4 ms·

I intentionally moved from reddit to HN after this same specific realization. After a few years it seemed like reddit would be a good place for hyper local info

I intentionally moved from reddit to HN after this same specific realization. After a few years it seemed like reddit would be a good place for hyper local info on covid, but I quickly saw the same effect— misanthropy in the face of so many people trying to do the best they could for others during hard times. It’s off topic here, but I seriously wonder what specifically caused reddit to adopt the largely toxic culture it has.

dustingetz 7y ago
Reddit was the only place with covid info in January! And then in Feb, HN penalized coronavirus keyword as fake news.
- ultrarunner 7y ago
  Reddit was a good source early on, by it was fairly quickly overrun with doomsayers.
  - buboard 7y ago
    /r/covid19 is a great place to find the latest curated research reddit is great, if you avoid the popular but juvenile places
exmadscientist 7y ago
There were three huge changes to Reddit culture that I noticed. I might have these out of chronological order, but that's not material to the changes themselves. The first was when posts started showing thumbnails. This made image content much more viable. Unfortunately, while there's plenty of awesome image content, it's also one of the lowest-effort routes for "shitposts" (the definition of which is left to the reader). The second was the growth of subreddits. This allowed the community to split and silo itself. As a clichéd example, you can pick your left-wing politics subreddit or your right-wing politics subreddit, and you never have to mix with the other, bad one! And the third was the death of Digg, which sent a huge influx of people Reddit's way. That one's got a lot of folk mythology behind it and little hard data, so I'll say no more.
- imprettycool 7y ago
  Yeah the Digg migration is what killed the site, IMO. Now that I see this comment thread, I really need to stop visiting that site. It was clearly dead by 2016 and it's only getting worse now. Even subs like /r/ExperiencedDevs and /r/CSCareerQuestions are terrible.
filoleg 7y ago
My guess for the main reason Reddit feels so toxic would be younger demographic whose primary concern is demonstrating how much "smarter" they are than an average person. The commenting guidelines are also super lax, and the topics covered are very diverse. Which is mostly the opposite of HN, which skews older and actually more educated, comment guidelines are much stricter, and the topics covered are much more technical and narrow. Even non-tech topics covered on HN (e.g., in-depth discussions of particular judicial rulings) aren't really of much interest to an average teenager or a person in general. Which leads to a few different potential effects: a) Older and more educated people have much less reason to "flex" how smart they are. The also have fewer occurrences of delusions of grandeur/Dunning-Krueger effect. b) Niche technical topics have a barrier to entry, which already eliminates a gigantic portion of the toxic audience. The topics themselves are also largely uninteresting to an average person. c) Stricter comment moderation eliminates a lot of potential toxic material, like every other comment devolving into a shitty attempt at a joke or a personal attack. And for me, personally, the biggest difference seems to be that on HN, there is a way higher prevalence of people trying to figure out what is right, instead of who is right. I am glad to be proven wrong in an argument here, because it gets me one step closer to finding the "most correct" answer. And the arguments themselves (usually) tend to be very polite. While on reddit, it seems like the vast majority (outside of some specialized and fairly niche subreddits) is just obsessed with proving that their answer is the "most correct" one, so they go all out on the means to reach that goal, which tends to any sort of arguments to become very uncivil very fast.
- nkohari 7y ago
  > My guess for the main reason Reddit feels so toxic would be younger demographic whose primary concern is demonstrating how much "smarter" they are than an average person. > Which is mostly the opposite of HN You must be new here. :)
  - filoleg 7y ago
    Not at all, as the spectrum of this phenomenon matters. While I can definitely see a lot of people trying to show off how smart they are on HN, they are doing it through demonstrating things and making solid arguments. On Reddit, that is usually done through personal attacks and demonstrating themselves. So many times I went on reddit and saw someone making a solid argument, only to be derailed by someone going through their comment history and bringing it up as a "aha, gotcha" point in an argument. Even in cases where it shouldn't matter, something like seeing a poster getting downvoted to hell just because one of their comments wasn't critical enough of Trump in an argument that had nothing to do with politics and was purely technical.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Funny, I've been slowly moving more of my activity back to Reddit for the same reason. I stay away from the bigger subs though. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of terrible people there but they're an easy to ignore terrible. When you read something downright asinine there it's really easy to write it off as someone who's 14 and hasn't got the life experience to realize how crazy their opinions are. When you read something asinine here it's attached to a profile that says "senior dev at company X and maintainer of open source project Y" and seeing supposedly smart people be so stupid is a lot harder to rationalize.
Snoozle 7y ago
A few things I try to remember about Reddit as someone who has used the site for 10+ years: 1. I keep getting older, and Reddit doesn't just stay the same, they get younger. There are a lot of kids on there from age 10-16, and these kids don't just stick to Teenagers and Memes; they will actively comment and discuss politics, capitalism, society, etc. 2. Upvotes mean agree, downvotes mean disagree. In this way, any opinion with even a slight majority will always triumph. If I took 45 Redditors who were liberals and 35 Redditors who were conservative, and both used the upvote and downvote buttons on opinions, then every liberal comment would have +10 and every conservative comment would have -10, which amplifies the 10 person difference by 20. Every opinion you see is one that the majority of the user base agrees with or likes. 3. In both age and other demographics, redditors lean towards young, liberal males with low/no incomes. This causes a lot of bias against certain schools of thought, the role of government in our lives, and people who are on the opposite end of the spectrum - old, conservative (women?) people with high income. It's just a product of the site demographics. 4. The last point I'll make - since Reddit creates this echo chamber of a certain set of ideas and opinions, people who have differing opinions tend to stop posting those opinions or participating in discussion regarding those opinions. What you're left with are the people who are actively frustrated/righteous/feel like wasting time who are spouting against the grain opinions, making those opinions seem even worse to most Redditors than they already were perceived. (For example, if you were wanting to discuss how great you thought Donald Trump was on Reddit, you were most likely not looking for a productive and informative discussion)
- paxys 7y ago
  You're forgetting an important one – a significant percentage of votes come from bots or paid actors.

dustingetz 7y ago

Reddit was the only place with covid info in January! And then in Feb, HN penalized coronavirus keyword as fake news.

ultrarunner 7y ago
Reddit was a good source early on, by it was fairly quickly overrun with doomsayers.
- buboard 7y ago
  /r/covid19 is a great place to find the latest curated research reddit is great, if you avoid the popular but juvenile places

exmadscientist 7y ago

There were three huge changes to Reddit culture that I noticed. I might have these out of chronological order, but that's not material to the changes themselves. The first was when posts started showing thumbnails. This made image content much more viable. Unfortunately, while there's plenty of awesome image content, it's also one of the lowest-effort routes for "shitposts" (the definition of which is left to the reader). The second was the growth of subreddits. This allowed the community to split and silo itself. As a clichéd example, you can pick your left-wing politics subreddit or your right-wing politics subreddit, and you never have to mix with the other, bad one! And the third was the death of Digg, which sent a huge influx of people Reddit's way. That one's got a lot of folk mythology behind it and little hard data, so I'll say no more.

imprettycool 7y ago
Yeah the Digg migration is what killed the site, IMO. Now that I see this comment thread, I really need to stop visiting that site. It was clearly dead by 2016 and it's only getting worse now. Even subs like /r/ExperiencedDevs and /r/CSCareerQuestions are terrible.

filoleg 7y ago

My guess for the main reason Reddit feels so toxic would be younger demographic whose primary concern is demonstrating how much "smarter" they are than an average person. The commenting guidelines are also super lax, and the topics covered are very diverse. Which is mostly the opposite of HN, which skews older and actually more educated, comment guidelines are much stricter, and the topics covered are much more technical and narrow. Even non-tech topics covered on HN (e.g., in-depth discussions of particular judicial rulings) aren't really of much interest to an average teenager or a person in general. Which leads to a few different potential effects: a) Older and more educated people have much less reason to "flex" how smart they are. The also have fewer occurrences of delusions of grandeur/Dunning-Krueger effect. b) Niche technical topics have a barrier to entry, which already eliminates a gigantic portion of the toxic audience. The topics themselves are also largely uninteresting to an average person. c) Stricter comment moderation eliminates a lot of potential toxic material, like every other comment devolving into a shitty attempt at a joke or a personal attack. And for me, personally, the biggest difference seems to be that on HN, there is a way higher prevalence of people trying to figure out what is right, instead of who is right. I am glad to be proven wrong in an argument here, because it gets me one step closer to finding the "most correct" answer. And the arguments themselves (usually) tend to be very polite. While on reddit, it seems like the vast majority (outside of some specialized and fairly niche subreddits) is just obsessed with proving that their answer is the "most correct" one, so they go all out on the means to reach that goal, which tends to any sort of arguments to become very uncivil very fast.

nkohari 7y ago
> My guess for the main reason Reddit feels so toxic would be younger demographic whose primary concern is demonstrating how much "smarter" they are than an average person. > Which is mostly the opposite of HN You must be new here. :)
- filoleg 7y ago
  Not at all, as the spectrum of this phenomenon matters. While I can definitely see a lot of people trying to show off how smart they are on HN, they are doing it through demonstrating things and making solid arguments. On Reddit, that is usually done through personal attacks and demonstrating themselves. So many times I went on reddit and saw someone making a solid argument, only to be derailed by someone going through their comment history and bringing it up as a "aha, gotcha" point in an argument. Even in cases where it shouldn't matter, something like seeing a poster getting downvoted to hell just because one of their comments wasn't critical enough of Trump in an argument that had nothing to do with politics and was purely technical.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

Funny, I've been slowly moving more of my activity back to Reddit for the same reason. I stay away from the bigger subs though. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of terrible people there but they're an easy to ignore terrible. When you read something downright asinine there it's really easy to write it off as someone who's 14 and hasn't got the life experience to realize how crazy their opinions are. When you read something asinine here it's attached to a profile that says "senior dev at company X and maintainer of open source project Y" and seeing supposedly smart people be so stupid is a lot harder to rationalize.

Snoozle 7y ago

A few things I try to remember about Reddit as someone who has used the site for 10+ years: 1. I keep getting older, and Reddit doesn't just stay the same, they get younger. There are a lot of kids on there from age 10-16, and these kids don't just stick to Teenagers and Memes; they will actively comment and discuss politics, capitalism, society, etc. 2. Upvotes mean agree, downvotes mean disagree. In this way, any opinion with even a slight majority will always triumph. If I took 45 Redditors who were liberals and 35 Redditors who were conservative, and both used the upvote and downvote buttons on opinions, then every liberal comment would have +10 and every conservative comment would have -10, which amplifies the 10 person difference by 20. Every opinion you see is one that the majority of the user base agrees with or likes. 3. In both age and other demographics, redditors lean towards young, liberal males with low/no incomes. This causes a lot of bias against certain schools of thought, the role of government in our lives, and people who are on the opposite end of the spectrum - old, conservative (women?) people with high income. It's just a product of the site demographics. 4. The last point I'll make - since Reddit creates this echo chamber of a certain set of ideas and opinions, people who have differing opinions tend to stop posting those opinions or participating in discussion regarding those opinions. What you're left with are the people who are actively frustrated/righteous/feel like wasting time who are spouting against the grain opinions, making those opinions seem even worse to most Redditors than they already were perceived. (For example, if you were wanting to discuss how great you thought Donald Trump was on Reddit, you were most likely not looking for a productive and informative discussion)

paxys 7y ago
You're forgetting an important one – a significant percentage of votes come from bots or paid actors.