", my answer is "no".
    - kaens 16y ago
      Because groupthink is inherent in the upvoting/downvoting system. I'd almost argue that groupthink is inherent in human interaction in groups larger than one. Almost. Forums and mailing lists are certainly susceptible to it, even though it occurs less often, but I suspect that has more to do with the size of their memberships. SA, for instance, has tons of it. Oh, and /. had a serious problem with it for a long time. Their moderation system helps, and maybe it's gotten a lot better (it's been a while since I was active on it), but oh man when /. was the site, it was pretty bad. /. is a good example of what seems to happen to a lot of online communities -- a small, competent, awesome base of users is very active for a while, things snowball, you then get a huge upsurge in users and activity and trolling, and then that eventually fades and your userbase stabilizes at a point where the userbase is pretty solid and there's not too much in the way of ridiculousness going on.
- wvenable 16y ago
  Reddit is a very good place to have a discussion with a small group of people -- thanks to the orangered envelope you get whenever someone replies to one of your posts. HN, by comparison, discussions last only as long as the link remains on the homepage. On reddit, I've had conversations go on for weeks.
  - Natsu 16y ago
    > HN, by comparison, discussions last only as long as the link remains on the homepage Maybe if you don't check your threads for replies. Granted, not everyone does that, but I've conversed with more than a few folks long after the original story vanished.
    - wvenable 16y ago
      I check the threads link periodically (for example, right now) but I find most other participants in the conversation do not and almost 90% of the time the conversation is dead by the end of the day.
      - Natsu 16y ago
        I guess it depends more on who you converse with. I mean, just now, I got here via the threads link and I've already forgotten what story this was under.
- dhughes 16y ago
  Or use Google Chrome/Chromium and get the Chattit extension so you can bicker in real-time! But seriously most people are members of Reddit, Digg (well..), HN etc. it's not like each website only has the same guys and girls (yes girls!) whether people admit it or not some if not most people read many types of social news websites.
axod 16y ago
The mob rule is extremely distasteful to watch IMHO, and it's certainly a very specific community now - liberal, pro-drugs, anti-consumerism etc etc. There's a lot of knee-jerk reactions and short-termism - outraged one day, forgotten the next. They can get their users to 'do good' in the world, but can they make any money yet?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- anon_d 16y ago
  Stop reading r/politics!
  - axod 16y ago
    I'm talking front page stories here.
    - mkr-hn 16y ago
      Your front page is composed of stories from subreddits you've subscribed to.
jewbacca 16y ago
Perhaps compared to HN. But I would characterize Reddit (as characterized by what's voted up into default visibility) as fairly open-minded, even compulsively contrarian. While a large proportion of the up/down-voting is from petty agreement, there is still a strong enough core of "productive discussion" voting to overcome it. Especially with knee-jerk outrage stories, there's as much skepticism as I've seen in any online community (and more apparent reservation in judgment than I see in many fairly reasonable people I know personally). There's a lot of good research that gets done (when possible), and it's usually voted above the froth very quickly. Sensationalism will almost always get called out hard. I really can't conceive of any way a forum (online or afk) with sufficient mass (with the accompanying noise, groupthink and trolling that any community of people will pick up) to accomplish the things that Reddit has/may yet could turn out any more reasonable.
- ronnoch 16y ago
  > But I would characterize Reddit (as characterized by what's voted up into default visibility) as fairly open-minded, even compulsively contrarian. Have you been there recently? They're "contrarian" in the sense that they disagree with the non-Reddit mainstream, but they hardly respect contrarianism to their own views. I definitely would not call them "open-minded." (At least, not in the main subreddits. There are smaller, more intellectual communities within Reddit for which this is not as true.)
  - katovatzschyn 16y ago
    > Have you been there recently? Have you been anywhere else recently? Can you give an example of a community, of comparable magnitude, that is more open minded? I am easy to criticize reddit, popular as it is on HN, but it is a surprising community for its large population, and as you say the smaller parts of it can be very good. One can find all the flaws with a thing that one wishes to but, in the end, if none are better it's still the best.
    - ronnoch 16y ago
      Sure, Reddit's problems are caused by its size, the same way that Digg's are caused by its size. But this does not make the groupthink, mob mentality etc. any less irritating.
afshin 16y ago
I think it depends on the specific discussion. The front-page articles for the bigger subreddits are just too crowded to have any sort of nuance a lot of the time. But if you're interested in specific topics and are subscribed to smaller subreddits, you can have really good back-and-forth with no pitchfork-waving.
smhinsey 16y ago
I feel the same way about some of the bigger subreddits, but if you spend some time to find the good ones, the site improves dramatically. However, one unfortunate thing is that the programming subreddit isn't (in my opinion) part of the signal. It's just as full of intolerable sniping and general assume-the-worst behavior as anywhere else on the web.
- jamii 16y ago
  The coding subreddit is somewhat better.
rdtsc 16y ago
> But I can't help feel that it's the exact same mob mentality which made me want to leave Reddit in the first place. To put in the cliché Freudian speak -- Reddit is the Id and HN is Superego. Reddit is the place to call people stupid, post silly pictures of cats, but also a place to get together and donate for a cause, talk someone out of a suicide, or just spread around stupid memes for fun. A well placed witty one-liners will get you hundreds of upvotes. Anything too intellectual will likely get a TL;DR type reaction. HN is the site that discusses issues in depth, rational, evidence backed arguments are expected, civility and maturity is expected as well. A stupid one liner will most likely be frowned upon. But I think we need both. I am a member of both sites and both provide for a what I consider a healthy outlet for my online presence.
- jamesteow 16y ago
  "Anything too intellectual will likely get a TL;DR type reaction." I mostly agree with your post except for this. I actually find that Redditor's are extremely good about offering a counterpoint to a sensational title. Oftentimes, someone in the field related to the article will post something intellectual debunking the story (especially in the case of something to do with science or medicine) which will offer far more additional material than the source itself.
  - colah 16y ago
    I think it really depends on the subreddit. Once you start getting into speciality subreddits, the level of the discourse increases.
- crocowhile 16y ago
  I think you are all being very unfair. I find the same proportions of insightful comments on reddit and HN but I find HN has a form of snobism that I profoundly dislike. Not in all users, but it's obviously there and sucks. If you avoid the stupidest subreddits (/pics, /funny, etc) it's actually amazing what high level of discussion you can meet. (while having a good laugh too, btw).
pinchyfingers 16y ago
The key to Reddit is to unsubscribe from every major subreddit, and just stick with the one's that fulfill your niche interests. If you do that, there is reasonable dialog to be had.
ggchappell 16y ago
> Am I the only person who found Reddit generally quite unpleasant? Not at all. I think Reddit is a classic example of the "evaporative cooling effect" in groups. It's now dominated by a very restricted set of opinions. It looks very open and welcoming (initially, at least), if you share those opinions, but it's obviously ridiculously narrow-minded, if you don't.
colah 16y ago
I've actually switched from reading HN to mostly reading Reddit. The level of discourse increases quite a bit in subreddits, and you can usually find good discussions on even obscure interests. On the other hand, its pretty rare for the level of discourse to get to the level of HN. But level of discourse isn't the only quality of Reddit. I think the main reason for me switching to mostly reading Reddit was because I found it very comforting to read r/atheism (my family is very Christian, mostly fundamentalist and I was a closeted Atheist). I suspect that emotional support is what a lot of people go to reddit for.
nimms 16y ago
For me, the main unpleasantness of reddit lies in the amount of pun threads that show up in the comments on any story. It may have been funny at first, but it just makes it harder and harder to find the actual interesting comments. however, judging by the number of upvotes they all receive, there's probably hundreds of thousands of people out there who disagree with me, but seriously, a lot of comments on there are like i can haz cheezburger without the cutesy grammer.
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  I rarely see those. If you see them a lot, you can tinker with your thresholds so most of them will be hidden.
e40 16y ago
What I find really annoying about reddit is that inane and snarky comments are almost always at the top. You sometimes have to scroll very far to see a serious comment. I see this as a symptom of the fact the average reddit user is quite young. However, I'll tell you a secret: the subreddit called TrueReddit does not suffer from this. It's really pleasant.
bhiggins 16y ago
I find your smug attitude unpleasant.
niels_olson 16y ago
One anecdote that didn't make the article: my wife had a patient with multiple sclerosis and she thought he could get some real theraputic value from a Wii. We pitched it on Reddit and Facebook, and between the two, came up with over $200.
scorpion032 16y ago
Just everyday normal people living their lives and going out of their way to help each other and support greater causes. To me, this increases trust in humanity!

by tav 16y ago

Lewisham 16y ago

Reddit is not a place to have dialogue. Community-moderated areas just aren't very good at it. Even HN has been accused from suffering groupthink. If you want dialogue, forums, mailing lists or better yet, the real world (if you can find the community you need to discuss things with), is a better place to have it.

heyitsnick 16y ago
> If you want dialogue, forums, mailing lists or better yet, the real world (if you can find the community you need to discuss things with), is a better place to have it. Why?
- jewbacca 16y ago
  Hmm... more specialized fora will have the more concentrated focus of intentionally-informed people who've gathered explicitly to discuss a topic. Too much off-topic noise will get you shunned, because people come there for the signal (Reddit, though I love it, is noise incarnate). With far fewer threads, people maintain a discussion rather than post and run. In far smaller communities, with active posters within Dunbar's number[0], will call you out on your shit or for bailing whenever you get shut down. --- [0] Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
- Lewisham 16y ago
  Because groupthink is inherent in the upvoting/downvoting system. Perhaps only Slashdot is the only community I've seen where points are awarded to comments not based on agreement, but on general merit. Admit it: you've downvoted people you don't agree with. When enough people do it, you get groupthink. Forums/mailing lists don't have that problem. Every post is given equal merit in the number of eyeballs that read it. Those comments that are not interesting can get ignored, those that are interesting will either merit a "yeah, I agree" response, or a "you're wrong for [x,y,z]". That is a dialogue. Community moderated upvoted/downvoted discussions are not a dialogue. They are a "here's what we all think" metric.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    In real life people just don't talk to you. There are people I don't like, and when they say something like "want to go get beer", my answer is "no".
  - kaens 16y ago
    Because groupthink is inherent in the upvoting/downvoting system. I'd almost argue that groupthink is inherent in human interaction in groups larger than one. Almost. Forums and mailing lists are certainly susceptible to it, even though it occurs less often, but I suspect that has more to do with the size of their memberships. SA, for instance, has tons of it. Oh, and /. had a serious problem with it for a long time. Their moderation system helps, and maybe it's gotten a lot better (it's been a while since I was active on it), but oh man when /. was the site, it was pretty bad. /. is a good example of what seems to happen to a lot of online communities -- a small, competent, awesome base of users is very active for a while, things snowball, you then get a huge upsurge in users and activity and trolling, and then that eventually fades and your userbase stabilizes at a point where the userbase is pretty solid and there's not too much in the way of ridiculousness going on.
wvenable 16y ago
Reddit is a very good place to have a discussion with a small group of people -- thanks to the orangered envelope you get whenever someone replies to one of your posts. HN, by comparison, discussions last only as long as the link remains on the homepage. On reddit, I've had conversations go on for weeks.
- Natsu 16y ago
  > HN, by comparison, discussions last only as long as the link remains on the homepage Maybe if you don't check your threads for replies. Granted, not everyone does that, but I've conversed with more than a few folks long after the original story vanished.
  - wvenable 16y ago
    I check the threads link periodically (for example, right now) but I find most other participants in the conversation do not and almost 90% of the time the conversation is dead by the end of the day.
    - Natsu 16y ago
      I guess it depends more on who you converse with. I mean, just now, I got here via the threads link and I've already forgotten what story this was under.
dhughes 16y ago
Or use Google Chrome/Chromium and get the Chattit extension so you can bicker in real-time! But seriously most people are members of Reddit, Digg (well..), HN etc. it's not like each website only has the same guys and girls (yes girls!) whether people admit it or not some if not most people read many types of social news websites.

axod 16y ago

The mob rule is extremely distasteful to watch IMHO, and it's certainly a very specific community now - liberal, pro-drugs, anti-consumerism etc etc. There's a lot of knee-jerk reactions and short-termism - outraged one day, forgotten the next. They can get their users to 'do good' in the world, but can they make any money yet?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
anon_d 16y ago
Stop reading r/politics!
- axod 16y ago
  I'm talking front page stories here.
  - mkr-hn 16y ago
    Your front page is composed of stories from subreddits you've subscribed to.

jewbacca 16y ago

Perhaps compared to HN. But I would characterize Reddit (as characterized by what's voted up into default visibility) as fairly open-minded, even compulsively contrarian. While a large proportion of the up/down-voting is from petty agreement, there is still a strong enough core of "productive discussion" voting to overcome it. Especially with knee-jerk outrage stories, there's as much skepticism as I've seen in any online community (and more apparent reservation in judgment than I see in many fairly reasonable people I know personally). There's a lot of good research that gets done (when possible), and it's usually voted above the froth very quickly. Sensationalism will almost always get called out hard. I really can't conceive of any way a forum (online or afk) with sufficient mass (with the accompanying noise, groupthink and trolling that any community of people will pick up) to accomplish the things that Reddit has/may yet could turn out any more reasonable.

ronnoch 16y ago
> But I would characterize Reddit (as characterized by what's voted up into default visibility) as fairly open-minded, even compulsively contrarian. Have you been there recently? They're "contrarian" in the sense that they disagree with the non-Reddit mainstream, but they hardly respect contrarianism to their own views. I definitely would not call them "open-minded." (At least, not in the main subreddits. There are smaller, more intellectual communities within Reddit for which this is not as true.)
- katovatzschyn 16y ago
  > Have you been there recently? Have you been anywhere else recently? Can you give an example of a community, of comparable magnitude, that is more open minded? I am easy to criticize reddit, popular as it is on HN, but it is a surprising community for its large population, and as you say the smaller parts of it can be very good. One can find all the flaws with a thing that one wishes to but, in the end, if none are better it's still the best.
  - ronnoch 16y ago
    Sure, Reddit's problems are caused by its size, the same way that Digg's are caused by its size. But this does not make the groupthink, mob mentality etc. any less irritating.

afshin 16y ago

I think it depends on the specific discussion. The front-page articles for the bigger subreddits are just too crowded to have any sort of nuance a lot of the time. But if you're interested in specific topics and are subscribed to smaller subreddits, you can have really good back-and-forth with no pitchfork-waving.

smhinsey 16y ago

I feel the same way about some of the bigger subreddits, but if you spend some time to find the good ones, the site improves dramatically. However, one unfortunate thing is that the programming subreddit isn't (in my opinion) part of the signal. It's just as full of intolerable sniping and general assume-the-worst behavior as anywhere else on the web.

jamii 16y ago
The coding subreddit is somewhat better.

rdtsc 16y ago

> But I can't help feel that it's the exact same mob mentality which made me want to leave Reddit in the first place. To put in the cliché Freudian speak -- Reddit is the Id and HN is Superego. Reddit is the place to call people stupid, post silly pictures of cats, but also a place to get together and donate for a cause, talk someone out of a suicide, or just spread around stupid memes for fun. A well placed witty one-liners will get you hundreds of upvotes. Anything too intellectual will likely get a TL;DR type reaction. HN is the site that discusses issues in depth, rational, evidence backed arguments are expected, civility and maturity is expected as well. A stupid one liner will most likely be frowned upon. But I think we need both. I am a member of both sites and both provide for a what I consider a healthy outlet for my online presence.

jamesteow 16y ago
"Anything too intellectual will likely get a TL;DR type reaction." I mostly agree with your post except for this. I actually find that Redditor's are extremely good about offering a counterpoint to a sensational title. Oftentimes, someone in the field related to the article will post something intellectual debunking the story (especially in the case of something to do with science or medicine) which will offer far more additional material than the source itself.
- colah 16y ago
  I think it really depends on the subreddit. Once you start getting into speciality subreddits, the level of the discourse increases.
crocowhile 16y ago
I think you are all being very unfair. I find the same proportions of insightful comments on reddit and HN but I find HN has a form of snobism that I profoundly dislike. Not in all users, but it's obviously there and sucks. If you avoid the stupidest subreddits (/pics, /funny, etc) it's actually amazing what high level of discussion you can meet. (while having a good laugh too, btw).

pinchyfingers 16y ago

The key to Reddit is to unsubscribe from every major subreddit, and just stick with the one's that fulfill your niche interests. If you do that, there is reasonable dialog to be had.

ggchappell 16y ago

> Am I the only person who found Reddit generally quite unpleasant? Not at all. I think Reddit is a classic example of the "evaporative cooling effect" in groups. It's now dominated by a very restricted set of opinions. It looks very open and welcoming (initially, at least), if you share those opinions, but it's obviously ridiculously narrow-minded, if you don't.

colah 16y ago

I've actually switched from reading HN to mostly reading Reddit. The level of discourse increases quite a bit in subreddits, and you can usually find good discussions on even obscure interests. On the other hand, its pretty rare for the level of discourse to get to the level of HN. But level of discourse isn't the only quality of Reddit. I think the main reason for me switching to mostly reading Reddit was because I found it very comforting to read r/atheism (my family is very Christian, mostly fundamentalist and I was a closeted Atheist). I suspect that emotional support is what a lot of people go to reddit for.

nimms 16y ago

For me, the main unpleasantness of reddit lies in the amount of pun threads that show up in the comments on any story. It may have been funny at first, but it just makes it harder and harder to find the actual interesting comments. however, judging by the number of upvotes they all receive, there's probably hundreds of thousands of people out there who disagree with me, but seriously, a lot of comments on there are like i can haz cheezburger without the cutesy grammer.

mkr-hn 16y ago
I rarely see those. If you see them a lot, you can tinker with your thresholds so most of them will be hidden.

e40 16y ago

What I find really annoying about reddit is that inane and snarky comments are almost always at the top. You sometimes have to scroll very far to see a serious comment. I see this as a symptom of the fact the average reddit user is quite young. However, I'll tell you a secret: the subreddit called TrueReddit does not suffer from this. It's really pleasant.

bhiggins 16y ago

I find your smug attitude unpleasant.

niels_olson 16y ago

One anecdote that didn't make the article: my wife had a patient with multiple sclerosis and she thought he could get some real theraputic value from a Wii. We pitched it on Reddit and Facebook, and between the two, came up with over $200.

scorpion032 16y ago

Just everyday normal people living their lives and going out of their way to help each other and support greater causes. To me, this increases trust in humanity!