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.

  • ssjmarx [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I suddenly have like three or four users picking apart everything I said in the least generous way possible

    This behavior is encouraged by the upvote/downvote algorithm. It's encouraged on this site too, to be clear, but heavy moderation and a relatively homogeneous site culture prevents it (you can see the same effect at play in the "good" subreddits, like askscience). Join Reddit and you will either be turned into the kind of pedantic asshole you see everyone else being, or you will forever be the one being pedantically assholed at.

    I browse reddit only with the Stealth app to see posts about my hobbies and major news stories. That way I don't have to have an account.

      • ssjmarx [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I think an algo with a heavy bias towards new and randomly-chosen content is the way to go. Have upvotes make content more visible, but have a hard limit on how many "popular" posts can exist at once, something like 1 popular post per hundred random posts (the more populated the community, the higher the threshold should be). This makes karma farming difficult to impossible, and means that most comment threads should only have a couple people in them.