7 ms·

Its not just political views, it's everything. For example, try posting about Intel in pc building subs. Or try advocating for anything other than passive inde

Its not just political views, it's everything. For example, try posting about Intel in pc building subs. Or try advocating for anything other than passive index investing in /investing. Or say you like PHP for making websites in /programming. Any idea outside a sub's main approved-idea-space is rewarded with hate and downvotes.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Czarcasm 6y ago
I have been on Reddit for 5+ years now, and agree that it seems to have gotten worse over this period. Do you think that the removal of the downvote capability solves this problem? What solutions are available? I think the main issue is that Reddit has become more mainstream. My theory is that when a new website like reddit is created, the early adopters are typically more open-minded people by their very nature. Later as the platform is recognized as successful, the mainstream population joins. These mainstream users, less likely on average to accept new ideas than the initial early-adopter user base, then begins to drag the discussion into group-think. My most pronounced experience with this phenomenon was with r/wallstreetbets. In the early days, it was actually a very interesting and unique community with rapidly evolving conversations. With the mass influx of new users in 2018 and 2019, the comment sections slowly shifted into parroting of the subs common phrases and group think. Now in 2020, you can almost predict the comment sections before you open it up. Perhaps due to its lack of promotion and UI, HN has been more resistant to this shift, but is not immune. My personal solution to this problem is to keep jumping to new platforms if an old one becomes too bias. When my favorite subreddits start hitting r/all, I begin looking for new ones that follow the same topics.
- magicsmoke 6y ago
  When you think about it, it's like the phenomenon where cool places to travel get publicized in glossy magazines and turn into crowded tourist traps.
  - jasonv 6y ago
    I deleted my reddit account and read it read-only-accountless now. Having zero inclination to post there keeps my reading habit super lightweight. I don’t even bookmark subreddits. Just dip and dive out. I just can’t handle more than that amount of exposure to what it’s become.
    - csiegert 6y ago
      For even lighter reading, try https://popular.pics https://popular.pics – a picture/video viewer for Reddit I’m working on. I find it excellent for browsing image-heavy subreddits.
- quantummkv 6y ago
  > Do you think that the removal of the downvote capability solves this problem? What solutions are available? It's a classic case of a variant of the WWW-Eternal-September virus that had been plaguing the interwebs since the dawn of forums. There is no solution other than quarantine and moving to unaffected places.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    It's been plaguing non-interweb groups since always. The dynamic goes something like: - A thing becomes possible. Some people enjoy the thing, get together and form a community doing the thing. - the community quickly stratifies into "creators" - the people who actually do the thing and do it well, "community builders" - the people who don't actually do the thing very well, but are good at building the community around it, and "fans" - people who can't really do the thing, but enjoy the community and hang around in it. - if the creator:fan ratio stays within reasonable limits, the community will continue to be enjoyable and fun - if the community attracts more fans, though, the community is destroyed. Either the urge to monetise overwhelms and fans become customers, creators become rockstars and the community becomes an industry. - Or it drowns in its own bile. Fans don't actually contribute to the community, they just soak up every else's contribution. If there are too many fans, they drain the energy and ability of the community to self-sustain. Community builders "burn out" and creators become reclusive, staying away from the community. Anything that gets too popular gets either turned into an industry, or destroyed by its own popularity.
    - teddyh 6y ago
      Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
      - marcus_holmes 6y ago
        I loved that, but never agreed with the "sociopath" bit
- pgt 6y ago
  Clay Shirky describes this phenomenon as Eternal September in “A Group is its own worst enemy”: http://web.archive.org/web/20050615082335/http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://web.archive.org/web/20050615082335/http://shirky.com/...
- danielbarla 6y ago
  Removal of downvote is not necessarily enough, it doesn't stop differing comments from being drowned out in an echo chamber. I really think that the problem is somewhat embedded in two things: human nature, and practical limits of our attention. For the former, what I mean is that essentially discussions tend to get driven towards extreme or biased views, because people with moderated, centrist, or less extreme views are less likely to say anything. As the community grows, eventually there are enough people with extreme views that the limit of how many comments you are willing to read through is saturated with them. Eventually one view becomes predominant. And I guess, the last factor would be that people enjoy seeing their beliefs echoed back to them, as a form of validation - aannd we've hit peak echo chamber. I honestly have no real solution to this, other than trying to stay within smaller subreddits, where the middling opinions are not yet drowned out. And preferably ones that are well moderated, and have expectations of quality posts (you mention HN, and the self-moderation of the community here is a good example, jokes and other shitposts are regularly voted into oblivion, although this trend has been slowly diminishing over the years). As for specific subreddits that are great examples, it is hard to point out, because they are so specific.
- benibela 6y ago
  >Do you think that the removal of the downvote capability solves this problem? What solutions are available? You used to get downvoted for disagreement. Nowadays, you get banned from the sub altogether.
Moodles 6y ago
Church.
collyw 6y ago
To be fair you will get a bit of pushback against PHP on here as well, no?
- ptero 6y ago
  It's not the fact of the pushback that it is important, but how it is expressed. One of the great HN advantages is community's focus on substantive comments and a strong dislike of any personal attacks. HN: "php sucks because of those technical reasons". Reddit: "php sucks, period, and you are a moron".
DoingIsLearning 6y ago
I think there is also another aspect that is not talked about when discussing downvotes and eco-chamber: the shills. Companies/lobbyists/govs have realised a few years back that reddit was big enough/influential enough to shape some aspect of public opinion, it is now quite obviously that they are paying PR companies to defend their lobbies/brand/products on reddit. The other day I commented on a european sub-reddit, where they were discussing the move away from coal power plants as an energy source. I pointed out that the move away from coal was great but that we should remain sceptical of the "green" "clean" energy marketing around bio-mass power plants and also natural-gas power plants. Immediately the comment became controversial with wildly varying scores of up and downvotes. All the comments that followed where quite adversarial and flippant, mixed with bland marketing statements filled with buzzwords about how bio-mass is sustainable and 'renewable'. I doubt this situation would have occurred 6/7 years ago. In this case it was so obvious that I couldn't care less but probably for some users they would be intimidated to continue to comment on the topic after this. It's not just Energy lobby, you could say the same thing about Pesticides, Pharma, <insert major lobby group>. Also on the shills, I used to go to reddit as a source of legitimate product reviews and recommendations, now it's obviously that every marketing person uses the platform to name drop their product and do stealth marketing companies. As so many others before it, reddit has become a victim of its own popularity.
mschuster91 6y ago
> Or say you like PHP for making websites in /programming. To be fair, advocating for new PHP projects here on HN is met with ... scrutiny to put it lightly, too... same for going against the "groupthink" when it comes to libertarian capitalism, gig economy or the latest JS framework.
cameronfraser 6y ago
This also makes it hard to find new information. The movie and moviesuggestion subreddits for example always recommend from the same small subset of movies. There used to be people who would post really interesting galleries of "Movies you may have missed in 20xx" and they were almost always movies I had missed that flew way under the radar but were great. Ir's like that with every subreddit though, they have this corpus of knowledge they refer to and won't consider anything outside of it, everyone is just parroting someone else.
chrstphrhrt 6y ago
Same thing happens on HN. Comments that go against the kooolaid-driven white saviour ethos of certain VC-backed ideas are often downvoted. Still not as bad as popular Reddit subs though. There is so much dystopian doublespeak in startup marketing, and people continue to believe it, because not doing so threatens their careers. Of course there are also many startups out there that actually do improve lives, but I wouldn't say it's the majority.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Czarcasm 6y ago

I have been on Reddit for 5+ years now, and agree that it seems to have gotten worse over this period. Do you think that the removal of the downvote capability solves this problem? What solutions are available? I think the main issue is that Reddit has become more mainstream. My theory is that when a new website like reddit is created, the early adopters are typically more open-minded people by their very nature. Later as the platform is recognized as successful, the mainstream population joins. These mainstream users, less likely on average to accept new ideas than the initial early-adopter user base, then begins to drag the discussion into group-think. My most pronounced experience with this phenomenon was with r/wallstreetbets. In the early days, it was actually a very interesting and unique community with rapidly evolving conversations. With the mass influx of new users in 2018 and 2019, the comment sections slowly shifted into parroting of the subs common phrases and group think. Now in 2020, you can almost predict the comment sections before you open it up. Perhaps due to its lack of promotion and UI, HN has been more resistant to this shift, but is not immune. My personal solution to this problem is to keep jumping to new platforms if an old one becomes too bias. When my favorite subreddits start hitting r/all, I begin looking for new ones that follow the same topics.

magicsmoke 6y ago
When you think about it, it's like the phenomenon where cool places to travel get publicized in glossy magazines and turn into crowded tourist traps.
- jasonv 6y ago
  I deleted my reddit account and read it read-only-accountless now. Having zero inclination to post there keeps my reading habit super lightweight. I don’t even bookmark subreddits. Just dip and dive out. I just can’t handle more than that amount of exposure to what it’s become.
  - csiegert 6y ago
    For even lighter reading, try https://popular.pics https://popular.pics – a picture/video viewer for Reddit I’m working on. I find it excellent for browsing image-heavy subreddits.
quantummkv 6y ago
> Do you think that the removal of the downvote capability solves this problem? What solutions are available? It's a classic case of a variant of the WWW-Eternal-September virus that had been plaguing the interwebs since the dawn of forums. There is no solution other than quarantine and moving to unaffected places.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  It's been plaguing non-interweb groups since always. The dynamic goes something like: - A thing becomes possible. Some people enjoy the thing, get together and form a community doing the thing. - the community quickly stratifies into "creators" - the people who actually do the thing and do it well, "community builders" - the people who don't actually do the thing very well, but are good at building the community around it, and "fans" - people who can't really do the thing, but enjoy the community and hang around in it. - if the creator:fan ratio stays within reasonable limits, the community will continue to be enjoyable and fun - if the community attracts more fans, though, the community is destroyed. Either the urge to monetise overwhelms and fans become customers, creators become rockstars and the community becomes an industry. - Or it drowns in its own bile. Fans don't actually contribute to the community, they just soak up every else's contribution. If there are too many fans, they drain the energy and ability of the community to self-sustain. Community builders "burn out" and creators become reclusive, staying away from the community. Anything that gets too popular gets either turned into an industry, or destroyed by its own popularity.
  - teddyh 6y ago
    Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      I loved that, but never agreed with the "sociopath" bit
pgt 6y ago
Clay Shirky describes this phenomenon as Eternal September in “A Group is its own worst enemy”: http://web.archive.org/web/20050615082335/http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://web.archive.org/web/20050615082335/http://shirky.com/...
danielbarla 6y ago
Removal of downvote is not necessarily enough, it doesn't stop differing comments from being drowned out in an echo chamber. I really think that the problem is somewhat embedded in two things: human nature, and practical limits of our attention. For the former, what I mean is that essentially discussions tend to get driven towards extreme or biased views, because people with moderated, centrist, or less extreme views are less likely to say anything. As the community grows, eventually there are enough people with extreme views that the limit of how many comments you are willing to read through is saturated with them. Eventually one view becomes predominant. And I guess, the last factor would be that people enjoy seeing their beliefs echoed back to them, as a form of validation - aannd we've hit peak echo chamber. I honestly have no real solution to this, other than trying to stay within smaller subreddits, where the middling opinions are not yet drowned out. And preferably ones that are well moderated, and have expectations of quality posts (you mention HN, and the self-moderation of the community here is a good example, jokes and other shitposts are regularly voted into oblivion, although this trend has been slowly diminishing over the years). As for specific subreddits that are great examples, it is hard to point out, because they are so specific.
benibela 6y ago
>Do you think that the removal of the downvote capability solves this problem? What solutions are available? You used to get downvoted for disagreement. Nowadays, you get banned from the sub altogether.

Moodles 6y ago

Church.

collyw 6y ago

To be fair you will get a bit of pushback against PHP on here as well, no?

ptero 6y ago
It's not the fact of the pushback that it is important, but how it is expressed. One of the great HN advantages is community's focus on substantive comments and a strong dislike of any personal attacks. HN: "php sucks because of those technical reasons". Reddit: "php sucks, period, and you are a moron".

DoingIsLearning 6y ago

I think there is also another aspect that is not talked about when discussing downvotes and eco-chamber: the shills. Companies/lobbyists/govs have realised a few years back that reddit was big enough/influential enough to shape some aspect of public opinion, it is now quite obviously that they are paying PR companies to defend their lobbies/brand/products on reddit. The other day I commented on a european sub-reddit, where they were discussing the move away from coal power plants as an energy source. I pointed out that the move away from coal was great but that we should remain sceptical of the "green" "clean" energy marketing around bio-mass power plants and also natural-gas power plants. Immediately the comment became controversial with wildly varying scores of up and downvotes. All the comments that followed where quite adversarial and flippant, mixed with bland marketing statements filled with buzzwords about how bio-mass is sustainable and 'renewable'. I doubt this situation would have occurred 6/7 years ago. In this case it was so obvious that I couldn't care less but probably for some users they would be intimidated to continue to comment on the topic after this. It's not just Energy lobby, you could say the same thing about Pesticides, Pharma, <insert major lobby group>. Also on the shills, I used to go to reddit as a source of legitimate product reviews and recommendations, now it's obviously that every marketing person uses the platform to name drop their product and do stealth marketing companies. As so many others before it, reddit has become a victim of its own popularity.

mschuster91 6y ago

> Or say you like PHP for making websites in /programming. To be fair, advocating for new PHP projects here on HN is met with ... scrutiny to put it lightly, too... same for going against the "groupthink" when it comes to libertarian capitalism, gig economy or the latest JS framework.

cameronfraser 6y ago

This also makes it hard to find new information. The movie and moviesuggestion subreddits for example always recommend from the same small subset of movies. There used to be people who would post really interesting galleries of "Movies you may have missed in 20xx" and they were almost always movies I had missed that flew way under the radar but were great. Ir's like that with every subreddit though, they have this corpus of knowledge they refer to and won't consider anything outside of it, everyone is just parroting someone else.

chrstphrhrt 6y ago

Same thing happens on HN. Comments that go against the kooolaid-driven white saviour ethos of certain VC-backed ideas are often downvoted. Still not as bad as popular Reddit subs though. There is so much dystopian doublespeak in startup marketing, and people continue to believe it, because not doing so threatens their careers. Of course there are also many startups out there that actually do improve lives, but I wouldn't say it's the majority.