I deleted Reddit from my home screen when the mods did the fake strike and I've mostly kept off of it since then, but in the past few weeks I've opened it out of boredom and holy God is it just a truly awful place. My only explanation is that it's a window into the psyche of the American middle class email job worker and they're so fucking brain rotten that it hurts to even look at.
I thought I was misremembering or that 
was just a good meme, but that site really does represent the absolute worst of American liberalism. I don't even have anything specific to say, I just need to scrape out the festering mass that a 15 minute scroll session there created in my brain.
I really do think that made a difference. Don't get me wrong, it was always shitty, but I think the people who stuck around and keep commenting are mostly the ones so addicted to arguing online they downloaded the official reddit app to keep going, while the slightly less brain broken people just said fuck it.
I gave it a chance because lemmy wasn’t quite ready yet. It’s better here now and I’m slowly spending more time here than there.
I've always preferred smaller online communities. I think you're right though, there's a sweet spot.
Even a month ago it was kinda a ghost town. Enough people have finally moved over to make it more interesting. Having just experienced yet another unexpected but adverse interaction with a toxic reddit mod I think I’m pretty much done there.
Yeah I've on Hexbear since the start which has been a bit more active. I jumped on Lemmy around the same time and there wasn't much.
I went back a couple times because no instance has really got a large MMA community at this point and reddit had an active sub on r/mma.
I don't know if it's because I've been away for a while, but it did seem like there was a lot of anger.
Yeah I pretty much only use reddit for sports stuff and I've noticed there being a lot more aggressive weird shit on there lately. People are talking about sports like it's politics. Maybe they always have and I'm just noticing it now though.
It’s all bots, angry people, and toxic mods now. All the quality contributors have long departed.
I got a random permanent ban from the atheism sub for mentioning that some countries in Africa are asking adult men to get circumcised for HIV control. Apparently I’m advocating for mutilation, am sick, and was threatened to never contact them again. It was very strange.
Lol to be fair the one argument I've gotten in on here was about circumcision. People are pretty wild about that online.
its soooo angry in there. I use it to keep up with manga and game communities mostly, dont feel like having 8 discord instances just to know when a new chapter drops and the difference in tone on reddit versus something like tik tok is nuts, the redditors are constantly in a near catatonic rage state. It feels like a recent development too, I dont remember it always being like this.
It's always been a rage bait generator. I'm sure it's gotten worse, but people interact with reddit most when angerry enough to make comments. Always has been.
I have a 15 yo account. It followed the typical ark: a lot of fun, all the people come out to game the system for personal gain, people leave because it now sucks. Reddit was indeed a great place until 2010 or so.
dunno about always being that way, but in the last few years i def needed a loooong filter list to make the frontpage bearable
Definitely wasn’t always that way but the number of angry people increased over the years and they don’t seem to have moved on yet.
That part about who reddit represents is so true. I feel so alienated from those people unless it's a niche hobby topic. They overwhelming represent a cross-section of white middle class office workers who were all told they were gifted as kids. They're so smug and smarmy. They're all addicted to porn too.
They're all addicted to porn too.
They tend to accuse feeeemales of "attention whoring" if they dare to exist on a picture of something but also expect sexual stimulation from the same feeeemale.
"Already checked guys, no gw posts!" On anything where the poster indicates they might have breasts
The part that's even more alienating about it for me is that I'm from the same stock as them. I was the smart kid in all the gifted classes, I never wanted for anything, my parents were a Republican booster dad and a Ralph Nader volunteer mom who my dad would pay to not vote every election. I came from exactly where they all do so the fact that they choose to see the world through the obviously and brutally false lense of meritocracy just kills me.
I have poor and working class friends in real life and their politically incoherent views don't bother me because I can understand why they're losing the thread. On the other hand, I make a point of really digging into the comfortable liberals I know because they have no excuse for not seeing the world for what it really is. With the personal social aspect removed in a place like Reddit, those comfortable liberals are way too dug in to get them to engage in an ounce of self reflection and they can brush you off as an agent of misinformatzyion if you press them.
I really fucking hate it there.
my parents were a Republican booster dad and a Ralph Nader volunteer mom who my dad would pay to not vote every election
Hold up, what's this now?
Yeah my background is not boring. I'm very lucky that my dad was terrible with money or we would have had a whole lot of it.
r/europe has to be one of the most bigoted subs I've seen, the comments are disgusting, but it's ok you see, because it's dignified cultured european racism.
I remember one guy felt irked by their obtrusive racism, and created "tolerant Europe" sub which slide into the same thing in like a week then died because it was redundant lol.
Yeah, I come from the area and it was a breath of fresh air seeing people mocking the everday situation here, where there is just a shitton of xenophobia baked into the culture. Or at least that’s how I saw that subreddit. It made it easier to cope with dealing with the everday casual xenophobia.
But yeah I understand that it’s a lot at the same time and that it isn’t for everyone. Honestly it’s probably for the best that it went down do people that didn’t go on there for the irony, but took it seriously don’t have a large platform like r/2balkan4you for their antics.
I found a new, fairly specific sub that seemed pretty harmless yesterday, and being bored out of my mind at my job I decided to look thru some of the top all time
I think the fifth or so post had a top comment of a mod asking people to not be racist and someone following that with a wikipedia entry about how all Chinese eat dogs and have a holiday for it and just so much unbridled racism sooooo...no, not just a meme
There is no sub safe from sinophobia. Main reason i left that shithole.
My only explanation is that it's a window into the psyche of the American middle class email job worker and they're so fucking brain rotten that it hurts to even look at.
They get their personality cues from, like, fucking The Office and it shows.
like, the last subreddits i was active in were a few niche band subreddits and 196 just as it was starting to get worse and worse bcs like, as shit as the western chauvinism in there is, it was at least, idk, a space where i could be openly queer and shit, even though it was like stuffed to the gills with chasers (at least they weren't open transphobes / queerphobes ig) and i was kind of just a pick me femboy egg gradually coming to terms with non gender comformity.
but yeah, eventually i got banned for telling someone to minecraft themselves for doing like an "upvote to scare the tankies" thing over an image of Syngman Rhee, either that or for saying basically the same to someone saying that the US should go back into afghanistan, i cant remember which one the ban was for, and then i decided to like, just delete my account
196 is a hive of scum and villainy my god. unironic joe biden praise like, weekly from the vaunted 'leftists and anarchists' of
"upvote to scare the tankies" thing over an image of Syngman Rhee
I thought it was like, decently common consensus that Rhee was a brutal dictator, I've certainly seen liberal Youtubers say as much (in a "he was just as bad as Kim" way but still), but I guess nothing is too far for Vaushite radlibs if it pisses off the tankie boogeyman.
Libs are currently normalizing even SS apologia, what is one little puppet dictator for them.
Sometimes im on reddit and i forget that im not on hexbear and im like boy the threads sure are sarcastic today
Sometimes im on reddit and i forget that im not on hexbear and im like boy the threads sure are sarcastic today
It's almost as if Redditors can't help using the same exhausting smug sarcastic templates over and over again.
There's like 5 subs I check on every now and then and none of them are mainstream. Reddit had been an astroturfed liberal hellscape for a while but I'm just completely done with it now. I think a lot of the big corporate sponsored social media is on life support, Reddit and twitter are destroying themselves, nobody cares about facebook/meta and everyone else has either moved on to smaller independent platforms or group chat. I hope this trend continues because relying on techbros and megacorps for a public forum of communication could never end well.
Reddit is only good for one thing for me anymore, sports discussion. Anything else it's like you said, just painfully liberal and painfully lame
And even then they have awful takes. when I’m looking up how to do some random shit on the computer somehow China and Russia bashing breaks out. Libs stfu challenge
The Hamilton hate is unreal. I hope he beats Verstappen sometime soon just for the
reactionI was skipping past comments and read the first sentence as referring to Alexander Hamilton
I only use it for specific game subreddits anymore, but even that's slowly being supplanted by discord servers
Every sub has lost major traffic. Here are three random examples
https://subredditstats.com/r/whatisthisthing
Show
https://subredditstats.com/r/visiblemending
Show
https://subredditstats.com/r/skincareaddiction
Show
whoever is left is... a robot, oblivious, addicted, posting into the void... or what
We checked against some other stats and while it was less disastrous we're still seeing a 30% drop and right now there is a very obvious declining trend downwards occurring across communities, which isn't good.
oh you mean the site can't could the posts because it uses the api to count but the api was limited. well that makes sense.
I do find myself missing /r/TGCJ and /r/gamingcirclejerk but I don't really feel like remaking my account.
TGCG is so fun but probably not a net gain for anyone's health. As long as it's not 4tran I guess.
It's definitely not for everyone at the very least.
For me personally it was a way to vent any bad vibes into the relative void and it ended up being one of the only communities where I could be unapologetically trans until I came here.
I deleted my account and feel so much better. I still browse to keep up with news or interests that don’t have communities on here, but there is so much less psychic damage when I’m not engaging.
I think reddit is some sort of louche extraction machine by the archons while we're stuck in samsara. Reddit is only suffering these days. I used to use an app that could filter out by sub, so I would never run across the emotionally draining posts (about 95% of them) and then all apps were banned, and it's worse for my mental health than going at it without a condom.
F1 subreddit and Lewis Hamilton
