I've given up most social media but have become obsessed with Reddit.
No matter how much I use it, I'm constantly amazed that I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about.
I'm not a fan of the redesign or their push to look at other social media platforms, but I understand the direction they have to go to build revenue.
Seriously? I just assume most people on there are in high school, it seems like a place where the lowest common denominator ideas get upvoted and everything else gets nailed.
It's crucial to mostly ignore and unsubscribe from the default subreddits. If there's a topic you're interested in, try to find a small subreddit dedicated just to it. My personal reddit homepage looks virtually nothing like the default, and indeed whenever I accidentally view the "popular" feed I'm shocked at what the site devolves into if you don't manually curate your subscriptions.
Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable.
Some popular subs can have good content, too - askreddit has a good topic once or twice a month, and depthhub (used to) have good curation of deep learning.
>Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable.
I disagree. Those subs are chock full of people who suffer from "expert beginner" symptom. The real experts have moved on to communities with a higher bar of entry (mostly forums). You can't have real in-depth discussion about technical subjects when you're constantly getting buried by people who are mostly trying to score internet virtue signaling points by pointing out that their table saw is old and lacks the most modern safety features or that they're not using jack stands. Forums (or 4-Chan, or anywhere else with linear, non-ranked discussion) doesn't have that problem. Once you're above the lowest common denominator in any sub there's little left to gain because you can't reliably interact with people who are at or above your level (because those people get drowned out so they start keeping their mouths shut or leave entirely).
It's because Reddit displays the upvote totals. Anytime you set up something that looks like a scorekeeping mechanism, people are going to start treating it like a video game and chasing high scores, with all the attendant showboating and bad behavior that leads to.
I've also yet to find a subreddit I like. I admit I haven't tried recently, but the "high school" vibe is very much the one I get. I don't even mean in a bad way, I just mean in a very naïve way. I came of age on the internet, as a teen in the mid-90s, and I just feel like, 20+ years later, I've moved beyond the "everything is new" phase, and reddit still feels like everyone discovering things for the first time. Whether it's a car subreddit where nobody knows how cars work, or a tech-specific subreddit where nobody has the background of my peers.. I'm all for helping people along, but on every topic it feels like 95% rehashing the same old things I rehashed as a teenager.
I think it's just that, ultimately, younger people have more time for online community than middle-aged folks, and the average tone of most subreddits clearly shows this.
Perhaps I'd have a different perspective if I was pursuing a new hobby, so I was the n00b, but I'm.. not.
Agreed. I've seen cases where you had niche subreddits containing people who are somewhat experts, but when the sub gets remotely popular, it gets bombarded by people who don't know anything but feel like they can post whatever useless crap they want that has been posted a million times before. Eventually the moderators give up trying to control quality due to posts and upvotes by beginners, the experts leave in disgust, and the sub devolves into dumb conversations about the topic because now it's just beginners talking to beginners.
The heavily moderated ones are generally better. /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians are the highest quality subs I know of. They delete any comments that don't cite sources.
Moderation and composition contribute a lot to a sub's quality. On one end you have fantastic and popular subreddits like Ask(Historians|Science|*) which rely on extremely heavy moderation and qualifications or sources. On the other end you have very niche subs that are really only of interest to enthusiasts/relevant parties, and so composition keeps the quality high rather than moderation. The problem with a lot of subs is that they are popular and unmoderated, and so left alone they just converge to the mean (and the mean's not great).
As someone who has been on reddit for a long long time (10+ years). It's clear as daylight that the site is mostly comprised of teenagers and that is the dominating voice. As other mentioned there are still (plenty of)diamonds in the rough if you know where to look but the site lost its voice and the leadership their values. Since spez has returned the strategy has been to gradually move the goal posts to keep uproar at a minimum.
This was inevitable though. At some point the corporate overlords will want to cash out. Time for something new.
You could say the same thing about YouTube -- just look the "YouTube trending" page any time, it's a bunch of stuff only children and dumb people would be contributing statistics for (sorry to be pretentious, but am I wrong?). That doesn't mean YouTube isn't a valuable source of information -- you just have to find the right channels.
/r/starcraft: doesn't have nearly as much good discussion as TeamLiquid, but TL's forums are not easy to trawl through. Great coverage of tournaments/announcements tho
/r/personalfinance: really great here, lot of professional financial experts drop knowledge bombs. I've improved my financial life oodles just reading through this.
/r/piano: lots of great/interesting posts, mostly people playing pieces or shots of their set-ups, not too much memery but people try a little bit. Quite a few better/more experienced players than I am to answer my Q's.
The main thing I hate is memes. They are very low effort, many of them are inside jokes/highly meta, and the humor is usually bargain-basement, not very funny. If you can avoid those subreddits where memery takes over, then you have a better experience IMO.
Your reddit experience varies wildly based on which subreddits you subscribe to. If you don't have an account, you're likely seeing the unwashed masses.
The sports streams subreddits are a God-sent though for people like me obsessed about sports, for the first time in two decades I've started watching US sports again thanks to /r/nbastreams and /r/MLBStreams/.
Reddit is basically Usenet 2.0, this time with moderation!
The same rules apply. The bigger the community the lower the signal-to-noise ratio. Also, the more political or religious the community the more strident the users will be. The echo chamber effect is huge.
The biggest difference is that Reddit mostly has spam under control, something the Usenet could never claim. Also, it's much less efficient under the hood, but the world has tons of bandwidth now so nobody cares. Plus as far as I know nobody posts binaries to Reddit by UUencoding them and splitting them across hundreds or thousands of posts--torrents are much less hassle.
The heavily moderated academic subs are great (/r/askhistorians and the ilk), but massive subs like /r/science are filled with clickbait headlines written by people who haven't read the literature or understood it's broader importance ("x in carrots can target tumor cells" -frontpage upvotes, yet published in a crap journal, or anything ctrl-f CRISPR). Many comments on these articles are only informed by these partially-true-well-not-quite headlines, yet they sail to the tops of threads.
Maybe some of the CS subs are better in quality, that's not my field, but the only biology sub I've found where technically trained people regularly post and comment has only like 50k subscribers and posts reach the top with 100 votes.
You are describing reddit 8 years ago. Reddit today is a mess of political propaganda and fake content. Hardly anything knowledgable or interesting. Certainly the only "enthusiastic" people are the hordes of democratic party employees and trump supporters. Every else is just exhausted by it.
CMV and ELI5 also have decent political discussion at times I think; askHistorians often seems to provide insight into current political issues; there's probably more I don't know.
For all the good and enjoyment I get out of Reddit, sometimes it seems like it's just various angry mobs that coalesce and split as needed to maximize the amount of angry voices present at any one time for any one topic.
I'm an avid gamer, but honestly I can't read popular gaming subreddit (wow and halo for game specific sub), it's almost depressing. There's so much flames and complaints that you can even appreciate something without getting a lot of flake.
Leave subreddits that are just as lousy with shills as Twitter, there are subs for a decent political conversation (at least, as decent as is possible in 2019).
Personally I've found lots of quality discussion outside the usual places. /r/europe tends to have nice debates every now and then. I'm sure other regions or subjects have nice communities where people discuss things without insulting each other.
/r/politics is fairly left-leaning by US standards, while The_Donald and /r/conservative are hardly about politics anymore. Furthermore, I'd say on a global scale /r/politics is pretty much dead middle, while subreddits like /r/latestagecapitalism represent the far left.
Frankly, Democrats are being pulled to the left by the progressives and Republicans went hard right years ago with the tea party, so the reason there's no middle-of-the-road discussion is because there isn't one anymore. Luxuries of a two-party system.
The most common topics there are higher taxes on the wealthy and universal healthcare. Neither of these things are far left on a global scale: they are standard in most industrialized countries.
Interestingly, the GOP probably contains the conservative and right wing impulses of the base. And it certainly feels that way, among my friends, we hate that illegal aliens are entitled to health care at ERs. I want to see their countries billed for the care / or I want to see the illegals dumped at the embassy rather than hooked up to medicine. I'm certainly not going to get my wish granted by the GOP. However, should the party fail, there's a chance I could get the representation I want.
I really think "The illegals" needs to be erased from the discourse. Unless they have a distinct species moniker, they're still human beings located in the wrong place politically (in the geographical sense).
Probably not. There's an invisible order that underpins burning man - the United States' rule of law. If acts at burning man didn't invite the scrutiny of US Law Enforcement, it'd be a very different place.
'But there are drugs at burning man' - if it were truly a land onto its own, they'd be synthesizing the drugs at burning man.
You don't think language has an impact on perception? You think the Nazi effort to dehumanize jews with rhetoric didn't work? What a simple world you must live in.
> I want to see the illegals dumped at the embassy rather than hooked up to medicine.
That is a horrible, near sociopathic, line of thinking. You seem to have gotten to a point where you can't even recognize illegal immigrants as human beings.
I don't see it as any more or less sociopathic than saying "you need to pay for these people's medicine or else I'll sic the authorities on you".
If I saw illegals as non-human, I'd advocate for the local DNR to hand out hunting permits for illegals.
Don't you see my humanity? I bust my ass to earn my keep, I don't demand access to things others have, if that attitude were reciprocated and people took care of themselves, their livelihood wouldn't depend on my opinion of them.
As long as you coerce others to provide for those who are unwilling to do so for themselves, you're going to have this tension.
My borders my choice. If I can't advocate for my hard work and sacrifices to be invested as I see fit, what autonomy do I have? Do you tell women they have to spread their legs for the less fortunate or else they're sociopaths?
You can see people as less than human without thinking it is okay for you to hunt them as animals. Advocating to let people die, instead of treat them, because they aren't here legally is putting their immigration status above them as a person and to me absolutely lessening their humanity.
If someone is hurt and comes to me for help, I don't ask to see their papers.
>You can see people as less than human without thinking it is okay for you to hunt them as animals.
Please keep reading my mind - why do I think this way? What status do I think illegals have if I want to treat them better than animals but worse than fellow citizens?
>Advocating to let people die, instead of treat them, because they aren't here illegal is putting their immigration status above them as a person and to me absolutely lessening their humanity.
Then why don't you advocate for a voluntary system to take care of illegals rather than tell me I'm a sociopath for exercising challenging but important fiscal discipline?
For the record I'd be fine treating illegals if someone else paid for it voluntarily - billionaire philanthropists, DSA chapters, the countries that these people remit their earnings to, etc. I'm not saying they don't deserve health care, I'm saying that I don't want to pay for it and I'd rather they suffer than I do.
Please address: My borders my choice. If I can't advocate for my hard work and sacrifices to be invested as I see fit, what autonomy do I have? Do you tell women they have to spread their legs for the less fortunate or else they're sociopaths?
> I'm saying that I don't want to pay for it and I'd rather they suffer than I do.
Glad to hear you admit it. Money > humanity.
You can advocate for whatever you want, just like I'm free to tell you that it's a horrible idea that's only justification is to "punish" people you think deserve it.
My humanity is more important to me than others. I have to take care of myself because I know others would resent me if they had to take care of me. I'm sure you wouldn't be thrilled to provide for me if I came to your house with my hat in hand.
And you feel the same way - we're just arguing over where to draw the line. If you save any money that could be donated to those in need, you've also put money above humanity. Have you ever bought a Mcflurry? Did you really need that sweet treat more badly than someone needed a malaria net?
So where's the line of sociopathy? What's the permissible amount of money to put above humanity?
If you come to my house I'll happily call an ambulance for you. We have enough collective resources to treat the life-threatening illness of everyone within our borders, legally or not. We can worry about fixing immigration separately. Even when someone isn't a citizen, you should do your best to help people in reach not be sick. And this doesn't mean you have to give them an income for free.
And as a society-level thing it makes sense to fund with the general tax fund. Charging the countries of origin does sound like it should be attempted though!
Trying to fix every problem in the world is more fraught. We probably should be trying harder, but there are severe issues where throwing resources at a poor country invites corruption and can be worse than doing nothing at all.
>If you come to my house I'll happily call an ambulance for you.
And I'd do the same. My objection is that my tax obligation is roughly the GDP per capita - that's well above and beyond calling an ambulance. What are the limits of what you'd do for me? Could I come into your kitchen and eat until I'm full? Could I play your video games if I were bored? Could I ask for a sexual favor?
>We have enough collective resources to treat the life-threatening illness of everyone within our borders
Why stop at the borders? Is the inside the border / outside the border distinction more ethical than the illegal vs non-illegal distinction?
You don't get to come in my house unless it's an emergency. I'll help pay for things you need, but if you keep coming for food and shelter and you're not a citizen then we can get on deportation proceedings. (I don't want to tie deportation to medical attention because it can lead to people getting sicker, likely costing more, and definitely dying more. But for other things we can.) If you want niceties then here is the library and you can use the resources inside to search for a job.
Food for the starving would be a negligible part of taxes.
> Why stop at the borders? Is the inside the border / outside the border distinction more ethical than the illegal vs non-illegal distinction?
I think I addressed that fine in the last paragraph of my previous post.
But also this is what we have control of, and we should make the best of it!
If we could pay some single-digit percentage of GDP and provide basic health care to the entire world, I'd suggest that we have a pretty strong moral imperative to do so. But I don't believe that's the world we're in.
Centrism has fallen out of favor in our political discourse, largely because of the polarization of the current administration and culture.
Maintaining a centrist position can't work when both parties see the other as actively undermining/destroying the fabric of our system (i.e. Trump packing the courts with activist judges, dems raising taxes to Vietnam era levels.)
Identity politics largely doesn't permit nuanced political opinion because you're cast out if you don't subscribe to all of the major tenants of the party you're trying to loosely align with.
Twitter seems to be the enigma to that rule, because I still get heated replies to tweets from years ago from time to time. Even though time has passed, the conversation is still as shallow as ever.
I can't imagine being a celebrity and getting dozens of hate tweets in my mentions because a tweet I made 8 years ago shows up as a link on a facebook group somewhere.
Well, they lock threads after 6 months, probably to save moderation time. It's always possible for someone to re-create a discussion topic and get new responses going.
I actually found a shocking lack of knowledgeable people in fairly mundane hobby reddits like r/guitars. Other forums seem to attract a much more competent crowd.
No matter how much I use it, I'm constantly amazed that I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about.
I'm not a fan of the redesign or their push to look at other social media platforms, but I understand the direction they have to go to build revenue.