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> Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison. Yeah especially on r/AmITheAsshole. Those comments never advocate for communication, forgiveness
by legacynl 7mo ago
> Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison.
Yeah especially on r/AmITheAsshole. Those comments never advocate for communication, forgiveness and mending things with family.
- SJMG 7mo agoYes, it is a toxic sub, where the notion that there can be greater happiness on the other side of forgiveness than cutting ties is all but absent.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo agoTo be fair, it’s easier to concisely explain cutting someone off than justifying forgiveness. And the latter will land with some people versus others, while the former will only be rejected by people who have themselves concluded a theory of forgiveness. As a result, the simpler pitch gets upvoted. Even if the majority would have been swayed by a collection of arguments the other way.
- theoreticalmal 7mo agoIt’s a good theory. My theory is, for whatever reason, jaded, narcissistic, miserable people congregate in r/AITA and try to drag other people into their misery because that’s easier than accepting responsibility and doing something to change.
- BoorishBears 7mo agoBefore Reddit made hiding profiles easy you'd click on a user's unreasonably scorched earth advice to the OP, and find their post history is essentially going to every story they come across and advocating for scorched earth.
- daveguy 7mo agoWhat are the chances you were seeing the anti-civ bots and now reddit makes them easier to hide? (And I'm not saying regular people acting like bots, but an anti-civ campaign.)
- nwallin 7mo agoHiding profiles has genuinely made the platform profoundly worse. It's impossible to tell if you've just got a troll on your hands or someone who's making a good faith argument. It used to be enough to check their profile, and either downvote and move on, or engage with someone on a human level. Now everyone is a troll/bot by default unless proven otherwise.
- wiseowise 7mo agoExcept it’s not toxic to suggest that cutting toxic relationship out yields greater happiness.
- prepend 7mo agoWell, maybe. The challenge is interpreting what is toxic, correctly. Also, if everyone I know is “toxic” then that’s a good sign that the problem is me and not everyone else.
- wiseowise 7mo ago> The challenge is interpreting what is toxic, correctly. Correct. It is always case by case review. > Also, if everyone I know is “toxic” then that’s a good sign that the problem is me and not everyone else. Why “everyone”? Generalizations like these are the same mistake that Reddit, that you’re calling out, makes. Also, toxic is relative to your perspective – it’s not a universal merit.
- Iulioh 7mo agoIt's often that a lot of "NTA" answers are downright antisocial. "No one owns you anything, you don't own anyone anything" mentality, without a crumb of social awareness.
- brikym 7mo agoI believe this. There is a graph somewhere of the relationship subs tending towards breaking up over time.
- tdb7893 7mo agoI don't think this is necessarily that the advice is getting worse. My friends are pretty mature and stable people and I've found that they've had way more issues staying in relationships longer than they should've compared to breaking up earlier. Especially for relationships earlier in people's lives (where many people I know has a story about being in a relationship for way longer than they should've and seems often to be the ages of people asking for advice) erring towards breaking up seems prudent. Not that these relationships subreddits are good (often it's obviously children trying to give advice they don't have the experience for) but I don't think that telling people to break up more is less accurate advice.
- sarchertech 7mo ago> I've found that they've had way more issues staying in relationships longer than they should've compared to breaking up earlier Consider that if ending a relationship causes noticeable problems to external observers, it’s almost by definition because you were in it “too long”. That is you developed a strong attachment, shared assets, or had kids with what was in hindsight obviously the wrong person. Essentially you can know which relationships a person stayed in too long, but you can’t know how things would have worked out in relationships people ended too early. Also it’s probably good advice to tell a 19 year old to break up with her boyfriend over a half dozen serious red flag issues, but that’s not the only kind of thing Reddit relationship advice is generally dealing with. It’s not even the majority. If you’re advice is always to beak up over every petty difference or minor slight, you might reduce the number of people who stay in bad relationships, but your advice, if taken, would make good long term relationships impossible.
- dTal 7mo ago>Consider that if ending a relationship causes noticeable problems to external observers, it’s almost by definition because you were in it “too long”. That is you developed a strong attachment, shared assets, or had kids with what was in hindsight obviously the wrong person. Reducing it to "right person / wrong person" is a very narrow viewpoint. People can change in unpredictable ways, including yourself. Relationships end - or continue - for so many reasons, both emotional and pragmatic. It's simply too reductive to say that if a relationship causes pain when it ends, there was necessarily some sort of mistake. It could even be that the pain is a price to pay for a life experience that you'd be worse off for not having...
- LinXitoW 7mo agoWell, because that's never the correct choice. There's a big big filter on people actually posting there. Any easy problems with obvious solutions never make it to there. Think about it, how fucked does your relationship have to be to post on Reddit for advice?
- BoorishBears 7mo agoThis wrongly assumes people are good at judging what easy problems are. Not to mention nowadays an untold amount of posts to subreddits that invite commentary are made up stories from accounts trying to get engagement.
- Robotbeat 7mo agoSomeone has a chart somewhere that shows responses in that subreddit getting more and more anti-conciliatory over time. I think it’s online misanthropy (measured by Reddit responses) increasing over time rather than it being objectively never the correct choice.
- ijk 7mo agoAlso the rules and norms of the subreddit has changed over time, which has led to spin-off subreddits that serve those purposes.
- redanddead 7mo agowhen people post there it’s for the self justification
- everdrive 7mo agoAdditionally, I'm sure many posts and replies on r/AmITheAsshole are LLM-generated in the first place.
- kshacker 7mo agoOh man, I have 8 reddit accounts (AFAIK) one for each purpose so that I am not branded based on my open comments. Anyways, one of them is abandoned because ... that's where I got started at reddit about 7-10 years back. Got hooked actually to the relationship subs. Very addictive to start with. Then I tried to play the "Indian family values" where I would advocate communication and compromise for small matters, of course I recommended "get a lawyer, divorce" once in a while, but more often than not, I would advocate reconciliation and provide practical solutions for that. And wow ... the amount of downvotes and pushback I will get on those. I just stopped using that account at one point because what is the point of discussions when either my values are totally out of sync with the mob, or the mob does not want to listen to me. Now I just read the best of redditor updates for vicious pleasure.
- pocksuppet 7mo agoThat's amazing you have more than one account, aren't a power mod, and haven't been IP banned yet.
- kshacker 7mo agoNope. Started my first maybe 8-10 years back, and then added the others over a year or 2. None since. I do not use them all nowadays, but I was very active in my early reddit days. Since someone downvoted my parent comment, I am not hiding anything, this is just being safe in the modern world, and here are the 8 alts: 1. This same name - bay area / tech 2. entertainment - least used, but it becomes useful when i am watching something live. It was my place to be during game of thrones last season (and sadly so) 3. indian left politics + bollywood - pretty much unused. 4. indian right politics + bollywood. i got banned from one sub for an innocent comment, so i decided to just form personas. and maybe that's when i created health / finance / bay area accounts -- but memory fades after a long time. pretty much unused. 5. relationship advice - unused for a long time. it does not exist on my main phone, but i have all of them on my work phone so i know it exists 6. american politics. i do not participate much nowadays, with age my brain has dulled and it needs to shed load so this is used minimally, but at a point i was so active that my karma pulled me into the sweet reddit IPO. I kept only 100 shares btw 7. health - only health topics, also unused, but i go there and use that account when i need to read on a specific topic 8. finance - only investment, trading nowadays you can hide reddit history, but earlier you could not, and my point is i do not want to 1) delete my comments, but 2) be hounded by them when i have a question about a different topic. but i did not care if people read my past 100 comments about politics when i talk about politics. so i flip between 2-3 accounts on a daily basis, and maybe 4-5 in a good week. i have not been challenged by reddit, but if they do, i will adapt. Switching between them was much easier earlier in the Apollo days and even at reddit - they have made navigation worse for this specific use case.
- curiousgal 7mo agoWe're missing the other obvious problem, most of the content there is AI generated anyway. I personally posted a fake story generated by Chatgpt and even posted screenshots of that at the start of the post and yet, the post ended up on the frontpage...
- throwaway27448 7mo agoIt doesn't help that the actual submissions are difficult to distinguish from creative writing exercises.
- insane_dreamer 7mo agoThat sub is so toxic that I would seriously question the wisdom of any of its posts simply because the authors are member of that sub.