My frustrations with Reddit

This is a bit of a "water is wet" kind of post, but as prolific user of reddit, I'm so tired of the website's militantly caustic culture. As a general rule of thumb, Redditors are so damn aggressive in pushing whatever views they got onto others, and nuance is an almost alien concept to them. Just about anything you submit will "trigger" someone (especially if post to a larger sub), regardless of what world views they follow. God have mercy on those who go against the hive mind in a political themed sub.

Case in point, just today I was scrolling through an official discussion thread of the new Conjuring movie in r/horror. Someone wrote that they enjoyed the film and "wished for more." They were down-voted into oblivion, and another other user accused them of being the director's sock-pocket account.

I've got a few personal experiences I would like to share here. One time I shared an artwork of a skinwalker on r/Imaginarymonsters, as I thought it was relatively well made. Some user decried it as "cultural appropriation", and accused it of something on the lines of trivializing "real native fears."

Another time, I submitted a photograph of ISIS militants in r/militaryporn (a war and military photography sub). Keep in mind, as I'm a very visual person, war photography is a hobby of mine. I've have a fascination with photographs and artworks of combatants from all sides in all manner of historical and ongoing conflicts around the globe. In other words, I enjoy viewing images of Croatian fighters in the Bosnian War as much as I enjoy photographs of Liberian Rebels in the Liberian Civil Wars. I don't soapbox for any particular side. One commenter accused me of being an ISIS shill, who was "helping them" with my post.

Similarly, I posted a picture of a Shining Path (a "communist" rebel group/drug cartel in Peru) fighter in that same sub. Photographs of Shining Path fighter are extremely difficult to come by, and I've only found maybe a little more then a dozen of them in my years of hours long web-surfing sessions. When you search "Shining Path" on Getty Images, there's only one actual photo of their fighters in the results. The rest are just peasants displaced by their attacks, press releases made about them, some arrested leaders in custody, and a handful of government soldiers and anti rebel self defense groups. Naturally, I tend to gravitate towards the very few I'm able to find.

Like with the ISIS post, I got a handful of users that complained "why are terrorists featured here" and followed up with "not military." I'm guessing that they're teenage or juvenile minded gamers, who assume that war is flashy, state of the art firepower and fancy uniforms. Akin to how the US military is depicted in first person shooters. I don't think it has dawned on them, that in real life, wars today are mostly fought by motley and ill disciplined militias and insurgents.

Yeah reddit is a wasteland more toxic then Chernobyl. Sometimes, I feel like I need to consult a lawyer every time I post something there. Just so I could hopefully avoid the axe grinders misinterpreting/misrepresenting my intentions and lunging at my throat for it. On second thought, they'll just find another reason to crusade at my posts (probably entailing nitpicking my typos and and throwing "karma whore" accusations).

 

Reddit is a little better than say facebook or Twitter, but upvotes and downvotes are still heavily based on feels before reals.

I think I posted this before, but when the first gov't stimuli were being distributed as well as increased unemployment, I posted on a certain subreddit that inflation was likely. My logic was with increased cash but lower output due to lockdowns and other restrictions, more money would be chasing fewer goods.

I was downvoted, I think because people assumed I thought the stimuli and unemployment benefits were bad. And that probably made them feel bad. I never said that the stimulus was bad, I only pointed out a potential side effect. Turns out I was wrong about inflation, of course, at least based on the first few stimulus programs.

 

I've posted maybe three times on Reddit, and I think I had to make a new account each time because they were so far between that even my device had forgotten who I was supposed to be. From what I've read and the few times I've been on it, it's definitely not the sort of place where I would thrive. That's why I had the mods ban me from the Debate Room. Just somewhere I don't belong.

 

I've never understood why people conflate a website with a particular type of person. I don't think you can say that all Redditors are X. What you're seeing here is surely just human tendencies brought out by virtue of anonymity. The statement, "Redditors are so damn aggressive in pushing whatever views they got onto others, and nuance is an almost alien concept to them," doesn't make any sense. It's like saying that everyone on Facebook is this or that negative thing... Reddit is just a general website where millions of people discuss topics. Of course you're going to run into idiots and people unwilling to properly engage. That doesn't mean that every single Redditor is incapable of nuance and are hyper aggressive.

 

Plus the 'social credit' system that allows downvoting. Such a system encourages mob mentality and mass ingroup bias.

 

Downvoting is such a terrible system!

 

True, very true indeed. I've also stumbled and been a part of many fascinating discussions on all manners of topics. And yeah, I admit that I was painting reddit in with overly broad strokes. Which, I've addressed in my edit. However, since I've far more encounters with overly combative or just plain trollish asshats then I care to have, it's a tad easy for me to make such generalizations.

 

Cliques. People start becoming more and more hostile. Certain people leave, others stay. When this repeats for over ten years, you'll have cliques who chase away those that differ and accept those who don't.

The biggest argument against your statement is 4chan and their politics board, I believe anyone in their sane mind can easily conflate that with a particular type of person (or in specific, political view).

There's also what others raised, certain websites acticely encourage this selection process. Reddit's downvotes facilitate mob mentality.

 

I subscribe to a Red Dwarf sub and recently someone started a thread asking which actor was best as ship computer Holly. I said the original played by Norman Lovett was best and that Hattie Hayridge’s version was awful. Within the next hour I received 11 downvotes (enough to render my comment ‘invisible’).

Then just the other day I was asking on an iPhone sub about getting a battery replaced and said I might just take it to one of these Indian phone booths you find in market places, and see how much they charge. An hour or so later I had some numbnut accusing me of being a racist, and they were deadly serious too

 

And then most of them went on to be in Taxi.

 

I hate when that happens. Especially when you try to explain yourself to them, they find more ways to interpret your words into a dog whistle for something off the mark of what you're actually talking about. Made all of the worse, when that person is joined by a lynch mob hellbent on burning you at the stake.

 

I think the issue with Reddit, if I may generalise, is that it's a product of internet culture. It's one of the "meme" sites to which a lot of younger people gravitate. I did say that it's so large as to be almost a general site filled with a plethora of different types of people, but I was wrong in some respects. It's more suited to a certain demographic. Also, as mentioned earlier, cliques are unhelpful in quite a few ways.

 

This. Some people are mostly interested in acting cool and using hip internet slang. And it always involves sarcasm and insults. They go to Reddit and 4Chan and similar places. I think it can become an addiction.

 

Exactly! Fortunately no one joined in with his ridiculous line of argument, but he did try and twist everything I said. It became quite amusing but enough was enough and I reported him for harassment. A pointless exercise on Reddit, but it made me feel slightly better.

 

Yeah Reddit is a mean place with lots of mean people who are mean because they think it makes them look cool. What they don't realize is that cruelty is easy to do.