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Controversially, this is what I love Reddit for. I (and I believe a lot of other HN frequents) live in a bubble. We rarely meet people outside of the bubble -
by kika 13y ago
Controversially, this is what I love Reddit for.
I (and I believe a lot of other HN frequents) live in a bubble. We rarely meet people outside of the bubble - ask yourself when did you speak IRL with a real racist, for example? I remember this recent thread about his/her/them/their and a poor chap from Joyent. This is a special form of "sexism for us in the bubble". You just don't want to know what real sexism is.
Reddit allows me to look outside this bubble without actually meeting these people. And to adjust my gauges, and to educate myself (it's easy to laugh at some weird looking gal on the internets, but much less easy if you've learned what she went through and what her disease means, etc).
TL;DR: If you feel the urge to laugh and you see that the Reddit crowd laughs too, then probably you need to google around first. Chances are you won't be able to laugh and sometimes you'd cry instead. Which in itself a useful emotional exercise for (way too much) rational people.
- mherkender 13y agoI see it a bit differently myself. All online communities seem to end up the same way, people group together based on shared interests, which tends to lead to a false-consensus bias. Ironically, I think much of reddit has fallen victim to this bias, while simultaneously believing reddit is resistant to these kinds of biases because it is free-speech friendly. But in actuality, reddit is generally filled with straight, white, English-speaking, college educated, single, 18-25, middle-class males [1] [2]. Reddit sees more of traits, perspectives, problems, etc of these groups and less of others. I see a lot of hostility towards perspectives that come from groups who fall outside the criteria above. In other words, I see plenty of racists on reddit -- just not non-white racists. In my opinion, this is not looking outside my bubble, it's looking in at a smaller part of my own bubble. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/gzb2w/i_made_a_basic_reddit_demographic_survey_lets/c1re10k http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/gzb2w/i_made_a_b... [2] http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/social-media-stats/2012-social-network-analysis-report/#Reddit http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/social-media-stats/2012-soc...
- kika 13y agoIMHO, Reddit is just too big a community, there's no shared interest. Just too many people. I'm speaking about large subreddits like the one discussed here, /politics, etc. Also, there's no problem "seeing" plenty of racists on Reddit or whereever, but I was talking real life.
- mherkender 13y agoSize is not diversity, nor does it prevent shared interests.