My desire to read the comments sections on reddit and increasingly on here completely baffle me. If I was sat in a room and the people in there were saying things as stupid as I see on reddit I would leave that room and wonder how the hell I ended up in it. What possible reason do I have to be wasting time reading the barely formed thoughts of what must be predominantly teenagers. Yet ... I find myself back there.
I'm in my mid-30's. I quit reading Reddit because in pretty much all the subreddits I was in I started to feel old. People sound like I did 10-15 years ago when I lacked the life experience I have now.
I don't have this experience on HN really. I suspect I'm closer to the average age here. There is the occasional poor opinion but it usually gets downvoted pretty hard. Even people that I disagree with I learn a lot from. Today in this thread I learned about how classic Christianity thought about doubt for example. Of course a lot of people are anonymous here (including me) so people are much more bold with their opinions than they would be in person.
Not discounting your experience, but to me I have a very different experience on HN than I do Reddit.
Similar experience for me, on average reddit feels like people confidently speaking on topics they've not actually participated in much yet (if at all). Which reminds me wholeheartedly of myself when I was younger.
When I was in my teens, I would tell engine builders on a car enthusiast forum that they're wrong about how a specific part goes together, because I'd seen one on google images and was pretty sure I knew better. I have grown of course, and whilst I know more about engines now, what I've truly learned is that someone who has actually done the thing probably knows how it really it is. People often base opinions on how they think things should be, when life is rarely so perfect.
No matter what the subreddit is, it’s full of radically far left political comments. They get upvoted and any attempt to provide reason gets downvoted.
Not sure how it became this way but perhaps it’s as simple as what you say:
> People sound like I did 10-15 years ago when I lacked the life experience
They’re kids.
Or perhaps it’s more sinister and coordinated. Either way, the political component of Reddit has made me abandon it. It’s unfortunate because I used to enjoy niche subs in the same way you would any other niche forum.
American Politics in general dominates almost all online conversation spaces, as someone who doesn't live there it has essentially ruined most internet forums in English for me.
I used to think people who banned politics from the dinner table were being closed minded, but I get it now, they're fucking bored of the topic, and it creates tensions that the topic is underserved of. It's the same discussion over and over again.
I mean Reddit is an echo chamber in the worst possible way and it doesn't help that the admins don't understand the concept of a containment board and think if you delete the board the users and their opinions will evaporate into nothing, so you just get the same extreme groups being corralled into smaller and smaller concentrations with other extreme groups.
> No matter what the subreddit is, it’s full of radically far left political comments. They get upvoted and any attempt to provide reason gets downvoted.
Not sure how it became this way but perhaps it’s as simple as what you say
I can comment a bit about how this is achieved, and it is “achieved” because it’s worked for/not organic.
It starts with the mods being overwhelmingly far-left, from the mainstream subs to even obscure radio subs. People who post leftist #CurrentThing will almost never be banned, and people who inevitably reply will face immediate bans.
“So what? I just won’t comment” you might think, but most are unaware bans also shadowban your voting power. You’ll see the numbers change from your votes but no one else will.
This has the effect of shifting what’s “popular” in a given sub over time, further reinforcing the narrative. Lots of people go with the flow/assume what appears popular is correct, so the effects of silencing one side reach far beyond those who are banned.
Specific to the far-left vibe on reddit, a few things come to mind:
- Authoritarian
- Intolerant
- Pro censorship
- Naive
- Bigotry
- More emotional than logical
Advocates for sharp increases in federal-level government power and authority at the cost of individual liberties and freedoms.
Don't take me wrong here: I don't pretend that I have all the answers, that people left of center are always wrong, etc etc. I'm just describing the reddit vibe and why it's not for me.
Those sound like criticism anyone can level at either "extreme" side, but the clearest definition is the rejection of capitalism. Maybe /r/latestagecapitalism and /r/antiwork start to fit those the anti-capitalist mold, but they are aren't the majority.
When I'm browsing /r/pics I don't see "seize the means of production at any cost!" for example.
These days "far left", in my opinion, seems to be levied at people who want to tax the ten or so ultra billionaires in the US, protect transgender rights, have universal health care etc.
Not the parent, but still want to respond. I'd probably be seen as radical and far left myself, especially on social and environmental issues (I identify as neo-liberal though), but I'm pretty scared by how often I read calls to abandon "capitalism". It happens on almost every subreddit and even more scarry, I've heard it from other super smart younger people in person. I think some of this is to blame on corporatism in the US. Attacking capitalism as a whole strikes me as incredibly naive though and risks slaughtering the golden goose without any viable replacement.
I think it's mostly a case of people wishing utopia was achievable in their fantasy-land. But, it doesn't help that companies like Tencent have stakes in the company. If the CCP can get their hands on anything American, it'd be to their advantage to try to use it to contribute to the destabilization of our society.
You're being downvoted for bringing up politics—or maybe the "sinister and coordinated" sentence which I certainly find hard to believe. That's actually interesting since I was going to include pretty much this in my parent comment but left it out since I thought it would cause people to miss my point.
I think like a lot of people I'm moving more towards the center from the left as I get older and I find this is a point of contention with me and people on reddit. It's not only that though, it's also things like people being dogmatic about particular programming languages. I used to do that too but now I tend to see the world in grayscale. There are positives and negatives about pretty much everything.
Regardless, I think this is mostly an age thing since people remind me so much of younger self. I don't think they're even wrong necessarily but I did find myself practicing "Duty Calls" quite often: https://xkcd.com/386/
It's the lack of nuance that makes any conversation far <direction>.
I was pretty left wing until the whole AOC "scarcity is a lie" wing of the party started taking over all online conversation. I'm sure the same applies to conservatives and Boebert/Greene nutjobs.
I'm sure whether you see Reddit as left or right is mostly colored by the comments and posts that stick out to you, and those are probably the ones you find crazy or distasteful.
He's very classist though. Not wanting to give someone something doesn't mean you don't want them to have it, and he definitely conflates those two to give himself the moral high ground constantly.
I have the opposite experience. Try discussing pretty much anything (from latest news, to car repair, to salad recipes), and see how quick it goes to bashing GOP and Trump supporters. As a non-USian myself, this gets really tiring pretty quick.
A considerable chunk of the left-wing in the US would be considered right-wing almost anywhere else, so it's no surprise a non-American would see it that way (seeing how the majority of Reddit users are American)
Europeans keep saying this but Le Pen got 41.4% of the vote in France, so... you_cant_explain_that_meme.jpg
Also good to keep in mind that the US core Democratic party platform is only able to purport positions that have a reasonable chance of winning over some of the moderate right wing in the country. They're constrained by whatever the moderate right thinks (for better or worse)
Agreed. There have been entire days where I've found myself distracted from completing otherwise pressing deadlines.
What I've found is that the activity I do first when I start my 'working day' dictates what I do. So, if I show up at work and open Hacker News or Tweetdeck, there's a not-so-insignificant chance that I'll find myself distracted one way or another for the rest of the day. However, if I stick to a set schedule, there's a good chance that I have a productive day.
What worries me is that these distractions build on one another. So, if I start on Hacker News, and stay off of it for the rest of the day, I can still find myself spending a good chunk of time going through unimportant emails or browsing various news feeds.
> So, if I show up at work and open Hacker News or Tweetdeck, there's a not-so-insignificant chance that I'll find myself distracted one way or another for the rest of the day. However, if I stick to a set schedule, there's a good chance that I have a productive day
Do you think this is mediated by your mental state, instead of directly causal?
I noticed this for myself: I was recently diagnosed with a CFS-like issue and a combination of drugs and identifying food triggers has made a huge difference in my level of mental energy.
I still monitor and manage it day-to-day, and I noticed that when my inflammation is up, I am a complete sucker for YouTube videos and mindlessly rescrolling through Twitter. It's been really valuable to be able to reframe the problem as downstream of something more manageable.
> Do you think this is mediated by your mental state, instead of directly causal?
It’s causal. I’ve found that my productivity level is relatively constant when I maintain a routine. The quality of my work may change depending on other factors, but I still make meaningful progress.
However, if I break my routine by checking social media early on in the day, there’s a good chance that my productivity will subsequently go down.
I haven’t found anything to suggest that I am more or less likely to do this when I am, for instance, not feeling well. One caveat. I don’t have to deal with anything you have to deal with, so I can’t make an apples to apples comparison.
It kind of feels like some kind of idle loop where my mind has some spare cycles and it defaults to hacker news and similar stuff, then it goes down the rabbit hole once started. Just making it a little harder to view the sites seems to help me a lot. I add 127.0.0.1 <site> to my /etc/hosts file during work hours. I find myself looking at a broken page a couple times a day without even realizing how I got there, but it allows me to avoid the rabbit hole and just get back to work.
Is there a good MacOS¹/Unix-y way to automate this? (I’m guessing a crontab that swaps two versions of /etc/hosts is my best option but maybe there’s something more elegant?)
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1. I’m aware of ScreenTime, but it’s too easily overridden.
I bought it when it was a 1 time $20 purchase. You can define what times you want to block (Monday - Friday from 9am-5pm, for example). You can also lock preferences for when the Focus is active so you can’t change it. There’s also options for adding breaks.
It’s worked well for me. I know a little about myself and I need something like this to force me from being distracted. Whenever I find a new site, I add it to the list of blocked sites.
You can also block apps, or whitelist sites so everything except a few sites is blocked.
I think tolerance for text is much higher than real life, I mean it's just text so you filter out 80% of the rest of what face to face communication is about.
The majority of comments I encounter on Reddit are jokes that are at least mildly amusing, and some of them are hilarious. If I had to describe Reddit comments with one word, I’d say funny, not stupid.
This is what bedevils me about Twitter. I'm rigorous about pruning my Following list to keep it intellectually honest, so my main feed is pretty great. I end up reading replies to thought-provoking or provocative tweets because there's often additional context or good-faith rebuttals in there.
But holy crap, those nuggets are buried among the ravings of the absolute stupidest people in the world. It feels poisonous to my epistemology, but the good stuff is _so_ valuable.
I suppose the solution is to try to pick topics that nobody cares about? This was tough when Covid was an informational lifeline, but maybe I can just change my interests from economics to... Quantum physics or something.
An idea i had a while ago is a HN client which will only show the comments after one has completely read the article.
I don't know how to go about it yet, but could be really cool.
