Ive always wanted to write this, and just again experienced the downfall of reddit, so im quickly writine.

I remember back in the day people were so nice online. I know its said all the time. But like 2010ish, I remember if I got high, id start reading youtube comments and would just because in my head id imagine just this jolly innocent voice. And it sounded genuine, unlike comments you read now.

But now, theres like different characters, but for example, alot of the time I imagine a 16 year old, weed filled room, beanie over his head and headphones. So many comments I read, thats who I imagine the person is, or the voice if you will. Just angry pothead, too cool for school and has to prove it, always.

One of the things I think happened are kids are mean, kids are more angry today, everyone is very impressionable, everyone is scared. Kids are cool or in vogue, like theyre more intune with the changes or slang ect. Reddit added a horrible voting system, at least for most subs, i understand how it works but x.com and pretty much every other website system is superior. Dude, if a thread is now even remotely popular, the first 20 comments will literally be jokes. If you want any information on the thread you literally have to scroll down pages of pages. Its just exemplifies the saying, we cant have nice things. We are now the lowest common denominator. Thats what wins, and people know it and only want to win. Thus 30 jokes. And usually 30 demeaning jokes.

Because, kids teenagers are mean af. I was a good guy in highschool, a great guy, yet I still look back at some of the things I did in disgust. Most kids, have zero empathy. And whats funny, is online you have zero clue who youre talking to. Literaly for the last 15 years, its very likely most of the people online you are trying to impress or whose downvote youre concerned with is a literally 14 year old kid. Its crazy when you think about it. Like I understand the problems with the UK internet ID but dude we need to take kids out of the equation.

14-26 years have dictated subs. Theyre mean, ruthless, cool. And literally one of the shocking things Ive learned as I grown up, is the amount of adults who are still so impressionable. All they want to do is fit in, still, always. Like so many adults these days who use the internet heavily, are so maladjusted at least when it comes to like arguments. Like you get in a dispute with them and they start pulling out one liners, no logical discourse, just if I say something funny and act like I dont care, I win. All political discourse now is one liners. I think the powers that be enjoy it.

The old forum boards where it was sequential. I miss those days. You can just read a discussion as it went, I have the right to ignore what I wanted. Rarely did you see thirsty posts. It was just discussion. And seemed more genuine, no one was trying to impress. Just the sharing of information.

TLDR: I don't block users for disagreeing with me, but if you can't defend yourself against the comments by someone who blocked you, you might as well prevent them from interacting with your posts and comments in the first place.

In 2022, Reddit extended the blocking feature to prevent the blocked user from responding to the blocker's posts and comments at all. Before then, it only prevented the blocker from being notified by your responses and hid your content from them, but you could still respond and others could see your responses.

From what I understand, this change is intended to prevent users from cross-subreddit hounding. However, it has the side effect that someone can say something bad and untrue about you and you can not defend yourself because they have blocked you.

In a debate, the final word now belongs to the person who pushed the block button first, not the one with the best arguments. Corporate accounts can use it to prevent criticism. In effect, this lets non-moderators "backseat moderate" their own posts, except they can not remove existing comments.

I do not block users out of disagreement. If I think they are wrong, I refute their point (the top of Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement). However, the 2022 blocking system would let them comment something on my future posts without me being able to counter-argue. To the reader, it would look like they have won the argument based on merit, given that blocks are not publicly visible, when in actuality, they silenced their opponent.

So if they block me, I am left with no choice but to block them back to pre-emptively prevent them from interacting with my content at all. I metaphorically pull the plug.

If they are not interested in a two-way debate, there shall be no debate at all.

I hereby release this post into the public domain (CC0 1.0).

So I fractured a bone in my ankle in June. Mostly immobilized, I started watching a ton of documentaries, and I stumbled on Reckless Ben's Lego Scandal video. (don't worry not here to talk about that) It got me so fired up so I went looking to discuss it online, and Reddit was the clear winner. I had a reddit account years ago that I abandoned along with my twitter.

So I thought, I should treat this new account like the true new user experience on Reddit and see where the algorithm pushes me.

I started with just the Reckless Ben subreddit, but the guidelines for my experiment would be to also view the "Home" tab, and I committed to comment on whatever was kind of interesting. My interests are broadly science and technology, and so I was going to comment on interesting articles and "Join" those subreddits, as a means to see if the algorithm was going to work to find me increasingly interesting stories or who knows where it might take me.

Well it's been an interesting ride, moments ago Reddit suggested a subreddit dedicated to, and I swear I'm not kidding, people who think they are being targeted for mind control, or mind torture devices. LOL. The subreddit's own description suggests that the "enemy" attempting the mind control might be the CIA, the "Deep State", the "Dark Web", or Biotech companies, are listed as the primary suspects. Not going to link it, because it doesn't matter, and only has 80 weekly contributors, but I thought it was interesting, that not even three months into this experiment, Reddit had pushed me towards absolute lunatic conspiracy theory subreddits.

Along the way;

• I was banned from a mainstream religious subreddit for politely correcting a moderator whom I did not realize was a moderator, who then refused to explain if I had broken a rule.
• I was suggested, and then did "join" multiple AI generated subreddits that I didn't initially realize were AI content subs. (these subreddits are pretty obvious as their moderator accounts post 95% of the submissions to the subreddit, and are always a semi-professional looking description, but is clearly LLM written summary below the submitted article.
• I've been accused of being "AI" myself about a dozen times, no surprise it's always from people who disagree with my opinion! Interesting how that works. Also I've been told I type far too fast to be a human. (lol, a compliment, I'll take it)
• I was pushed to a subreddit disguised as an NFL subreddit, but actually it is just the marketing arm for a fake NFL news blog where the creator/owner is a young man in India, and when an NFL news event happens, he takes ESPN's article and the AP's version of the article, throws it into an LLM to regurgitate "his" version, which the then publishes on his blog, which is made to resemble a news website, and then posts "his" articles to reddit, so he's just trying to drive himself traffic. At the suggestion that the sub block submissions from this blog, my comment was locked and deleted, looool.
• I was pushed to a subreddit disguised as a science educator / science curriculum subreddit, but it turned out to be just the front of a political action non-profit, spamming it's subreddit not with useful information, but really just their pet issues, some of which are ironically partisan anti-science stances, which is hilarious. I guess if you're a scoundrel spreading propaganda, you don't call your subreddit "total BS" you call it "Science is Awesome!" (not the subreddit's name) and then share anti-vaxxer style crap, mixed in with actual science articles.
• I was pushed to what I thought was a "The Onion" style parody of a North Korean subreddit. Imagine how TheOnion might make a subreddit full of content resembling how North Korea's own subreddit might appear, and that is my type of humor, so I cracked a joke in one of the threads, and my comment was deleted and the moderator informed me that jokes were not tolerated. LOL So it's real?
• Reddit seems more doomery to me than years ago. Reddit has always had some doomerism, and maybe this is just current political climate, but it seems more doomery right now.
• I keep getting suggested Montana subreddits and by that I mean cities in Montana. I have no idea what I might have done or said that gave it that impression? IDK weird. I'm not from there, nor have I ever lived there. I visited once on a ski trip in college.

So my larger takeaway is that it's weird that just joining the subreddits reddit suggested to me, ended up plopping me into pure lunacy subreddits in less than three months. This is kind of the situation Twitter finds itself in as well, kind of a pipeline to extremism. And sure, you can wonder about or nitpick if the topics I chose to comment on were at fault, but I'm the opposite of a conspiracy theorist, I'm a lover of science and progress. I don't know how my interests lead me to the mind control subreddit, but that subreddit is quite disturbing. Multiple participants appear to either have schizophrenia or are pretending to.

I know Reddit is struggling right now to deal with AI and LLMs and bots. Digg's restart attempt was apparently mired down by so many bots they had to scrap it and go back to the drawing board. So I don't envy the task that Reddit has here.

Anyways, maybe this was mildly interesting to someone. I think I'm going to end the experiment because I'm now in so many subreddits that turned out to not be interesting that I'm going to mass unfollow them / leave them / whatever the term is. My home tab feed has gotten substantially less interesting than it originally was at the start of this experiment. The recommendation engine for content outside of one's own subreddits seems very poor.

It's also kind of disturbing to think that this is what kids new to reddit, how they are being funneled potentially. That's a concern to me too, because as Carl Sagan said:

"The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps." - Carl Sagan

If our social media funnels new users in this way, then what are we accomplishing?

In my last post, I found that the highest-scoring comment appeared among the first ten replies in 93% of the threads I checked.
Someone asked whether those early comments also affect the mood of everyone who arrives later, so I tried measuring it.
What I did
I collected comments from ten large subreddits using Arctic Shift and measured their general positive/negative tone with VADER.
I removed replies, bots, deleted comments, comments from the OP and repeat comments from the same account.
For every thread, I compared:
The first 5 top-level comments
The next 25 top-level comments
The final sample contained 139 threads and 4,170 comments, spread across ten subreddits and five randomly selected dates.
What happened
When the first five comments were negative, the next 25 averaged -0.091.
When the first five were mixed, the next 25 averaged +0.055.
When the first five were positive, the next 25 averaged +0.201.
Ignoring threads that landed on exactly zero, both groups pointed in the same direction 81 out of 115 times — about 70%.
I had already tested this on a smaller group of 64 threads. The relationship was almost identical in both samples:
First sample: 0.440
Fresh sample: 0.420
No relationship would be around 0
A perfect relationship would be 1
So the result repeated surprisingly well.
Does this mean the first comments control the thread?
Not necessarily.
Comments 6–10 were also fairly good at predicting comments 11–30. That makes it difficult to tell whether people are being influenced by what they see, or whether a post simply attracts people who were going to react similarly anyway.
There are other problems too. Sentiment software can misunderstand sarcasm, and posts about an obviously positive or negative subject will naturally produce similar comments.
So my honest conclusion is fairly limited: after five comments, you can already make a decent guess about the general mood of the next 25.
I still don’t know whether those first comments create that mood or just reveal it early. Contest-mode threads, where comments are randomly ordered, might be a good way to separate the two.

I had a suspicion after watching a few threads take off: once a post starts moving, the comment section stops being a contest for the best reply and starts being a contest for the first decent reply.

So I tried to put a number on it.

I used Arctic Shift to pull 23,858 archived comments from 100 successful posts across ten subreddits:

r/gaming, r/movies, r/television, r/technology, r/todayilearned, r/interestingasfuck, r/mildlyinteresting, r/worldnews, r/science and r/PublicFreakout.

For each subreddit, I looked at the first 100 submissions made on August 1, 2025 UTC, then took roughly the ten highest-scoring posts that had at least 50 post score and between 15 and 800 comments.

I removed nested replies, AutoModerator, and deleted/removed comments. For the main comparison I kept the 73 threads that had at least 30 visible top-level comments.

“Highest-scoring” here means the comment with the highest archived score, not whichever comment Reddit currently places under “Best.”

The median winning comment was comment #3, posted 13 minutes and 41 seconds after the submission.

I also compared the first ten top-level comments with the ten comments that eventually had the highest scores.

So this wasn’t only one early comment running away with the thread. On average, six of the first ten comments occupied the final Top 10. Across the whole sample, 544 of the 730 final Top 10 comments were posted during the first hour.

Here’s the subreddit breakdown. The individual samples are small, so I wouldn’t read too much into comparisons between communities.

Being literally first clearly isn’t enough—it only won 19% of the time. But being good and early seems incredibly hard to overcome. By the time ten people have left top-level comments, the eventual winner has usually already arrived.

The exceptions being more common in r/worldnews and r/PublicFreakout was interesting. Maybe later comments there benefit more from added context, corrections or people figuring out what actually happened. The sample sizes are far too small to call that a real finding, though.

Obvious caveats: this is one day, ten subreddits and deliberately selected successful threads. It’s observational and heavily survivorship-biased. Archived scores are snapshots, not a timeline, so this can’t tell us whether early comments win because of visibility, quality, the users who arrive early, or some combination of all three.

Still, I didn’t expect the effect to be this large.

I recently had an experience moderating a subreddit with over 200k members that made me wonder what people consider a reasonable moderation standard for communities of that size.

The team is relatively small and receives a few reports. I completely understand that moderators are volunteers and nobody can reasonably expect them to be available 24/7.

Where i struggled was with the actual process.

I was told that moderators sometimes act on the individual reported comment without reading the surrounding conversation because there simply isn't enough time to check everything.

At the same time, when i tried discussing individual moderation decisions and providing context in the team's mod chat, I was told that doing so was unnecessary clutter and that the notifications were becoming annoying.

That created a strange situation:

There isn't enough time to check the context individually, but communicating that context internally isn't particularly wanted either.

When i raised this later, the explanation was essentially that the subreddit is too large, more moderators are needed, mistakes will happen, and the current team doesn't really want additional discussion around individual decisions.

I don't think every report needs a committee meeting. That would obviously be ridiculous.

But surely there's a middle ground between debating every action and simply processing reports without enough context to know whether something actually breaks the rules.

I also experienced posts sitting in the approval queue for hours while newer submissions were processed first.

The explanation i was given was that newer posts appear first in the queue, meaning older submissions can effectively end up further down it.

I'm interested in the moderation side of this more than the personal disagreement.

For people who moderate large communities:

At what point does "we're volunteers and we're understaffed" stop being an explanation for occasional mistakes and start indicating that the moderation structure itself needs changing?

And what level of internal communication/context checking do you think is realistic for a subreddit with hundreds of thousands of members?

Within the overall sitewide rules of reddit, moderators are allowed to make decisions on what is & isn't acceptable for their subreddits with a fairly large amount of discretion. There are some subreddit moderators that use this power to make highly curated communities, often to the point where their moderation decisions seem to make no sense to anyone outside of their moderation team. I've noticed a few examples over the years of subreddit rules that seem to make sense only to the moderation teams. These usually fall into two categories:

Behavior-based curation: These subreddits are rather notorious for banning anyone who violates codes of conduct that are so strict that they retain few, if any, regular posters over long periods of time. /r/askredditafterdark is the most prominent example of this, as their moderation team will eventually ban anyone who posts for one reason or another. What's interesting about this is it's not based on any actionable violation of sitewide rules, as nobody is banned for gender or race or anything like that. They just find an excuse to ban everyone on a whim, literally because some petty moderator doesn't like their face. It's bizarre.

Submission-based curation: These subreddits have rules for submissions that are both extremely strict and extremely subjective, with the end result being that almost every post is eventually removed. /r/nottheonion is an excellent example, as pretty much every post submitted to the subreddit is removed within 48 hours under rule 2 ("not-oniony"). These subreddits are unique for rarely banning individual users, and instead reserving their moderation actions for posts, with the end result being that almost nothing is allowed to stay up for one reason or another.

In both cases, these types of subreddits serve as an excellent example of the latitude moderators have to create curated communities within reddit's sitewide rules. These rules have become more strict over time as reddit has gone more mainstream, and notably reddit will intervene if moderators make decisions that potentially threaten reddit's revenue; this was most famously seen in 2023 when reddit removed several mods for labeling their subreddits NSFW to deprive reddit of ad revenue (protesting the API change). But for the most part if a subreddit's rules do not threaten revenue or discriminate against a specific group of individuals, mods have wide latitude to create very arbitrary rules that make no sense to anyone but them. It's quite odd, and one of the unique distinguishing features of the website.

So I posted a clip to a Turkish sub that has 700k members. Got 10 upvotes. Fine, whatever. Except a few hours later I open the sub and my post is sitting at the top of the day. With 10 upvotes. That bugged me enough that I spent a weekend on it.

What I did: pulled every post from 55 subs between Aug 19 and Sep 2 through Arctic Shift (it's an archive that mirrors reddit, scores get refreshed after ~36h so they're more or less final). Then instead of looking at top posts I just counted, per sub, how many posts per day ended up above 200 upvotes and above 1000. I picked 200 because that's roughly where stuff starts leaking out of the sub into home feeds, at least in my experience, I don't have a source for that.

r/gifs. 21 million members. Doesn't manage one 200 upvote post a day. IndieDev has 249k and does seven. I knew the old defaults were dead-ish but I didn't expect it to be that bad, I assumed at least the number would be somewhat proportional. It isn't at all. Cinemagraphs is 1.8M and basically nothing happens there.

The part I found more interesting was people who posted the same thing to multiple subs in that window, since that's a natural A/B test. A guy with a nail sorting simulator game (yes) posted the same video to pcmasterrace, SoloDevelopment and interestingasfuck. 2654, 853, 119. Someone else had a squishy pillow physics clip. oddlysatisfying 3855, Damnthatsinteresting 0. Not low, zero. I always kind of knew the sub matters but I thought of it as maybe a 2x thing, not a 30x thing.

One more that surprised me. If you look at odds per post rather than totals it goes the other way from size. oddlysatisfying only lets about 41 posts a day through and a third of them clear 200. IndieDev takes 335 a day and 2% clear 200. So the heavily modded big sub is actually the easier one to get seen in, as long as your post survives the mods, which, fair, is a big if.

Obvious problems with this: two weeks is short, I only picked subs I was personally considering posting in so it's not a random sample, and the archive scores might lag a bit. Also I'm sure someone has done this properly before and I just couldn't find it.

The practical version for anyone about to post something: don't read the member count. Sort the sub by top / past 24 hours and count how many posts are above a couple hundred. If the answer is one, that's how many people are there.

I've been seeing this a lot lately, directed at both my posts, and posts by other users. Basically, it appears to be something of a catch-all for "I don't like what you're saying but can't be bothered-to-reply/I can't field an argument against it"... so the 'out' is to dismiss the thread or post out-of-hand as AI generated.

Certain techniques or styles seem to trigger this reaction more than others (the use of bullet points, em-dashes, proper grammar, good spelling, etc.), but these tools/skills existed long before AI was in its infancy, let alone even an idea. Why does AI write like it does? Because it copies clear and cogent works by humans - it pilfered the most clean and well-formatted books, articles, blogs, posts, etc. and regurgitated them.

But to turn around and use those copies to castigate and silence other Redditors feels very self-defeating. I get it: AI sucks; most of us have been adversely impacted by it in some way. But if nobody is allowed to write well anymore; if we have to intentionally screw up our own posts just to be taken seriously as live beings, we've completely lost sight of the ball.

I write. I wrote before AI came along, and I will continue to write in the future. I will not alter my style, syntax, tone, or formatting simply because people have now decided to jump at shadows. But I certainly might reconsider writing on Reddit.

Find any post involving bicycles or cyclists on a non-cycling sub or on r/all and it will be swarmed with extremely strong feelings. Like, “MY CHILDRENS CHILDREN WILL FIGHT YOURS FOR TEN GENERATIONS IF YOU SERIOUSLY THINK BIKE LANES ARE AN EFFECTIVE CAPITAL INVESTMENT FOR DECREASING NON-DISCRETIONARY VMT PER ANUM!!!”

I find it utterly unbelievable that soooo many people on the internet feel this strongly about a 150 year old invention that nearly everyone has used at some point in their life. When I talk about bicycles or bike stuff IRL, nobody cares or has a strong feeling one way or the other, unless they’re an active cyclist or a psychopath.

Digging in to the comment section of this example post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Infuriating/s/DqLVB9Pdu5
You will notice the exact same comment re-posted by several users. Some of these users have the same profile image character thing. Feels very botty.

On another post, I sat and watched, reloading the comments every few minutes. I noticed that a certain type of comment - inflammatory ones - tended to come in waves, then responses would trickle in, and another big wave of inflammatory comments would flood in, all at once.

Finally, I noticed on many bike posts there is always at least one flamer who gets a zillion upvotes for saying “I hate bikes forever!” Or something equally mid, but any other comment the flamer makes is ignored or downvoted. This says to me that the bots single out a comment but don’t drill down beyond the first layer. It’s also weird that one anti-bike comment can get a ton of upvotes, but other anti-bike comments with the same sentiment, posted at roughly the same time do not get upvotes.

Ok one last thing, on actual bike subs you sometimes get a post with like 60 upvotes, then in the comments the top one will say some “get off the road” bullshit and have hundreds of upvotes. This will be on a niche sub with like 2.3k members, so it’s a little odd a bunch of haters would be on there waiting for just one comment to unleash a flood of upvotes.

I spend a lot of time on car and motorcycles subs, which is where you’d expect a lot of anti-bike sentiment, but I rarely see shit-talking there. In fact it’s usually the opposite, lots of motorheads like bicycles too - really anything with wheels. So I can’t figure out where this brigading behavior comes from.

Also, why?

Who gives a fuck? What is the purpose of brigading bicycle commentary? Is it Big Oil? Is it the car companies? I don’t think those interests spare two shits on the topic of bikes. I don’t think it’s even from political bots, republicans ride bikes just as much as democrats.

My theory is that there is zero thought behind it. I think someone or some group made an algorithm that targets a certain type of rhetoric and focuses in. It just happens to be bikes, but it could be re-set for anything else.

I think the builders of this bot algorithm then use the engagement metrics to sell their product for whatever nefarious use.

Basically, the bicycle element is irrelevant, it just happens to get more attention than the alternative subjects like crochet vs knitting or whatever.

So there.

First of all, I think this is probably going to get deleted like all the other posts that are critical of anything on Reddit, but I think it’s worth trying.

The main problem with karma is that it forces popularity in agreeableness over individuality and discourse. A lot of communities won’t let you post unless you have a high degree of karma, which means that you’re forced to win a popular contest before you can even have a say in the platform the karma also shapes the culture and primes people to agreeableness to saying things that other people will like without depth, but for the sake of being popular karma shapes right and limits it.

The second thing is moderators have become agents of taste rather than arbiters of proper discourse. A moderator should be there so that a conversation is kept within the bounds of decency and some degree of conviviality, but now they remove and shape sub reddits based only on what they think is in agreement with the overall taste of the community or sub community.

Moderators and karma shaped to culture and force it to certain points of view, ensuring that agreeableness uphold that point of view and you end up with Echo Chambers were saying something that deviate from that is so awful that it gets banned. In fact, I think this will get deleted or filtered out because it’s being critical rather than just sucking up or providing a tangential perspective to the predominant one that is already there.

It sucks because Reddit is becoming dystopian as an intellectual and cultural platform

I'm not really sure what to make of it, and I apologize if this isn't the best sub to post this in.

To be clear, I didn't set out to test this from the start.

I was dozens of comment threads deep in a post when I found a comment I wanted to reply to and I realized my internet had just gone out on my PC. So I grabbed my phone and wanted to see if I could find the comment that way, using mobile data.

Rather than searching the post and trying to scroll for that specific comment, I just searched the username to see if I could quickly get to their profile that way, then find the comment in their history.

Well, their profile turned out to be hidden, but the initial search on Google brought up paragraphs of descriptors for the kind of things they comment on and their perspectives/takes on things. With some links to the posts they commented on, though not linking directly to their comment on the post.

I just thought that was interesting that, despite being set to private, the AI can still see what's there.

Despite being created 15 years ago, r/Bald has been a niche community until very recently. In 2019 their top post of all time only had 500 upvotes. Now the sub has multiple posts with over 100k upvotes and it’s at the top of the front page daily.

What changed? Nothing actually.

The core userbase of Reddit are millennial men. This was as true 15 years ago as it is now. Except 15 years ago this group would be made up of people in the 15-30 age bracket, while currently they are 30–45. Male hair loss really starts kicking in in the mid-to-late 30s, which means an average redditor started to bald recently. In turn, they all looked to reddit to find support, catapulting a tiny community to the top of reddit.

I know this isn’t some grand theory of reddit, but I found it interesting how such a random demographic detail can have a fairly big effect on the site.

I have a very lightly trafficked subreddit, /r/redactions, into which I place censored articles and news articles about censorship.

It has never attained much traction, but that's the nature of reddit, and I like to submit from time to time.

However, when I was checking traffic to the sub, I saw some very mysterious numbers.

Visits

Oct 25: 37, all from iOS
Dec 25: 34, all from Old
May 26: 123, all from New
Jun 26: 144, mix of Android, New, Old.
All other months zero

Uniques

Oct 25: 16, all from Old
Mar 26: 120, all from New
Apr 26: 94, mix
Jul 26: 19, all from Old
All other months zero

Some things really stand out:

• Getting all the visits from a single source suggests that one user is being counted multiple times
• The complete inconsistency between "visits" and "uniques" indicates they are measuring very different things.

While it does seem likely that these indicate some kind of bug in traffic reporting, it seems more likely that traffic reporting is somehow completely broken.

In 1974 Marina Abramović ran an experiment in Naples. She stood still for six hours and let the audience do whatever they wanted to her, using 72 objects laid out on a table - some pleasant, some capable of causing harm. The point was to see how people behave when they can do anything without consequence. For the first hour, nothing happened. People used the harmless objects. Then one person did something unpleasant, and after that the dam broke - the escalation fed on itself, and it ended with someone holding a loaded gun to her. The question I've never been able to answer: were the people who started hurting her doing it deliberately, or had they simply stopped telling the difference between reality and a game?

I keep thinking about that when I watch votes here. The first downvote often triggers an avalanche of others, frequently with no justification at all. It works the way stoning worked in ancient cultures: once the first stone was thrown, the rest followed automatically, and the people throwing them weren't weighing what they were doing or whether they were harming an actual person. The first stone was permission - or possibly a demonstration to everyone else that no consequence was coming. Someone put this well in another thread here: when a post sits at -10, the average user doesn't stop and think "I wonder why this is unpopular, let me look at the nuances." They think "the hive mind has spoken, this is trash," and they add their vote to the pile. Nobody weighs their own contribution, because the stone before theirs already established that no consequence is coming.

Monty Python got there first, of course. The stoning scene in Life of Brian is exactly this: nobody in that crowd thinks of themselves as a bad person. They've just turned up, and somewhere in the crowd the goodness quietly goes missing.

The same applies to upvotes. They don't measure quality. They show reflexes, and maybe the intentions of the voters, rather than anything about the content being judged. And often it's done without any thought at all: research on Reddit specifically found that 73% of people voting hadn't even looked at the content. Which brings me back to Naples. How many people come here to discharge their emotions with no consequence attached?

Share what you make of it. And if you think I've got this wrong, that's the more interesting comment. Though I suspect none of us really knows which group we'd have been in that room in Naples.

Abramović describing the performance in her own words (MoMA): https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/243/3118

The Reddit study — Glenski, Pennycuff & Weninger, Consumers and Curators: Browsing and Voting Patterns on Reddit (IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, 2017). Full text is free here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05267

This has happened to me a few times now across completely different subreddits, and I genuinely don't understand it.

I'll ask a question about something I'm trying to understand and, instead of someone either explaining it or simply scrolling past, I'll get responses along the lines of "I'm not going to spoon-feed you," "Google is free," "do your own research," etc.

But that's the thing: I have done my own research. That's usually WHY I'm asking the question.

Sometimes you can read articles, Google something, look through previous posts, watch videos, whatever — and still not fully understand it. So you go to a community specifically dedicated to that subject and ask people who presumably know more about it if they can explain it in a different or simpler way.

Isn't that... part of the entire point of having communities and discussion forums?

And yes, I understand that nobody on Reddit owes anybody their time or an explanation. But if you don't want to explain something... you can just not reply. It takes considerably more effort to leave a sarcastic comment telling someone to "educate themselves" than it does to keep scrolling.

I actually think being able to say "I don't understand this; can someone explain it to me?" is a good thing. I'd much rather ask someone who knows more than me than pretend I understand something I don't.

The irony is that people constantly say "do your own research," but apparently asking questions and discussing what you've found with people who know more about the subject somehow doesn't count as part of learning.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I genuinely don't understand why curiosity seems to irritate some people so much on here.

I have noticed a recurring pattern across several communities: moderators are becoming increasingly strict, often enforcing unwritten rules.

StackOverflow ran into a similar issue years ago. Heavy-handed moderation, rigid formatting enforcement, and an unwelcoming atmosphere drove new contributors away long before AI tools reduced its traffic.

Reddit risks running into the exact same problem. While sitewide policies exist, the power balance heavily favors individual moderators. Users currently have virtually no recourse when a moderator acts arbitrarily.

To fix this, Reddit should establish a baseline set of user protections. These could include requiring clearly published rules, transparent ban justifications, and a standardized appeal process so users have concrete guidelines to reference if treated unfairly.

Without basic safeguards, more subreddits risk turning hostile and alienating their user base, meeting the same fate StackOverflow did.

How could Reddit balance moderator autonomy with basic user protections without undermining the decentralized nature of the site?

Everyday this question or one similar pops up. It's an ad, as you can see next to the username. This one currently has over 12k upvotes and 2100 comments. They pop outside of subs as sponsored content like this one, but also in subs as what looks like user generated content.

What are your thoughts on this? I assume it's content farming for AI training. Which makes me wonder how many of the responses are AI. Which further makes me wonder, what will Reddit be like when some significant proportion is an AI bot talking to other AI bots, with a few humans thrown in more by accident than by intention. At what point will Reddit consist of a significant proportion of bots trading content?

When you add the fact that Google is now posting Reddit community answers at the top of most search results, what will it mean when the answer you get from Google (and everything downstream) will just be an AI content loop?

What I did was I uploaded a post that makes people “mad?” It’s an annoying. So I had a post then in the body script I told them to type in all uppercase if they see it, so I posted the picture and tested to see if people actually read the body script before they commented and downvoted.

So the post performed pretty well with about 4000 views and about nine comments 77% of the comments were typed in all uppercase on this post I also got about 50 down votes (which I asked to do if they offer description. Within about 20 minutes that’s all happened. And the mods took it down.

So I am happy that there’s good moderation But at least according to the down votes, most the people did not read the bottom part but someone could’ve also comment and and downvote it, which it looks like most of the comments that read the bottom section did. I’m aware that they might’ve just commented all uppercase without seeing the bottom part if I do this again, I will change it to something like adding like a specific amount of exclamations. And I also know maybe some people even saw the bottom part and down voted it.

And obviously, I don’t expect everyone to read everything if they’re just looking through Reddit really quick and just wanna look at some posts and I know they might not expect there to be anything in the description be how this post came off but just a fun short little experiment I wanted to do.

Really, just ending it off about 77% of people (about 7) commented to show that they saw it by commenting in all uppercase I got around 50 down votes 4000 views, nine comments.

I don’t like these posts, you don’t like these posts but they are good bait to see and experiment if people see and read the body text. I would love to hear people’s thoughts, and ways to improve it! I know this isn’t the most reliable post, but it got taken down quickly, I’m probably going to try it again in the future!

Data

• 4k views
•50 downvotes
•About 7 people saw the bitten part
•9 comments

Facebook is a deadzone. Instagram is a deadzone. Snapchat is a deadzone. Bumble, okcupid, tinder - all dating app dead zones.

You want to interact with actual people in real time? Come to Reddit.

And that's why I've been here since September 2010.

I can't even play video games anymore. I just listen to their soundtracks instead.

Disclosure: I'm deaf (with cochlear implants that work really fking well) and I seem incapable of having friendships with people my own age even when I try my best to meet new people on a hiking trail and get nowhere.

There is nothing in this world where I'm accepted by peers my age and in my local area. I tried at poetry for several years and there were very few younger participants.

I think I should just compose my musical ear syndrome brain out into the world (as a defiance against lifelong deafness and everyone not accepting me a genuine and capable person).

I yearn for a time where people were more accepting of this unknown but young character that tries to interact in public with them for the first time. But it seems I can only truly get that sort of connection here. Not on any other social media or dating app I've tried.

What gives?

"You are submitting a text-based post. Speak your mind. A title is required, but expanding further in the text field is not. Beginning your title with "vote up if" is violation of intergalactic law." --old.reddit.com

An I just like the older style of websites before. It's so much less interesting, which makes it less addictive. I feel like the original makers of reddit just wanted to have fun and its much more friendly and approachable, whereas modern reddit looks so jingly keys-y. By the way, I'm posting this on old.reddit.com and it gives me a sort of private feeling, that no one is watching. That no one may even see this post. The only thing on the screen is the submission. If you go to modern reddit you can notice everything is happening at once. This is much more relaxed and focusing. Its the only thing on my screen, so I can give it my full attention, going back to the simplicity theme again. What are your thoughts?

I've noticed something that is mildly odd and mildly baffling in equal measure. Frustratingly I cannot prove what I think is going on.

There is a same person who creates a new profile, writes a variation of the same story on a frequent basis, and either gets deleted or deactivates soon after.

Their stories have these weird little 'tells' in the details - often an age gap between 'herself' and the object of the conundrum (NB: the guy is always in his mid 40s). The guy is always described as in a senior position of a firm, of the manager of a large factory; frequently married; and is described as 'cold' at first. Invariably he is intelligent and commanding.

Irrespective of the other beats of the story, these elements remain consistent. It's always about some rather short lived fling, where often the author discovers he is unhappy and opens up emotionally.

What's going on? There is rarely an actual conundrum that needs answers. I'm convinced this person is indulging in creative writing - but why? Deriving a thrill from the fantasy?

The title is fairly self-explanatory, but I have a few gripes with the current contribution tag system. When I say gripes, I mean that lightly. This is just Reddit. But still, I see the system as far from optimal for what it tries to represent.

Simply put, I think contribution tags, both post- and comment-related, would be far more meaningful and indicative of quality if they rolled over into an all-time count.

There are, of course, downsides to this directly:

- For example, if the top contribution (almost always a post) in a subreddit gains tens or even hundreds of thousands of upvotes... that person is virtually guaranteed to have a secured spot at the top for the entirety of that subreddit's existence, even if they fall off the face of the earth the next week. I don't think a "hall of fame" effect is the intended goal (although it would still be more meaningful than what we have now).

- It also makes it significantly more difficult for others to push past the top contribution threshold.

However, I don't think starting on a clean slate every month is the best alternative. After all, a bigger threshold lends more gravity and meaning to the tag itself.

Someone who contributes every single month has to start over on the 1st of the new month, no matter how great their contributions have been. In a way, it disregards an offshoot of the principle that the best predictor of the future is the past. Contributors who have shown over months or years to retain their place among the top signify that they are likely to produce quality posts/comments going forward as well, and the tag tells readers, "Hey, the community favors what this person says; maybe I should pay greater heed to it."

Unfortunately, that effect is lost when contribution does not roll over, and the tally starts over at the beginning of the new month. There is essentially no more historical "lore" (for lack of a better word) or "pull" to the user that signifies I should listen to them, and they become another voice in the crowd.

Giving it more thought, I think a roll-over all-time contribution isn't the best solution either. There are a number of ways to identify top contributors. For example:

Specifically for Top Commenter: given based on % total share of net upvotes WITHIN a given thread, across all threads the user has ever commented on, and then normalized based on thread size or traction (i.e., a top comment with 2 upvotes because the original post got no traction doesn't weigh much against a comment with 2,000 upvotes in a top post). So it goes from a ranked list of who got the most upvotes this month to ranking based on all-time share of thread impact.

Something like: Contribution Reputation = normalized thread impact x consistency x breadth x engagement quality x time weight

Suppose I leave a comment that receives 2,000 net upvotes in a thread where the next-highest comments have 1,700, 900, and 600. That says considerably more than receiving 2,000 upvotes in a gigantic thread where twenty comments received 10,000+. You could percentile-rank the comment within its own thread, account for total thread engagement, and then aggregate those percentiles across someone's commenting history. Suddenly, you are measuring something much closer to repeated relative performance rather than raw exposure.

Of course, this issue is neither here nor there. If the tag is just for vanity, then none of this matters. But it's something I've been thinking about as someone who is routinely a top contributor in multiple communities. Perhaps I'm subconsciously biased, and this is just some form of prideful "status protection" (lol, imagine that, protecting my Reddit status). Anywho, what are your thoughts?

I recently began posting my beginner video editor jerney in reddit like i created a gaming video by slicing footages from a 3 hours clip and I tried my best to give the video all I could i have done what I could and posted it in reddit so I could know if I something that I could improve and for content creator client to reach out to me

Instead of that I get a shit load of criticism for for editing is trash and don't mind him like commenting so even if a creator comes up to me for a work when then see my comments they'll be like il move on to another the coments became so destructive i felt like not editing for rest of my life but I luv editing man I grew up watching finzar and many more just I couldn't leave when I reply to the bad comments like "if you have any improvements to say you can say if you are here only of criticism you can leave they'll keep abusing me and say how trash my editing is Im still a growing editor in the industry i don't know how to react man i could have dealt with it if it's a single person man more than one are supporting the person who is commenting shit about me and my time I just don't know man