Every few months I go dip my toes back into posting on reddit for some reason. Maybe it's because I'm a bit of an idiot who never learns, but to my credit it's never overtly political stuff or concerning current events. Don't want to give myself an aneurysm, after all. Usually it's just a mix of hobby stuff and a variety of subs for tv shows I'm watching.
Commenting isn't too bad for the most part, but for some reason posting really sucks. Maybe I'm just sharing a thought I had, a cool idea, maybe a theory for an ongoing tv show, posted in a friendly and conversational way that is by no means signalling I'm looking for an argument. Then I hit post and within a few minutes I'm instantly reminded that reddit isn't a shithole just because of its politics, but also because its userbase is full of scumfuck, pedantic assholes.
My posts always gets downvoted to 0, and I suddenly have like three or four users picking apart everything I said in the least generous way possible. Comments don't seem to have this problem, which makes me think the new filter on subreddits is populated disproportionately by the worst of the redditors. It is these people who disproportionately decide which posts blow up and which posts don't.
demographics - some proportional split of bots, US military, tech workers , some disaffected proles with an education who failed to secure their rightful place in the hierarchy - with the vast majority being from the anglosphere and some from the rest of 'the west'. Also, the structure of the site with moderators - and disguised reddit staff - policing. In other words, its a forum made up of the contributions of enforcers of the western hegemony and class hierarchies. The middle of the pyramid - kick down & lick up - given a voice, and unsurprisingly its pretty vile.
I remember an actual military general was a head mod at /r/technology before he was exposed.
its likely that most moderators, certainly the so called super-mods, are paid staff. The vast majority of people don't have the time or inclination to do that kind of thing, certainly not without renumeration. I imagine there are exceptions, obsessives or hobbyists or idealogues, but even then such people need to have the time to do this kind of thing, which means they're certainly not coming from the bottom of the pyramid nationally or globally. With the structure of that site being what it is - silos of information/contribution policed by anonymous accounts - it looks to me a lot like an informational warfare experiment, one big psyop.
targeting the demographics it does - originally and most notably tech workers, but broadly the PMC - makes sense because they have skills and educations and a place in the hierarchy that make them somewhat useful/dangerous to a state. Like they target academics, not via that site of course but in other ways.
edit; I forgot to mention another common category of user/poster/moderator, the grifter. The merchants and artists and scammers looking to promote their brand/show/product etc and sometimes denigrate that of their rivals. This is more difficult on reddit because of the relative anonymity but wherever people gather the vultures circle too.