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I've wondered why Twitter seems far more toxic than Reddit (certain now-banned subreddits excluded) and I believe the downvote is a powerful tool used to achiev

I've wondered why Twitter seems far more toxic than Reddit (certain now-banned subreddits excluded) and I believe the downvote is a powerful tool used to achieve this, along with Reddit's community-style moderation, even though that can border on toxic itself at times. I wrote about it here a little while back https://unlikekinds.com/article/trolls-and-consequences-what-twitter-needs-to-learn-from-reddit https://unlikekinds.com/article/trolls-and-consequences-what...

antigirl 5y ago
Twitter exposes the profile of the user a lot more and people have their own feeds. Reddit in comparison albeit with profiles seems anonymous all the same.
- whalabi 5y ago
  That's a good point, seems less enticing to a troll to rip into an anonymous username. Reddit's moved a bit in that direction in recent years, with full fledged profiles, user feeds, profile pics, etc.
tompazourek 5y ago
I'm wondering about the same thing. To me, Reddit feels more like it emphasizes communities. While Twitter is more about the cult of personality, and not too centered around community. Also, on Twitter it's much easier to get to another social bubble by accident (just see some random tweet in the feed, and here it goes). On Reddit, you are much more likely to stay within your chosen subreddits (unless you look at the most popular, news, etc.)
- whalabi 5y ago
  Yeah I thought the same thing re communities, it's a super important aspect and gives you some of the.. social geography you get in the real world. Tgat and the personal, per-community moderation.
sascha_sl 5y ago
While Twitter loves to have bubbles crash into one another for engagement, reddit is far worse than you might think for minorities, mostly because their subreddits have little collective voting power. For instance some trans friendly subreddits that's not primarily about trans people has been continuously raided for the past few months, where lots of people - exceeding the organic voting power of the subs population - downvote posts that feature trans topics in any capacity to make the posts effectively invisible. Then they started sending mass-DMs to further disincentive trans people from talking (I myself got a message from "youdontpass1488", not too hard to see the perpetrators political alignments there). Moderators have near-zero available tools to prevent this from happening, aside from going private which is not really the best option for various reasons. While this practice is banned on reddit, coordination has just moved elsewhere.
Sergiu37 5y ago
Reddit is not toxic if you agree with the majority views. If not it is probably the most toxic social media. So other views people leave and so reddit remains a bubble of like minded people that don't see their toxicity. You can just look at some popular subreddits like iata i am the asshole or idiotsincar or murdered by words, justiceserved to name a few and many other where people just laugh and are being toxic towars other people. Most popular posts are also angry ones. For a good mental health is imperative to avoid reddit, or at least just take part in tech/thinvs you love, but even there the neagtive and frustrated people will bring their issue there.
- azangru 5y ago
  > Reddit is not toxic if you agree with the majority views. Different subreddits will have different majorities with different views, no? > toxicity ... toxic towars other people What does this mean? For example, if you are sitting inside your bubble and laughing at the outsiders, who don't even come to your bubble, is there any toxicity going on?
  - JulianMorrison 5y ago
    No, the right wing douchebros can and will brigade any subreddit containing people they don't like.
    - opinion-is-bad 5y ago
      Is there some evidence to support this being a purely right-wing phenomena?
      - krapp 5y ago
        What subreddits have been brigaded by the left?
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
contravariant 5y ago
Reddit's way of fostering communities likely helps. In twitter you're somewhat forced to talk to the same group of people at all times, especially now that tweets seem to be the main topic of discussion.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Personally, I think it's just because of subreddits: - Well-moderated subreddits are bubbles of locally higher quality - Discussions on one subreddit stay contained within it - each subreddit is also a social bubble On Twitter, there's no quality standards moderation, and Tweets spread along the social graph, not within bounded communities. You may be discussing a niche topic with a group of like-minded friends, but it takes one asshole in your, or your friends', follower list, for your tweet to suddenly gain attention with a larger group of assholes, who then are free to inject themselves into the conversation.
- dkarl 5y ago
  This is exactly it. You can find subreddits that match your interests and your desired level of civility. Somebody else can find theirs, and you can live in separate spheres. People also heavily use alts on Reddit, which I think makes them less self-conscious about conforming to standards of behavior, because if they are feeling a bit pissed off and aggro about something they can switch to a different alt and a different subreddit where they can vent and it's acceptable behavior. It's much more like the real world where different physical spaces allow outlets for different kinds of behavior, where you can be polite and deferential at work and then go home to your living room and tell your brother in law that your boss is a rat bastard and cheerfully cuss up a storm watching sports together. Twitter seems to have a totalizing effect on people's personalities, I think because people realize there's only one context, and therefore only room for one version of themselves. They talk one way all the time. If someone I follow for software news and insight posts a beef Wellington recipe or talks about the whiskey they got for their birthday, they sound exactly like they do when they're talking about software. Real people don't act that way! You know if you only work with somebody then you only know a fraction of who they are, and you crave a glimpse behind the curtain. I think online communities where identities are intended to correspond to real people and there is no compartmentalization of space will always suffer from this totalizing effect, where a percentage of people, small but enough to poison things, choose the worst part of themselves to stand in for the rest of them.
- nsonha 5y ago
  It has nothing to do with bubble or not. It's just twitter only allows shalow takes with no nuances, so people either are lazy and give in to that, or they are frustrated by not being able to say what they want to say and get angry instead. My personal view is bubbles are actually bad for discourse, make people intolerant.
ChrisRR 5y ago
I think it's also that twitter's UI isn't designed for discussion, it's designed for shouting your opinion into the void. So I think this empowers people to voice their shitty opinion without consequence.
- Telemakhos 5y ago
  Twitter is an advertising platform. Corporations advertise to users through it, and users advertise to each other. The character limit is there to turn discussions into slogans. I quit Twitter a few months back, and I've been a happier person since then. I'd joined because I heard it was the way to "do outreach" and "engage in the discussion" of my field on a daily basis. Really, it was just the less skilled people in my field advertising their politics to each other, while the more skilled people were off using their skills to accomplish real things. The skilled and knowledgeable people I wanted to hear and learn from were not spending their time twittering.
machinehermiter 5y ago
I just don't understand why people are so terrified of opinions they don't agree with. I am just so glad I am old enough to have been exposed to a wide variety of different opinions and ideas before this crack down on such. Being exposed to bullshit ultimately hones your bullshit detector. If you grow up on twitter it just seems to me you will be easy to fool. Like a person who lives in a bubble afraid of germs so their immune system is nothing.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  When you did not reason yourself into your opinions but adopted them in order to get a sense of belonging to a group, the existence of other opinions is an existential threat.
allsystemsgo 5y ago
Reddit is absolutely toxic.
- tomrod 5y ago
  Parts of it are, but those tend to get banned. I'd argue reddit is more of an amplified hive mind of the communities that use the internet, of which some become toxic due to ineffective moderation policies or squelching of dissent. The elephant in the room is that large subreddits tend to avoid deep analysis if it disagrees with the hive mind, and cross-brigading from smaller subreddits happens all the time. Add influence peddling by sovereign states to that.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    > Parts of it are, but those tend to get banned. Only if politically and economically convenient. I've seen people openly condoning torture and rape as long as they happen to unsympathetic victims. The subreddits fostering this behavior won't get banned unless it threatens reddit's advertising. In practice it means only politically incorrect communities get banned.
    - tomrod 5y ago
      Do you have examples?
everdrive 5y ago
Reddit is broken up into sub-communities, and I think this is what is helping a lot here. Many subreddits are quite awful and toxic. Even ones which are not terribly evil are still awful and insipid. But there are also some really amazing and beautiful subreddits out there. This is all because of the existence of subreddits. Any subreddit past a certain size or popularity will begin to become terrible.
captainmuon 5y ago
I think what makes Twitter toxic is that everybody is in their little bubble. You are mostly shown content similar to what you liked, and you are encouraged to block outsiders. When you do see content from outside of your bubble, the contrast is harsh. Most of the time you don't even see dissenting tweets themselves, you see a lot of reactions in your bubble and have to fish for the original 'scandalous' tweet. Also, as somebody else said here, the discussion takes place "on" your identity, as opposed to reddit where you have your identity and then go out to places to discuss. I have separate accounts because my different interest belong to different bubbles, and I'm afraid they would outrage each other. Also, one is mostly for consumption and the other is mostly write-only. (My ideal social network would have each user in full control of their identity page - a bit like MySpace or the old Facebook. And then you would be able to go and create pseudonymous subaccounts for discussions. The system would only show what you want to share, e.g. "this handle's main account is female, on the site for >3 years, and has ~5000 rep". This way you'd have anonymity but still some measure of trust.)
baron_harkonnen 5y ago
As someone who once had a reasonably large (>5k) twitter following and has essentially given it up there are a few factors I believe contribute it being far more unhealthy than HN or Reddit: - It's tied to your real identity (and your real ego). We all know that pure anonymity creates 4chan, but being associated with your personal identity means that every "engagement" on twitter feels a bit too personal. On both reddit and HN being pseudonymous means you still have some sort of reputation, but up and down votes are always about how a community interacts with your ideas, not you personally. Even worse than facebook, you're primarily being judged by people who don't even know you. This sets up every tweet to being a basis for being personally attacked by strangers. - Short message length abolishes nuance. On both Reddit and HN the most successful posts are often long, nuanced and typically make several points to draw a conclusion. This is impossible on Twitter. You can't discuss the nuances and values of both R and Python for data science work, you can only make flippant, reactionary remarks. - Might makes right. The follower system is horrendous for any kind of reasoned discussion. There a plenty of well known, adored people out there that make factually incorrect assertions but it doesn't matter if they have 100k followers, they win the war for engagement. Forget about cases where it's not see easy to establish factual correctness. All of these combine to make an environment where to feel good about your self you are naturally driven to write flippant content that will attract more followers (so nothing too controversial for your audience, no having complex opinions, you should fit into an easy to market 'identity'). You can resist this, but this is what the platform has been designed to encourage. It's sad how many thoughtful people I've met on Twitter that inevitably get sucked into this trap and start shouting out engaging garbage so that they can continue feeding that cycle. Despite my complaints about trends in the HN community, several small things help a lot: - largely keeping pseudonymity - Hiding up/down vote counts! It's quite possible for one opinion to have an order of magnitude more support than it's opposition but both idea can be near the top and no one knows. - Giving all comments a temporary boost in the page position to give them eyeballs and a chance to be heard. Making votes invisible is probably the single most brilliant thing HN has ever done to keep this community sane. You can see "people agree with/like my comment" without comparing yourself to everyone else.
dgellow 5y ago
The core issues with Twitter are the Retweet feature and the short character limit. That's also what defines the platform, so that's unlikely to change. The problem with the retweet feature: Person A starts talking about a topic and post a few tweets. Person B sees one specific tweet, retweet it (with or without comment). People who were following person A see the original tweets. People who were following person B see the reactions to the retweeted tweet, without the original context. Every time the discussion is split with two crowds isolated from each others and everything taken out of context. The problem with the character limit: given that people link to or retweet a single tweet (120-240 characters I believe), that can only contain a very limited, and often dumb down, version of the actual message being communicated. That's of course worse given their feed algorithm.

antigirl 5y ago

Twitter exposes the profile of the user a lot more and people have their own feeds. Reddit in comparison albeit with profiles seems anonymous all the same.

whalabi 5y ago
That's a good point, seems less enticing to a troll to rip into an anonymous username. Reddit's moved a bit in that direction in recent years, with full fledged profiles, user feeds, profile pics, etc.

tompazourek 5y ago

I'm wondering about the same thing. To me, Reddit feels more like it emphasizes communities. While Twitter is more about the cult of personality, and not too centered around community. Also, on Twitter it's much easier to get to another social bubble by accident (just see some random tweet in the feed, and here it goes). On Reddit, you are much more likely to stay within your chosen subreddits (unless you look at the most popular, news, etc.)

whalabi 5y ago
Yeah I thought the same thing re communities, it's a super important aspect and gives you some of the.. social geography you get in the real world. Tgat and the personal, per-community moderation.

sascha_sl 5y ago

While Twitter loves to have bubbles crash into one another for engagement, reddit is far worse than you might think for minorities, mostly because their subreddits have little collective voting power. For instance some trans friendly subreddits that's not primarily about trans people has been continuously raided for the past few months, where lots of people - exceeding the organic voting power of the subs population - downvote posts that feature trans topics in any capacity to make the posts effectively invisible. Then they started sending mass-DMs to further disincentive trans people from talking (I myself got a message from "youdontpass1488", not too hard to see the perpetrators political alignments there). Moderators have near-zero available tools to prevent this from happening, aside from going private which is not really the best option for various reasons. While this practice is banned on reddit, coordination has just moved elsewhere.

Sergiu37 5y ago

Reddit is not toxic if you agree with the majority views. If not it is probably the most toxic social media. So other views people leave and so reddit remains a bubble of like minded people that don't see their toxicity. You can just look at some popular subreddits like iata i am the asshole or idiotsincar or murdered by words, justiceserved to name a few and many other where people just laugh and are being toxic towars other people. Most popular posts are also angry ones. For a good mental health is imperative to avoid reddit, or at least just take part in tech/thinvs you love, but even there the neagtive and frustrated people will bring their issue there.

azangru 5y ago
> Reddit is not toxic if you agree with the majority views. Different subreddits will have different majorities with different views, no? > toxicity ... toxic towars other people What does this mean? For example, if you are sitting inside your bubble and laughing at the outsiders, who don't even come to your bubble, is there any toxicity going on?
- JulianMorrison 5y ago
  No, the right wing douchebros can and will brigade any subreddit containing people they don't like.
  - opinion-is-bad 5y ago
    Is there some evidence to support this being a purely right-wing phenomena?
    - krapp 5y ago
      What subreddits have been brigaded by the left?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]

contravariant 5y ago

Reddit's way of fostering communities likely helps. In twitter you're somewhat forced to talk to the same group of people at all times, especially now that tweets seem to be the main topic of discussion.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

Personally, I think it's just because of subreddits: - Well-moderated subreddits are bubbles of locally higher quality - Discussions on one subreddit stay contained within it - each subreddit is also a social bubble On Twitter, there's no quality standards moderation, and Tweets spread along the social graph, not within bounded communities. You may be discussing a niche topic with a group of like-minded friends, but it takes one asshole in your, or your friends', follower list, for your tweet to suddenly gain attention with a larger group of assholes, who then are free to inject themselves into the conversation.

dkarl 5y ago
This is exactly it. You can find subreddits that match your interests and your desired level of civility. Somebody else can find theirs, and you can live in separate spheres. People also heavily use alts on Reddit, which I think makes them less self-conscious about conforming to standards of behavior, because if they are feeling a bit pissed off and aggro about something they can switch to a different alt and a different subreddit where they can vent and it's acceptable behavior. It's much more like the real world where different physical spaces allow outlets for different kinds of behavior, where you can be polite and deferential at work and then go home to your living room and tell your brother in law that your boss is a rat bastard and cheerfully cuss up a storm watching sports together. Twitter seems to have a totalizing effect on people's personalities, I think because people realize there's only one context, and therefore only room for one version of themselves. They talk one way all the time. If someone I follow for software news and insight posts a beef Wellington recipe or talks about the whiskey they got for their birthday, they sound exactly like they do when they're talking about software. Real people don't act that way! You know if you only work with somebody then you only know a fraction of who they are, and you crave a glimpse behind the curtain. I think online communities where identities are intended to correspond to real people and there is no compartmentalization of space will always suffer from this totalizing effect, where a percentage of people, small but enough to poison things, choose the worst part of themselves to stand in for the rest of them.
nsonha 5y ago
It has nothing to do with bubble or not. It's just twitter only allows shalow takes with no nuances, so people either are lazy and give in to that, or they are frustrated by not being able to say what they want to say and get angry instead. My personal view is bubbles are actually bad for discourse, make people intolerant.

ChrisRR 5y ago

I think it's also that twitter's UI isn't designed for discussion, it's designed for shouting your opinion into the void. So I think this empowers people to voice their shitty opinion without consequence.

Telemakhos 5y ago
Twitter is an advertising platform. Corporations advertise to users through it, and users advertise to each other. The character limit is there to turn discussions into slogans. I quit Twitter a few months back, and I've been a happier person since then. I'd joined because I heard it was the way to "do outreach" and "engage in the discussion" of my field on a daily basis. Really, it was just the less skilled people in my field advertising their politics to each other, while the more skilled people were off using their skills to accomplish real things. The skilled and knowledgeable people I wanted to hear and learn from were not spending their time twittering.

machinehermiter 5y ago

I just don't understand why people are so terrified of opinions they don't agree with. I am just so glad I am old enough to have been exposed to a wide variety of different opinions and ideas before this crack down on such. Being exposed to bullshit ultimately hones your bullshit detector. If you grow up on twitter it just seems to me you will be easy to fool. Like a person who lives in a bubble afraid of germs so their immune system is nothing.

blacktriangle 5y ago
When you did not reason yourself into your opinions but adopted them in order to get a sense of belonging to a group, the existence of other opinions is an existential threat.

allsystemsgo 5y ago

Reddit is absolutely toxic.

tomrod 5y ago
Parts of it are, but those tend to get banned. I'd argue reddit is more of an amplified hive mind of the communities that use the internet, of which some become toxic due to ineffective moderation policies or squelching of dissent. The elephant in the room is that large subreddits tend to avoid deep analysis if it disagrees with the hive mind, and cross-brigading from smaller subreddits happens all the time. Add influence peddling by sovereign states to that.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > Parts of it are, but those tend to get banned. Only if politically and economically convenient. I've seen people openly condoning torture and rape as long as they happen to unsympathetic victims. The subreddits fostering this behavior won't get banned unless it threatens reddit's advertising. In practice it means only politically incorrect communities get banned.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    Do you have examples?

everdrive 5y ago

Reddit is broken up into sub-communities, and I think this is what is helping a lot here. Many subreddits are quite awful and toxic. Even ones which are not terribly evil are still awful and insipid. But there are also some really amazing and beautiful subreddits out there. This is all because of the existence of subreddits. Any subreddit past a certain size or popularity will begin to become terrible.

captainmuon 5y ago

I think what makes Twitter toxic is that everybody is in their little bubble. You are mostly shown content similar to what you liked, and you are encouraged to block outsiders. When you do see content from outside of your bubble, the contrast is harsh. Most of the time you don't even see dissenting tweets themselves, you see a lot of reactions in your bubble and have to fish for the original 'scandalous' tweet. Also, as somebody else said here, the discussion takes place "on" your identity, as opposed to reddit where you have your identity and then go out to places to discuss. I have separate accounts because my different interest belong to different bubbles, and I'm afraid they would outrage each other. Also, one is mostly for consumption and the other is mostly write-only. (My ideal social network would have each user in full control of their identity page - a bit like MySpace or the old Facebook. And then you would be able to go and create pseudonymous subaccounts for discussions. The system would only show what you want to share, e.g. "this handle's main account is female, on the site for >3 years, and has ~5000 rep". This way you'd have anonymity but still some measure of trust.)

baron_harkonnen 5y ago

As someone who once had a reasonably large (>5k) twitter following and has essentially given it up there are a few factors I believe contribute it being far more unhealthy than HN or Reddit: - It's tied to your real identity (and your real ego). We all know that pure anonymity creates 4chan, but being associated with your personal identity means that every "engagement" on twitter feels a bit too personal. On both reddit and HN being pseudonymous means you still have some sort of reputation, but up and down votes are always about how a community interacts with your ideas, not you personally. Even worse than facebook, you're primarily being judged by people who don't even know you. This sets up every tweet to being a basis for being personally attacked by strangers. - Short message length abolishes nuance. On both Reddit and HN the most successful posts are often long, nuanced and typically make several points to draw a conclusion. This is impossible on Twitter. You can't discuss the nuances and values of both R and Python for data science work, you can only make flippant, reactionary remarks. - Might makes right. The follower system is horrendous for any kind of reasoned discussion. There a plenty of well known, adored people out there that make factually incorrect assertions but it doesn't matter if they have 100k followers, they win the war for engagement. Forget about cases where it's not see easy to establish factual correctness. All of these combine to make an environment where to feel good about your self you are naturally driven to write flippant content that will attract more followers (so nothing too controversial for your audience, no having complex opinions, you should fit into an easy to market 'identity'). You can resist this, but this is what the platform has been designed to encourage. It's sad how many thoughtful people I've met on Twitter that inevitably get sucked into this trap and start shouting out engaging garbage so that they can continue feeding that cycle. Despite my complaints about trends in the HN community, several small things help a lot: - largely keeping pseudonymity - Hiding up/down vote counts! It's quite possible for one opinion to have an order of magnitude more support than it's opposition but both idea can be near the top and no one knows. - Giving all comments a temporary boost in the page position to give them eyeballs and a chance to be heard. Making votes invisible is probably the single most brilliant thing HN has ever done to keep this community sane. You can see "people agree with/like my comment" without comparing yourself to everyone else.

dgellow 5y ago

The core issues with Twitter are the Retweet feature and the short character limit. That's also what defines the platform, so that's unlikely to change. The problem with the retweet feature: Person A starts talking about a topic and post a few tweets. Person B sees one specific tweet, retweet it (with or without comment). People who were following person A see the original tweets. People who were following person B see the reactions to the retweeted tweet, without the original context. Every time the discussion is split with two crowds isolated from each others and everything taken out of context. The problem with the character limit: given that people link to or retweet a single tweet (120-240 characters I believe), that can only contain a very limited, and often dumb down, version of the actual message being communicated. That's of course worse given their feed algorithm.