I've wondered why Twitter seems far more toxic than Reddit (certain now-banned subreddits excluded) and I believe the downvote is a powerful tool used to achieve this, along with Reddit's community-style moderation, even though that can border on toxic itself at times.
Reddit is not toxic if you agree with the majority views. If not it is probably the most toxic social media.
So other views people leave and so reddit remains a bubble of like minded people that don't see their toxicity.
You can just look at some popular subreddits like iata i am the asshole or idiotsincar or murdered by words, justiceserved to name a few and many other where people just laugh and are being toxic towars other people. Most popular posts are also angry ones.
For a good mental health is imperative to avoid reddit, or at least just take part in tech/thinvs you love, but even there the neagtive and frustrated people will bring their issue there.
Reddit is diverse. I hear a lot of “Reddit is toxic”. Or that “Reddit is the best place”. Both are correct. It is not only about the majority view. It is mainly about which subreddits you pick. I am not a massive Redditor. Yet, for some time, I opened r/MachineLearning daily.
Some subreddits are/were highly toxic (e.g. the infamous r/incels). Some other are full of vulnerable life stories you won’t find anywhere else. People won’t post them on their public FB feeds; not everyone writes anonymous blogs. Any coverage of such topics by journalists (if the topic gets ever covered) is likely to focus on a handful of cases, be biased and heavily edited.
Another subreddit with not so much majority view is CMV:
https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/.
It is heart-warming (and mind-stimulating) to see people open to changing their minds. Compare and contrast with Twitter, where there are no enough characters to express a more nuanced argument. And views are usually pushed down one’s throat (if they ever leave a bubble).
I disagree with your overall point that reddit is diverse (and it is beyond the scope of this comment to mention why) but I'd like to chime in with my love of ChangeMyView.
I just love the idea that you can have a judgement free place to discuss things openly and get reasoned replies without being piled on.
Sometimes we hold views which are controversial, and it's great that we can had a non-adversarial discussion about those things.
The only downside is that the person asking to change their view might end up being right in the end, and that the view should not have been changed, but that's against the spirit of the subreddit.
It also has some minor problems of people asking to change their view but have no honest intention of doing so.
But regardless of that, I love that subreddit and I'm sure it wouldn't be possible without good moderation.
On the contrary, it's an objectively true statement, and everyone already knows the reasons why. Therefore, explaining it here is what would be flamebaity, since even those that know the reasons still try to disingenuously pretend the reasons aren't valid. What is valid is the point made, since it addresses a point of the previous comment directly.
I find C.M.V. essentially failed due to the vote system.
All the upvoted, visible views are the same trite repetition topics that have been done a thousand times before that are also about hot button political issues: more interesting apolitical C.M.V.'s are often downvoted for not being political enough. I've seen views about optiomality of certain cooking methods be downvoted there.
> I disagree with your overall point that reddit is diverse
To make it clear, I know that the whole Reddit demographic is not representative.
However, each channel subreddit has a different demographic. Too much of a male perspective? Go to r/TwoXChromosomes/. Too libertarian or heteronormative? You can find your channels too.
I disagree with the notion that subreddits can be so considered atomically and not part of a whole. r/Fantasy has had this problem where the regulars and the moderators are generally great, but authors they invite to do AMAs will often risk being harassed by users who aren't even regulars of r/Fantasy. The mods even had to go to other subreddits for new beta features condemning some planned stuff specifically because it would enable even more harassment of authors.
For awhile I was harassed in almost every subreddit I frequented because I’d posted in The Donald. Not even a full throated support of Trump just a post-2016 election “well let’s see how he does” sort of support.
>For a good mental health is imperative to avoid reddit, or at least just take part in tech/thinvs you love, but even there the neagtive and frustrated people will bring their issue there.
I got into a real black hole of posting about politics on Reddit during lockdown, which as someone with fairly anti-authoritarian convictions couldn't have been timed more horrendously. Deleted all my accounts and it did wonders for my sanity.
This is a good point. Reddit is a self-described hive mind and there are certainly things that will get you abused.
I imagine you were fairly safe from death and rape threats, as happens frequently on Twitter, but you're right it's not a welcoming place for everyone, at least outside of certain subs.
Reddit is a particular demographic and mostly a particular philosophical lean.
And there are ways for users to be dicks without the extreme behaviour you get on Twitter. I'm sure it happens on Reddit too but it seems more managed.
Fortunately in my case at least the unpleasantness was limited to the odd loony stalking me across the site to carry on arguments that were several days stale. I did get told to kill myself once, but the person making that suggestion sounded so unhinged their rant had very little weight! To be honest it wasn't abuse from other users that were affecting my mental health at all, it was the never-ending doomscroll of depressing content and the people who seemed almost gleeful at bad news because it validated their worldview (and this ironically seems to apply across the political spectrum). /r/ukpolitics prior to perhaps 2015 or so was something really special because people entertained ideas they disagreed with for the purpose of debate, rather than this ideological total war that is the norm on the internet now where any inch of retreat is cowardly and any notion that the "enemy's" arguments might have a point is treason. Of course it wasn't perfect (/pol/ raided it from time to time which would crapflood the whole sub with obvious bait), but the arguments were mostly good-faith debate rather than simply rhetorical cudgels to hit your opponent with.
That's what made me leave Reddit fundamentally, I wanted a debate rather than a conflict. I want people who'll tell me why I'm wrong, not people who'll call me an irredeemable piece of shit for not clicking my fingers and 100% agreeing with some philosophy neither of us really had an in-depth knowledge of. It's like internet debates (especially on Twitter) have adopted the old Calvinist notion of "total depravity" for the modern age. It's not even about being right, it's about other people being wrong and that'll make you an angry, bitter person if you're jumping headlong into that world for hours a day.
> Reddit is not toxic if you agree with the majority views.
Different subreddits will have different majorities with different views, no?
> toxicity ... toxic towars other people
What does this mean? For example, if you are sitting inside your bubble and laughing at the outsiders, who don't even come to your bubble, is there any toxicity going on?
I've been on Reddit for over 10 years now and have to agree. Generally all the larger subreddits are fairly left.
There have been some hard right subs, but most of the larger ones are banned now.
I find a lot of the mods of large subs are quite power hungry too, for example r/soccer. If someone breaks some news, linking good sources, correct post format etc. mods will regularly take the post down and repost it themselves or just leave their own posts up so they get the karma for it.
When I first joined that kind of thing bothered me, and I enjoyed getting internet points and actively tried to get karma. Now if I think something is funny or relevant I'll post it, but generally avoid big subs and stick to smaller niche ones about a certain topic, like a phone, programming language, football club, watch brand, cryptocurrency etc.
> There have been some hard right subs, but most of the larger ones are banned now.
I can't even begin to express the emotion from the thought that someone may decide to erase a part of your life. This is what puts me off social networks in general.
Avoid the large ones, I am not even referring at politics, any big movie,book,game subbreddit will be filled with garbage , better to find or create a subreddit with strict rules.
For politics, I have no advice , probably try real life
That still doesn't help. Unless you 100% tow the party line in whatever sub you're on you will get inundated with hate.
Try telling any car sub that Toyotas can break or that Germany's automotive regulations are even slightly over-bearing and see where that gets you. No matter how narrowly you scope your dissent from the local norms the platform rewards everyone dog-piling onto the dissenter. There is simply no room for conversation on that platform and that drives out anyone who doesn't extremely align with whatever the local opinion on a given sub is so eventually all subs become filter bubbles almost completely dominated by one set of views and you basically can't have any meaningful exchange unless it's ten levels of comments deep where the masses won't see it and crap on it.
>Try telling any car sub that Toyotas can break or that Germany's automotive regulations are even slightly over-bearing
On r/justrolledintotheshop, a fairly large mechanic and car enthusiast subreddit, those kind of discussions are commonplace. The mechanics will say "toyotas are usually reliable" and then also agree that they suffer from rust issues. You are being heavily hyperbolic or refusing to see counterexamples to your belief
I honestly think some people are just not used to get pushback on their ideas. Whether they are surrounded by like-minded individuals in real life or they just haven't ever shared their believes/thoughts much, I don't know. But I quite often see people shocked by encountering the concept that their ideas aren't perfect.
Couple that with the difficulty of reading intent and intensity in a written media and you get people that believe conversations are heavily skewed against them.
It’s probably a controversial opinion, but when it comes to certain subjects like accepting homosexuality or just accepting the existence of trans people, it is no longer politics - not doing so is a moral failing. That’s not left-leaning anymore than believing that war crimes are bad.
While reddit is actually left leaning in a more purely political view as well, I don’t find conservative viewpoints banned/discriminated against that are actually political, only those that are anti-people — which is welcome.
This is an almost natural consequence. The largest sub-groups start out with having most of the same people of the whole society. Then the minorities get turned off and leave to smaller sub-groups where they feel more welcome.
>Different subreddits will have different majorities with different views, no?
No, not really.
Ignoring standard left/right policy bickering points you are still going to catch a lot of hate on Reddit if you don't think people are fundamentally untrustworthy by default and that centralized authorities (be they governments, academia, professional organizations or BigCo) are fundamentally trustworthy and credible by default.
Offend upper middle class consumer sensibilities and you'll catch a whole lot of hate from that direction too.
It's hard for me to accept such a final "No" when there seems to be a sub for literally every viewpoint. However, I am willing to accept that those subs get brigaded and maybe that's what you're referring to?
As if there would be more and less popular opinions among the general population? Like, I would be surprised if r/clojure had more subscribers than a gaming sub.
Then try /r/libertarianuncensored or /r/libertarian_party or make your own sub that follows your own leanings. This idea that you straight up can't find a community that has whatever particular leaning you're looking for doesn't seem very accurate.
"am I the asshole" and idiotsincars are pretty normal places where people can politely disagree; MurderedByWords and Politics are political echochambers and that territory brings a bit of toxicity like black-and-white thinking, but I would only call "justiceserved" particularly toxic.
>am I the asshole" and idiotsincars are pretty normal places where people can politely disagree
These places are echo chambners too you just don't realize it because you agree with the echo.
Go on I am the asshole and give even the slightest hint of approval for a parent that's parenting in a traditional manner (e.g. approving of a "my house my rules" attitude toward an older teenager) and you'll get all sorts of hate.
Go on idiots in cars and talk about how people can't be expect widespread compliance for asinine road signage (like a 55mph speed limit on an interstate highway designed and marked for a much higher speed) and you'll be inundated with "hurr durr the law is the law" types.
There are visceral reactions (I’m pretty sure you can catch yourself doing the same from time to time as well), but my opinion/experience is that well-meaning and well-explained comments are well-received in most of the not-completely echo-chamber subreddits.
I can check from my armchair, thanks. You get lots of different opinions, it's just that the hive mind forms an opinion around whatever the current topic du jour is. This opinion changes day to day, it's not a place where people have political agendas that are exacerbated by like minds. It's just people in large groups.
I learned this the hard way in my mid twenties. So many angry people, wasting their valuable time and energy.
In life you're the only judge, as long as you're not doing anything which hurts another person you can do whatever you want. Say you only want to live in a city with fresh chocolate almond croissants. This is not subject to Reddit approval. The opinions of others, particularly random people should have absolutely no bearing on your life. But if you're chasing fake Reddit status, you can quickly lose sight of this.
I find myself agreeing. I utilize a few subreddits from time to time, mostly about entertainment, and all of them have very homogeneous opinions and aggressively downvote subjective dissent and verbally gang up against it, which I've certainly not noticed elsewhere.
The internet king of pluriformity and aggressive dissent still remains 4chan. A lack of identity does seem a good way to facilitate dissent.
Local subreddits can also be incredibly toxic. I thought that moderating one of them would be fun, but I got stalked and harassed. Other mods had it worse. I thought people would appreciate the Internet janitors that occasionally improve the subreddit, but indifference is the best I could wish for.
Thankfully, I didn't have the wrong opinions. Another mod did, and there were threads calling for his resignation, for a change of mods. Of course, no one actually volunteered their own effort.
Hacker News is smaller, and has much tighter moderation. The conversation tends to stay civilised. I can't remember a negative interaction here. On reddit, they're the norm.
> The conversation tends to stay civilised. I can't remember a negative interaction here.
That's very much in the eye of the beholder. This isn't my first account (I abandoned my previous one a few years ago) and I chose the name for a good reason. The only good thing I can say is that my username does not seem to have had an effect on downvoting behavior.
There are plenty of communities on Reddit that are considerably smaller than HN and either have good moderation or are unknown enough to be able to do well without it. HN isn't special, or at least not any more special than the rest.
The front page content changed. There's more and more outrage porn and other content that work on your anger. I noticed that the quality of the community changed accordingly, and became more unpleasant to interact with.
I used to post waaaaay too much, but lost all interest in it because there are only downsides nowadays.
Personally, I think it's just because of subreddits:
- Well-moderated subreddits are bubbles of locally higher quality
- Discussions on one subreddit stay contained within it - each subreddit is also a social bubble
On Twitter, there's no quality standards moderation, and Tweets spread along the social graph, not within bounded communities. You may be discussing a niche topic with a group of like-minded friends, but it takes one asshole in your, or your friends', follower list, for your tweet to suddenly gain attention with a larger group of assholes, who then are free to inject themselves into the conversation.
This is exactly it. You can find subreddits that match your interests and your desired level of civility. Somebody else can find theirs, and you can live in separate spheres.
People also heavily use alts on Reddit, which I think makes them less self-conscious about conforming to standards of behavior, because if they are feeling a bit pissed off and aggro about something they can switch to a different alt and a different subreddit where they can vent and it's acceptable behavior. It's much more like the real world where different physical spaces allow outlets for different kinds of behavior, where you can be polite and deferential at work and then go home to your living room and tell your brother in law that your boss is a rat bastard and cheerfully cuss up a storm watching sports together.
Twitter seems to have a totalizing effect on people's personalities, I think because people realize there's only one context, and therefore only room for one version of themselves. They talk one way all the time. If someone I follow for software news and insight posts a beef Wellington recipe or talks about the whiskey they got for their birthday, they sound exactly like they do when they're talking about software. Real people don't act that way! You know if you only work with somebody then you only know a fraction of who they are, and you crave a glimpse behind the curtain. I think online communities where identities are intended to correspond to real people and there is no compartmentalization of space will always suffer from this totalizing effect, where a percentage of people, small but enough to poison things, choose the worst part of themselves to stand in for the rest of them.
It has nothing to do with bubble or not. It's just twitter only allows shalow takes with no nuances, so people either are lazy and give in to that, or they are frustrated by not being able to say what they want to say and get angry instead. My personal view is bubbles are actually bad for discourse, make people intolerant.
> It's just twitter only allows shalow takes with no nuances
There's nothing in Twitter that disallows nuance and deep take. The structure may somewhat discourage this, but this has long been overcome with "Tweet thread" pattern (also known as "Tweetstorm").
The problem is that there's nothing preventing shallow takes from becoming dominant. There's nothing forcing people to think before they tweet. Thoughtfulness is not the default steady state for humans, so without any external factor to prevent it, people just slide down the ladder of civilization. In on-line communities, that external factor is typically moderation (and secondarily, the social norms that build around the rules enforced by moderators).
> My personal view is bubbles are actually bad for discourse, make people intolerant.
Maybe opaque bubbles. But with subreddits, we're talking about transparent bubbles. Content there isn't hidden out of sight - it just doesn't automatically leak out to everyone on the platform.
As for intolerance, well... there's a reason why the phrase is "Twitter mob" and not "Reddit mob". The most intolerant people perform their acts of intolerance on the former. Outside of any bubbles.
> The structure may somewhat discourage this
> Tweetstorm
The nuances of discourse are not in the size of the blobs of text you can throw in other people's faces and be done with it. They are in that it engages people to interactive in long thoughtful responses and build competing naratives.
You can make a tweetstorm but as soon as someone replies and adds another narative, it's impossible to follow. HN and reddit make this very easy.
> transparent bubbles
as opposed to what? Bubble are normally "transparent" anyway. People choose to not read/watch "the others", instead of being gatekeeped from alternative media. The leaking out is good for informing majoriry of the public who want to only stay in their bubbles.
It only becomes toxic when people feel compelled/manipulated to engage. I don't think twitter manipulates people with their recommendation. It's just the kind of message that twitter encourages are sentimental and more triggering, hence people can feel offended and could not simply not care sometimes.
> not "Reddit mob"
You go into one of the more opinionated subreddits and tell me how diverse and tolerant they are. I look up depression discussion on related subreddits all the times, most of the posts I see in those are people reinforcing victim mentality and hopelessness attitute to each other. Don't you dare to suggest them to fix their attitude
I'm wondering about the same thing. To me, Reddit feels more like it emphasizes communities. While Twitter is more about the cult of personality, and not too centered around community. Also, on Twitter it's much easier to get to another social bubble by accident (just see some random tweet in the feed, and here it goes). On Reddit, you are much more likely to stay within your chosen subreddits (unless you look at the most popular, news, etc.)
Yeah I thought the same thing re communities, it's a super important aspect and gives you some of the.. social geography you get in the real world. Tgat and the personal, per-community moderation.
Twitter exposes the profile of the user a lot more and people have their own feeds. Reddit in comparison albeit with profiles seems anonymous all the same.
That's a good point, seems less enticing to a troll to rip into an anonymous username. Reddit's moved a bit in that direction in recent years, with full fledged profiles, user feeds, profile pics, etc.
I just don't understand why people are so terrified of opinions they don't agree with.
I am just so glad I am old enough to have been exposed to a wide variety of different opinions and ideas before this crack down on such.
Being exposed to bullshit ultimately hones your bullshit detector.
If you grow up on twitter it just seems to me you will be easy to fool. Like a person who lives in a bubble afraid of germs so their immune system is nothing.
When you did not reason yourself into your opinions but adopted them in order to get a sense of belonging to a group, the existence of other opinions is an existential threat.
Twitter is an advertising platform. Corporations advertise to users through it, and users advertise to each other. The character limit is there to turn discussions into slogans.
I quit Twitter a few months back, and I've been a happier person since then. I'd joined because I heard it was the way to "do outreach" and "engage in the discussion" of my field on a daily basis. Really, it was just the less skilled people in my field advertising their politics to each other, while the more skilled people were off using their skills to accomplish real things. The skilled and knowledgeable people I wanted to hear and learn from were not spending their time twittering.
I think what makes Twitter toxic is that everybody is in their little bubble. You are mostly shown content similar to what you liked, and you are encouraged to block outsiders. When you do see content from outside of your bubble, the contrast is harsh. Most of the time you don't even see dissenting tweets themselves, you see a lot of reactions in your bubble and have to fish for the original 'scandalous' tweet.
Also, as somebody else said here, the discussion takes place "on" your identity, as opposed to reddit where you have your identity and then go out to places to discuss.
I have separate accounts because my different interest belong to different bubbles, and I'm afraid they would outrage each other. Also, one is mostly for consumption and the other is mostly write-only.
(My ideal social network would have each user in full control of their identity page - a bit like MySpace or the old Facebook. And then you would be able to go and create pseudonymous subaccounts for discussions. The system would only show what you want to share, e.g. "this handle's main account is female, on the site for >3 years, and has ~5000 rep". This way you'd have anonymity but still some measure of trust.)
As someone who once had a reasonably large (>5k) twitter following and has essentially given it up there are a few factors I believe contribute it being far more unhealthy than HN or Reddit:
- It's tied to your real identity (and your real ego).
We all know that pure anonymity creates 4chan, but being associated with your personal identity means that every "engagement" on twitter feels a bit too personal. On both reddit and HN being pseudonymous means you still have some sort of reputation, but up and down votes are always about how a community interacts with your ideas, not you personally. Even worse than facebook, you're primarily being judged by people who don't even know you. This sets up every tweet to being a basis for being personally attacked by strangers.
- Short message length abolishes nuance. On both Reddit and HN the most successful posts are often long, nuanced and typically make several points to draw a conclusion. This is impossible on Twitter. You can't discuss the nuances and values of both R and Python for data science work, you can only make flippant, reactionary remarks.
- Might makes right. The follower system is horrendous for any kind of reasoned discussion. There a plenty of well known, adored people out there that make factually incorrect assertions but it doesn't matter if they have 100k followers, they win the war for engagement. Forget about cases where it's not see easy to establish factual correctness.
All of these combine to make an environment where to feel good about your self you are naturally driven to write flippant content that will attract more followers (so nothing too controversial for your audience, no having complex opinions, you should fit into an easy to market 'identity'). You can resist this, but this is what the platform has been designed to encourage. It's sad how many thoughtful people I've met on Twitter that inevitably get sucked into this trap and start shouting out engaging garbage so that they can continue feeding that cycle.
Despite my complaints about trends in the HN community, several small things help a lot:
- largely keeping pseudonymity
- Hiding up/down vote counts! It's quite possible for one opinion to have an order of magnitude more support than it's opposition but both idea can be near the top and no one knows.
- Giving all comments a temporary boost in the page position to give them eyeballs and a chance to be heard.
Making votes invisible is probably the single most brilliant thing HN has ever done to keep this community sane. You can see "people agree with/like my comment" without comparing yourself to everyone else.
While Twitter loves to have bubbles crash into one another for engagement, reddit is far worse than you might think for minorities, mostly because their subreddits have little collective voting power.
For instance some trans friendly subreddits that's not primarily about trans people has been continuously raided for the past few months, where lots of people - exceeding the organic voting power of the subs population - downvote posts that feature trans topics in any capacity to make the posts effectively invisible. Then they started sending mass-DMs to further disincentive trans people from talking (I myself got a message from "youdontpass1488", not too hard to see the perpetrators political alignments there). Moderators have near-zero available tools to prevent this from happening, aside from going private which is not really the best option for various reasons.
While this practice is banned on reddit, coordination has just moved elsewhere.
The core issues with Twitter are the Retweet feature and the short character limit. That's also what defines the platform, so that's unlikely to change.
The problem with the retweet feature: Person A starts talking about a topic and post a few tweets. Person B sees one specific tweet, retweet it (with or without comment). People who were following person A see the original tweets. People who were following person B see the reactions to the retweeted tweet, without the original context. Every time the discussion is split with two crowds isolated from each others and everything taken out of context.
The problem with the character limit: given that people link to or retweet a single tweet (120-240 characters I believe), that can only contain a very limited, and often dumb down, version of the actual message being communicated.
That's of course worse given their feed algorithm.
Reddit is broken up into sub-communities, and I think this is what is helping a lot here. Many subreddits are quite awful and toxic. Even ones which are not terribly evil are still awful and insipid. But there are also some really amazing and beautiful subreddits out there. This is all because of the existence of subreddits. Any subreddit past a certain size or popularity will begin to become terrible.
Reddit's way of fostering communities likely helps. In twitter you're somewhat forced to talk to the same group of people at all times, especially now that tweets seem to be the main topic of discussion.
I'd argue reddit is more of an amplified hive mind of the communities that use the internet, of which some become toxic due to ineffective moderation policies or squelching of dissent.
The elephant in the room is that large subreddits tend to avoid deep analysis if it disagrees with the hive mind, and cross-brigading from smaller subreddits happens all the time. Add influence peddling by sovereign states to that.
Only if politically and economically convenient. I've seen people openly condoning torture and rape as long as they happen to unsympathetic victims. The subreddits fostering this behavior won't get banned unless it threatens reddit's advertising. In practice it means only politically incorrect communities get banned.
I wrote about it here a little while back https://unlikekinds.com/article/trolls-and-consequences-what...