4 ms·

Reddit is notorious for being awful at real life interactions just look at the relationship subreddit the first answer is always divorce, it’s become a meme b

Reddit is notorious for being awful at real life interactions just look at the relationship subreddit the first answer is always divorce, it’s become a meme but beyond romantic relationships, i think a lot of us have seen how it can impact work relationships, i’ve had venture partners clearly rely on AI (robotic email responses and even SMS) and that warped their perception and made it harder to connect. It signals laziness and a lack of emotional intelligence AI should enhance and enable connection, not promote isolation, imo this is a real problem it should spark curiosity, create openings for conversations, point out the biases to make us better at connecting with other people, i hope we get to a point where most people are made kinder by ai. I’m seeing the opposite atm, interested in hearing others experiences with this

kelvinjps10 7mo ago
I always find it interesting how, in Reddit any trivial fight or even just different opinions, the advice it's always to end the relationship.
- abpavel 7mo ago
  You deserve better
  - yabutlivnWoods 7mo ago
    A very sycophantic AI style answer. Code bot equivalent being all "you are absolutely right! Here is the unequivocal fix for now and all time!"
    - finghin 7mo ago
      No one would ever have made that comment before GPT. I have a feeling you could be the one that’s poisoned!
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- PhoenixFlame101 7mo ago
  The power of an echo chamber; makes extremism seem logical.
  - MaxBarraclough 7mo ago
    I think it's more than just an echo chamber, it's the community wanting drama more than it wants to help people.
- roncesvalles 7mo ago
  I mean... it's a solution guaranteed to work in a trivial sense. It's not meant to be a serious suggestion but more of a thought experiment, like "hold this as the bar, can you find a solution better than this?" It's like what GiveDirectly says: all charitable interventions should be benchmarked against simply giving the beneficiaries a wad of cash.
- fortmeier 7mo ago
  I think it is some kind of survivership bias. Who is going to give advise on reddit? Maybe people shying away from difficult social interactions?
  - somenameforme 7mo ago
    Paired with the echo chamber effect voting systems create. Anything that affirms the biases of a majority of upvoters gets elevated, anything that contradicts it gets hidden, and so you not infrequently end up with ubiquitous nonsense that then further reinforces the echo chamber as they become self assured. Then real life intervenes, completely goes against the online zeitgeist, and they're all confused.
    - DeathArrow 7mo ago
      If you want to get poor fast, you can follow the most up voted advices on r/wallstreetbets.
      - ahartmetz 7mo ago
        Would be interesting to have data on that. If it was true, you could win by always doing the opposite!
        DeathArrow 7mo ago
        Just because one action is demonstrably harmful does not mean its negation is automatically beneficial. Or, formally, my claim is A implies B. The only logical contrapositive is non B implies non A. (not losing money means not following advices on r/wallstreetbets) But you say: non A implies non B, which is the fallacy of denying the antecedent.
        diydsp 7mo ago
        It doesnt have to be universally true to be true in a mathematical system like options/puts/calls.
- gunsle 7mo ago
  That would be because nearly all of those posts are entirely made up and somehow I guess people can’t tell that?
- 9rx 7mo ago
  Stands to reason. Ask a computer for advice and it is going to give you a computer-centric answer: Restart and try again.
- ModernMech 7mo ago
  > the advice it's always to end the relationship. To be fair, if your interpersonal skills and relationship dynamic are such that you find yourself seriously asking the Internet (Reddit of all places) for relationship advice... yeah, just end it is probably the null hypothesis.
triage8004 7mo ago
Every answer on Reddit feels like: divorce them, dump them, cut them out of your life, or similar.
finghin 7mo ago
Yes, in principle this would be a great way to get a grip on AI personal-decision-making. But there’s a nontrivial chance Claude is more emotionally intelligent than r/AITA. That is not something I enjoy saying.
- intended 7mo ago
  Eh, AITA works very well for the more common and obvious situations. I wonder how MUCH better Claude really is when compared to AITA. Also people are mixing up relationship advice with AITA.
blablabla123 7mo ago
I think this may be selection bias. People asking anonymously (edit: for relationship advice) on Reddit perhaps even with a throwaway account are likely in a desperate situation. So hardly to be compared with the _average_ real life situation. Thus 1. chances are running is a good option and 2. also considering even in 2026 AI still essentially is a statistical machine that doesn’t handle corner-cases at the tails well. Anecdotally as I’ve thoroughly worked and used AI myself. It performs best with google-able stuff that is needle-in-the-haystick like and worst with personal and work advice. The main problem I see is that it’s tempting to use it for that.
- trueno 7mo ago
  > worst with personal and work advice. The main problem I see is that it’s tempting to use it for that. i think i want to expand on this even more. even people ive worked with for years that ive looked up to as brilliant people are starting to use it to conjure up organizational ideas and stuff. they're convinced, on the backs of their hard earned successes, that they're never going to be fallible to the pitfalls of... idk what to call it. AI sycophancy? idk. i guess to add to this, i'm just not sure AI should be referenced when it has anything to do with people. code? sure. people? idk. people are hard, all the internet and books claude or whatever ai is trained on simply doesnt encapsulate the many shades of gray that constitute a human and the absolute depth/breadth of any given human situation. there's just so many variables that aren't accounted for in current day ai stuff, it seems like such a dangerous tool to consult that is largely deleting important social fabrics and journeys people should be taking to learn how to navigate situations with others in personal lives and work lives. what ive seen is claude in my workplace is kind of deleting the chance to push back. even smart people that are using claude and proudly tout only using it at arms length and otherwise have really sound principled engineering qualities or management reportoire are not accepting disagreement with their ideas as easily anymore. they just go back to claude and come back again with another iteration of their thing where they ironed out kinks with claude, and its just such a foot-on-the-gas at all times thing now that the dynamics of human interaction are changing. but to step back, that temptation you talk about... most people in the world aren't having these important discussions about AI. it's less of a temptation and more of a human need---the need to feel heard, validated and right about something. my friend took his life 3 months ago, we only found out after the police released his phone and personal belongings to his brother just how heavy his chatgpt usage was. many people in our communities are saying things like "he wouldve been cooked even without AI" and i just don't believe that. i think that's just the proverbial cope some are smoking to reconcile with these realities. because the truth is we like... straight up lost the ability to intervene in a meaningful way because of AI, it completely pushed us out of the equation because he clapped back with whatever chatgpt gave him when we were simply trying to get through to him. we got to see conversations he had with gpt that were followups to convos we had with him, ones where we went over and let him cry on our shoulders and we'd go home thinking we made some progress. only to wake up to a voicemail of him raging and yelling and lashing out with the very arguments that chatgpt was giving him. it got progressively worse and we knew something was really off, we exhausted every avenue we could to try and get him in specialized care. he was in the reserves so we got in contact with his commander and he was marched out of his house to do a one night stay at a VA spot, but we were too late. he had snapped at that point, he chucked the meds from that one overnight stay away the moment he was released. and the bpd1 snap of epic proportions that followed came with him nuking every known relationship he had in his life and once he was finally involuntarily admitted by his family (WA state joel law) and came back down to reality from the lithium meds or whatever... he simply could not reconcile with the amount of bridges he had burned. It only took him days for him to take his own life after he got to go home. im still not processing any of that well at all. i keep kicking the can down the road and every time i think about it i freeze and my heart sinks. this guy felt more heard by an ai and the ai gave him a safer place to talk than with us and i dont even know where to begin to describe how terrible that makes me feel as a failure to him as a friend.
DeathArrow 7mo ago
I don't have any proof but empirically and intuitively Reddit seems to select for people who hate other people and who can't stand other people. Reddit doesn't seem to reflect the behavior of most people, but a subset.
j45 7mo ago
It's also overrun with AI content that I hope the highly trained researchers would be able to detect and filter out. Or maybe not.
jojomodding 7mo ago
One of the reasons relationship advice subreddits suggest divorce so often is because most people with "small" problems in their relationships don't write an essay about it on Reddit but are able to solve them with the tools/friends they have. So a Reddit post existing indicates the relationship has serious flaws. This is not to defend the study, because asking AI has a lower barrier to entry.
- gunsle 7mo ago
  No, a Reddit post indicates whoever posted is fishing for large scale validation from internet strangers. Their relationship may or may not even exist. Most of the posts are pretty obviously fake. Just like 90% of interactions in general on Reddit these days. That site should be taken out back and put out of its misery.
  - coffe2mug 7mo ago
    But nothing wrong about that. Some decisions are to made in a hunch. Even a therapist doesn't suggest to divorce or not. Victims are often not in a state to decide. They need support (as myself). Humans often don't help. They often suggest - everyone goes through pain. It is part of life blah blah.
  - dessimus 7mo ago
    >That site should be taken out back and put out of its misery. With it gone, a large portion of it's users would come here, reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of HN.
MajorTakeaway 7mo ago
[dead]
ekidd 7mo ago
> just look at the relationship subreddit the first answer is always divorce, it’s become a meme As someone who has been married for a couple of decades, I, too, would recommend divorce to many of the (often-fictional) people asking Reddit for relationship advice. A marriage has a huge impact on whether your life is basically good, or if you pass a big chunk of your time on this Earth in misery. And many of the people (or repost bots) asking for advice on Reddit appear to be in shockingly awful relationships. Especially for people who don't have kids, if your marriage is making you miserable, leave. (But aside from this, yeah, don't ask Reddit for relationship advice. Reddit posters are far more likely to be people who spend their life indoors posting on Reddit, and their default advice leans heavily towards "never interact with anyone, ever.")
- indistinction 7mo ago
  [dead]
classicpsy 7mo ago
[dead]
nurettin 7mo ago
Haven't been there, but I think those typing "divorce" are weighing the situation against the worst outcome to cause a cognitive dissonance, implying "obviously this isn't something worth breaking up over, you need to work harder" in a tongue in cheek low energy way (since there is no way to know that the situation is even real to care about). So rather than taking it literally, which would be naive and assume the worst of people, maybe you should read between the lines. In fact, maybe those who take things literally all the time shouldn't really go there.
coffe2mug 7mo ago
> i’ve had venture partners clearly rely on AI (robotic email responses and even SMS) and that warped their perception and made it harder to connect. It signals laziness and a lack of emotional intelligence This is different. You are also able to detect it. You can question it. You can have a non emotional reaction/action to it. In my circle, there have never ever been real people (incl lifelong friends/siblings) that suggest divorce even in physical abuse. Reason: they don't want to get in the middle - both for economic reasons like giving the victim money/space etc. A third party anonymous can assess it without that.
stdbrouw 7mo ago
My subjective impression is that 5 years ago AITA was actually quite wholesome and the top comments tended to be insightful. The shift towards "set boundaries, always choose yourself, you don't owe anybody anything" seems fairly recent.

kelvinjps10 7mo ago

I always find it interesting how, in Reddit any trivial fight or even just different opinions, the advice it's always to end the relationship.

abpavel 7mo ago
You deserve better
- yabutlivnWoods 7mo ago
  A very sycophantic AI style answer. Code bot equivalent being all "you are absolutely right! Here is the unequivocal fix for now and all time!"
  - finghin 7mo ago
    No one would ever have made that comment before GPT. I have a feeling you could be the one that’s poisoned!
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
PhoenixFlame101 7mo ago
The power of an echo chamber; makes extremism seem logical.
- MaxBarraclough 7mo ago
  I think it's more than just an echo chamber, it's the community wanting drama more than it wants to help people.
roncesvalles 7mo ago
I mean... it's a solution guaranteed to work in a trivial sense. It's not meant to be a serious suggestion but more of a thought experiment, like "hold this as the bar, can you find a solution better than this?" It's like what GiveDirectly says: all charitable interventions should be benchmarked against simply giving the beneficiaries a wad of cash.
fortmeier 7mo ago
I think it is some kind of survivership bias. Who is going to give advise on reddit? Maybe people shying away from difficult social interactions?
- somenameforme 7mo ago
  Paired with the echo chamber effect voting systems create. Anything that affirms the biases of a majority of upvoters gets elevated, anything that contradicts it gets hidden, and so you not infrequently end up with ubiquitous nonsense that then further reinforces the echo chamber as they become self assured. Then real life intervenes, completely goes against the online zeitgeist, and they're all confused.
  - DeathArrow 7mo ago
    If you want to get poor fast, you can follow the most up voted advices on r/wallstreetbets.
    - ahartmetz 7mo ago
      Would be interesting to have data on that. If it was true, you could win by always doing the opposite!
      - DeathArrow 7mo ago
        Just because one action is demonstrably harmful does not mean its negation is automatically beneficial. Or, formally, my claim is A implies B. The only logical contrapositive is non B implies non A. (not losing money means not following advices on r/wallstreetbets) But you say: non A implies non B, which is the fallacy of denying the antecedent.
        diydsp 7mo ago
        It doesnt have to be universally true to be true in a mathematical system like options/puts/calls.
gunsle 7mo ago
That would be because nearly all of those posts are entirely made up and somehow I guess people can’t tell that?
9rx 7mo ago
Stands to reason. Ask a computer for advice and it is going to give you a computer-centric answer: Restart and try again.
ModernMech 7mo ago
> the advice it's always to end the relationship. To be fair, if your interpersonal skills and relationship dynamic are such that you find yourself seriously asking the Internet (Reddit of all places) for relationship advice... yeah, just end it is probably the null hypothesis.

triage8004 7mo ago

Every answer on Reddit feels like: divorce them, dump them, cut them out of your life, or similar.

finghin 7mo ago

Yes, in principle this would be a great way to get a grip on AI personal-decision-making. But there’s a nontrivial chance Claude is more emotionally intelligent than r/AITA. That is not something I enjoy saying.

intended 7mo ago
Eh, AITA works very well for the more common and obvious situations. I wonder how MUCH better Claude really is when compared to AITA. Also people are mixing up relationship advice with AITA.

blablabla123 7mo ago

I think this may be selection bias. People asking anonymously (edit: for relationship advice) on Reddit perhaps even with a throwaway account are likely in a desperate situation. So hardly to be compared with the _average_ real life situation. Thus 1. chances are running is a good option and 2. also considering even in 2026 AI still essentially is a statistical machine that doesn’t handle corner-cases at the tails well. Anecdotally as I’ve thoroughly worked and used AI myself. It performs best with google-able stuff that is needle-in-the-haystick like and worst with personal and work advice. The main problem I see is that it’s tempting to use it for that.

trueno 7mo ago
> worst with personal and work advice. The main problem I see is that it’s tempting to use it for that. i think i want to expand on this even more. even people ive worked with for years that ive looked up to as brilliant people are starting to use it to conjure up organizational ideas and stuff. they're convinced, on the backs of their hard earned successes, that they're never going to be fallible to the pitfalls of... idk what to call it. AI sycophancy? idk. i guess to add to this, i'm just not sure AI should be referenced when it has anything to do with people. code? sure. people? idk. people are hard, all the internet and books claude or whatever ai is trained on simply doesnt encapsulate the many shades of gray that constitute a human and the absolute depth/breadth of any given human situation. there's just so many variables that aren't accounted for in current day ai stuff, it seems like such a dangerous tool to consult that is largely deleting important social fabrics and journeys people should be taking to learn how to navigate situations with others in personal lives and work lives. what ive seen is claude in my workplace is kind of deleting the chance to push back. even smart people that are using claude and proudly tout only using it at arms length and otherwise have really sound principled engineering qualities or management reportoire are not accepting disagreement with their ideas as easily anymore. they just go back to claude and come back again with another iteration of their thing where they ironed out kinks with claude, and its just such a foot-on-the-gas at all times thing now that the dynamics of human interaction are changing. but to step back, that temptation you talk about... most people in the world aren't having these important discussions about AI. it's less of a temptation and more of a human need---the need to feel heard, validated and right about something. my friend took his life 3 months ago, we only found out after the police released his phone and personal belongings to his brother just how heavy his chatgpt usage was. many people in our communities are saying things like "he wouldve been cooked even without AI" and i just don't believe that. i think that's just the proverbial cope some are smoking to reconcile with these realities. because the truth is we like... straight up lost the ability to intervene in a meaningful way because of AI, it completely pushed us out of the equation because he clapped back with whatever chatgpt gave him when we were simply trying to get through to him. we got to see conversations he had with gpt that were followups to convos we had with him, ones where we went over and let him cry on our shoulders and we'd go home thinking we made some progress. only to wake up to a voicemail of him raging and yelling and lashing out with the very arguments that chatgpt was giving him. it got progressively worse and we knew something was really off, we exhausted every avenue we could to try and get him in specialized care. he was in the reserves so we got in contact with his commander and he was marched out of his house to do a one night stay at a VA spot, but we were too late. he had snapped at that point, he chucked the meds from that one overnight stay away the moment he was released. and the bpd1 snap of epic proportions that followed came with him nuking every known relationship he had in his life and once he was finally involuntarily admitted by his family (WA state joel law) and came back down to reality from the lithium meds or whatever... he simply could not reconcile with the amount of bridges he had burned. It only took him days for him to take his own life after he got to go home. im still not processing any of that well at all. i keep kicking the can down the road and every time i think about it i freeze and my heart sinks. this guy felt more heard by an ai and the ai gave him a safer place to talk than with us and i dont even know where to begin to describe how terrible that makes me feel as a failure to him as a friend.

DeathArrow 7mo ago

I don't have any proof but empirically and intuitively Reddit seems to select for people who hate other people and who can't stand other people. Reddit doesn't seem to reflect the behavior of most people, but a subset.

j45 7mo ago

It's also overrun with AI content that I hope the highly trained researchers would be able to detect and filter out. Or maybe not.

jojomodding 7mo ago

One of the reasons relationship advice subreddits suggest divorce so often is because most people with "small" problems in their relationships don't write an essay about it on Reddit but are able to solve them with the tools/friends they have. So a Reddit post existing indicates the relationship has serious flaws. This is not to defend the study, because asking AI has a lower barrier to entry.

gunsle 7mo ago
No, a Reddit post indicates whoever posted is fishing for large scale validation from internet strangers. Their relationship may or may not even exist. Most of the posts are pretty obviously fake. Just like 90% of interactions in general on Reddit these days. That site should be taken out back and put out of its misery.
- coffe2mug 7mo ago
  But nothing wrong about that. Some decisions are to made in a hunch. Even a therapist doesn't suggest to divorce or not. Victims are often not in a state to decide. They need support (as myself). Humans often don't help. They often suggest - everyone goes through pain. It is part of life blah blah.
- dessimus 7mo ago
  >That site should be taken out back and put out of its misery. With it gone, a large portion of it's users would come here, reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of HN.

MajorTakeaway 7mo ago

[dead]

ekidd 7mo ago

> just look at the relationship subreddit the first answer is always divorce, it’s become a meme As someone who has been married for a couple of decades, I, too, would recommend divorce to many of the (often-fictional) people asking Reddit for relationship advice. A marriage has a huge impact on whether your life is basically good, or if you pass a big chunk of your time on this Earth in misery. And many of the people (or repost bots) asking for advice on Reddit appear to be in shockingly awful relationships. Especially for people who don't have kids, if your marriage is making you miserable, leave. (But aside from this, yeah, don't ask Reddit for relationship advice. Reddit posters are far more likely to be people who spend their life indoors posting on Reddit, and their default advice leans heavily towards "never interact with anyone, ever.")

indistinction 7mo ago
[dead]

classicpsy 7mo ago

[dead]

nurettin 7mo ago

Haven't been there, but I think those typing "divorce" are weighing the situation against the worst outcome to cause a cognitive dissonance, implying "obviously this isn't something worth breaking up over, you need to work harder" in a tongue in cheek low energy way (since there is no way to know that the situation is even real to care about). So rather than taking it literally, which would be naive and assume the worst of people, maybe you should read between the lines. In fact, maybe those who take things literally all the time shouldn't really go there.

coffe2mug 7mo ago

> i’ve had venture partners clearly rely on AI (robotic email responses and even SMS) and that warped their perception and made it harder to connect. It signals laziness and a lack of emotional intelligence This is different. You are also able to detect it. You can question it. You can have a non emotional reaction/action to it. In my circle, there have never ever been real people (incl lifelong friends/siblings) that suggest divorce even in physical abuse. Reason: they don't want to get in the middle - both for economic reasons like giving the victim money/space etc. A third party anonymous can assess it without that.

stdbrouw 7mo ago

My subjective impression is that 5 years ago AITA was actually quite wholesome and the top comments tended to be insightful. The shift towards "set boundaries, always choose yourself, you don't owe anybody anything" seems fairly recent.