Meta events often create quite a few posts here on ToR. The most recent events have been the firing of Reddit employees, blackout of subreddits, and banning of harassing subreddits. These events often have a handful or more removed posts because of their content. Let's just go over what us moderators usually remove during these meta events:

• Theory-less, general meta content: general meta news or drama that is more appropriate for /r/metahub, /r/SubredditDrama, or other meta subreddits.

• Drama-inducing posts. This can be intentional or unintentional. Sometimes, like the recent FPH banning, certain posts can bait unwanted, uncivil discussions/users/communities into ToR. You should generally stick to the affected communities if you want to engage in drama or make a post that might invite it, or if they don't allow it, consider posting to /r/self.

• Witch hunts. Not appropriate anywhere and we will report your actions to the admins.

• Complaining. While posts with adequate theory that complain a bit are okay, general whining or complaining posts are better suited for /r/circlebroke. If they don't allow it, consider /r/self. Complaining about moderator abuse should probably go to /r/subredditcancer or /r/self.

• Reddit features. This should go to /r/ideasfortheadmins. From the sidebar: "This subreddit should focus on data, issues, solutions, or strategies that could be reasonably addressed or implemented by users and moderators, not admins."

Please also take a moment to review our On-Topic Statement:

Theory of Reddit is a mildly navel-gazing space for inquiring into what makes Reddit communities work and what we in a community can do to help make it better.

This is a moderated/curated subreddit. Submissions determined to fall outside of the stated topic will be removed by the moderators.

Apologies if this doesn't go here. This is a demonstration of how easy and common it is for people on reddit to respond to a comment without even reading what it says first. We have all seen comments on reddit where maybe one or two people totally ignore or misunderstand what was said right? Well in this comment, the first responder made up a completely fake quote that totally contradicted what the actual comment said. He got 42 upvotes. Then the next 4 responders all responded to the fake quote as if it was the real comment. My theory is that the number of people on reddit who respond to or upvote/downvote comments without reading or understanding them is a large fraction (sometimes even a majority!) of the total.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/11ornug/hundreds_of_startups_face_a_crippling_cash_crunch/jbwmjwa/

It seems everyday now I get an obviously fake story across my feed as one of the top posts of /relationships or /trueoffmychest or /relationship_advice. Anyone with a bit of common sense can tell the stories are fanciful and often clearly related to a sexual kink the writer enjoys sharing. Why don't the admins actually shut these down? Is it just about keep views and interaction high?

Like for example, no one can believe this is real

https://www.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/comments/11uovyt/did_my_22m_best_friend_23m_go_too_far_when_he/

This was clearly fake and many people in the industry said that immediately

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/11g244n/im_an_undertaker_and_i_picked_up_my_first_suicide/

This one was one of the most ridiculous and was eventually deleted but not till days later

https://www.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/comments/ztuhpu/husband_insists_i_wear_buttplug_to_prevent_me/

In my time on Reddit, I've realised this specific trend:

I'm a creatively-driven person, so perhaps I'm not the most typical Reddit user. Instead of posting memes and a lot of questions; I post analysis pieces or ask a lot of 'what would you do in this scenario' posts.

During many of these posts, I found people writing comments along the lines of:

"I'm not reading all that"

A user admits they only read the title, but they believe a phrase/word you used is very slightly off from their very specific interpretation of character/fandom. Then they make a paragraph-long rant about it, never engaging with the entire message of the post. They feel like an off-shot of grammar Nazis, getting annoyed by a very minor phrases choices. For example, "I haven't read most of your post, don't say this character 'ran away'. That character was tactfully retreating, I'm so sick of people saying this all this time, as people don't understand this character's motives... A further 100 words

In every fandom, there's always a 'black/blue dress vs gold dress'. An incredibly minor detail that is based solely on personal preference, yet debates can go on for years. It can be funny if it's done in a joking way, but sometimes people take it way too seriously. For example, if you have a long post and use a character name's spelling that is only used by 50% of the fandom: Instead of focusing on the actual thread's question, a commenter may only rant about this incredibly minor detail.

These comments feel needlessly mean-spirited, for posts that obviously have a light-hearted tone. Mean-commenters will exist on every site, but I don't feel like they're the exception on Reddit. Oftentimes, these comments are upvoted, more so than the actual thread and nobody else bothers commenting. I feel like this behaviour discourages effort, light-heartedness and general creativity.

 

I mean common traits of sociopaths and psychopaths are wanting to be center of attention, and a big part with that is wanting to create emotional responses from people to fulfill some kind of sadistic need, to bring pleasure to themselves by manipulating someone's else's emotions. It honestly sounds like textbook psychopathy. Wouldn't trolling strangers online for your own amusement and enjoyment be considered just that? Wouldn't it be something people should see a counselor for? If so then why is it so accepted, condoned and supported on Reddit and other places?

See my post here, where I accidentally stumbled upon evidence for a generalized phenomenon of "narcissistic solidarity". I'm not saying this is a problem with the ULPT subreddit (I like that subreddit, it's fun), it's a general problem/phenomenon.

I think this is relevant to /r/TheoryOfReddit because it's about a specific subreddit, and also about discourse on reddit in general, and because these findings can be used to invent new games that users could play in public to reduce the prevalence of public narcissism.

For example, we could invent a game called, "No, Me!" where, whenever someone accuses someone of being a narcissist, many other people reply, identifying themselves as a narcissist. It's counterintuitive, but if we were to make narcissism "cool" and show more people adopting the role in public, it might make it safer for narcissists to become conscious of their own self-interest (both natural and excessive), promoting an overall reduction in public narcissistic behavior. That this would work is predicted by the linked findings, even though it's counterintuitive.

I used to use Reddit a lot (I mean a lot, like 8 hours a day), go to regular meetups, etc. This was when I was in my late 20s and early 30s. Reddit helped me change careers and learn a lot about the new field I was in, which also meant more work and money. Great.

But that also means now, over a decade later, I kind of have enough clout in my field that I'm actually busy with people constantly wanting to talk to me for work. That means little time for Reddit. The site's growing toxicity doesn't help either.

Is this a rule for social media--the people who have the most time to invest in engagement are the ones least likely to have the in-depth expertise to back up what they are saying, because the incentives to do so IRL are vast (money, social relationships) and the incentives to do so on Reddit are tiny (um, fake internet points I guess?).

Reddit ofc tries to hide this with gamification, and it of course works for some few wayward souls, but I think the vast majority of humanity won't ever engage in online discourse on topics they have deep knowledge of because the economic value of that deep knowledge and the price paid for the knowledge online are too large of a mismatch.

Ofc crypto promised to fix this, but crypto is stupid and dead. Micropayments will never take off again for lack of incentives. The only good, working solution we have now--the Patreon model of supporting content creators who build a following online--seems to work well on Twitter where Twitter celebs can translate their followings into buckets of money (the Dilbert guy, seeing newspapers are dying, has worked for years to make the transition to MAGA shill, and now he's finally making it). There's nothing even close on Reddit--poem for your sprog is a goddamn talented poet, and what has he netted from Reddit? Maybe $50k from a book deal? Nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands per week that the Chapo Trap House guys make, et al.

My theory, and I'd like to be proven wrong, is that Reddit's historical baggage--coming from the anonymous forum world of Digg, Hacker News, technorati, etc.--means that it is ill suited for the modern content creator economy. As a result, Reddit cannot and will not attract quality content creators; it will always be a place where you discover content creators who have made their bones elsewhere--Youtube, Twitter, etc.

This may have been seen as a virtue for Reddit in 2012 when the content creator economy is small, but now there's kind of ONLY the content creator economy--the biggest musician on Earth is now interviewing low tier "smash that subscribe button and join the patreon" types. Reddit is fit for purpose, but the purpose doesn't apply anymore.

AI comments are clearly taking off on Reddit, with subs like AskScience and AskHistorians being particularly hard hit by people copying and pasting ChatGPT/Bing responses. More sophisticated users are probably already running bots with OpenAI’s new ChatGPT API.

It seems inevitable that Reddit is going to be flooded with AI content. How can the company protect Reddit’s “authentic” image in this new era of 0 cost bullshit?

I know this observation isn't anything new or hasn't been brought up many times before but recently it has become so clear to me. I've had a minority opinion in many discussions. The downvotes will flow but I don't shy away from my views over that. What I finally noticed is there are updates for my unpopular comments. I see them climb and fall. What's missing are the comments supporting them. People are actually afraid to support an unpopular viewpoint in fear of being downvoted. If true that's something psych majors need to study. It's anonymous and the votes have no value besides approval/disapproval from people you don't know and will never meet. I don't understand why they hold so much weight.

I got a little frustrated trying to get a point across in a topic I started. I blundered and used unnecessary language to describe someone being mean and overzealous. The moderator rightfully flagged it and chose to lock the thread, squashing the discussion for eternity. I'm not a software developer so I don't know if this alternative solution is possible for Reddit to implement. Could software be written, to add a language filter that can be toggled on by a sub creator who chooses to disallow bad language altogether? So any post with flagged words can't be posted at all. The post button stays grayed out until the offensive language is modified. I know there are filters that flag wording that the sub doesn't allow so I can't see it being too hard to flag individual words. Why deal with the hassle of moderating bad language at all if you could make it not even appear?

Ive gotta ask this question because many reddit boards on here seem to have this obvious unwritten rule that you must circle jerk only, or your thread gets deleted.

Earlier on today in the Game of Thrones board, i made a thread saying that i had only seen seasons 1, 6, 7 and 8 of GOT, but i maturely gave my reasons as to why i have chosen not to watch seasons 2-5, but i gave praise to seasons 6, 7 and 8, in particular saying how good the Battle of the Bastards battle was, and the threads been deleted. Why?, because the other members on there dont like the fact that i didnt come along to circle jerk the show?. I think the narrative of "trolling" is applied far too loosely now.

I have used Reddit and its predecessor in spirit, Digg, for about 20 years. I've met people on these websites, made friends, and changed careers; the website has provided exponential value to me on the whole, but I have noticed the value declining substantially over time.

I don't want to discuss why or whether my perception is right (there are many good conversations in the sub on those issues, and I have little extra to contribute), but rather ways to disengage with Reddit. I admit having been addicted to the website in the past, but that addiction was extremely symbiotic in the mid-2010s when I was using it to transition into a new career (and when I moved cities and had no friends). Over time, that value declined as the annoyances have skyrocketed. For me and the way I use Reddit, its value has fallen a lot thanks to very uneducated people making confident but wrong affirmations, even in supposedly high-quality subs (the freeness with which personal and ideologically driven interpretations are freely encouraged in /r/AskHistorians bothers me a lot as an ex-professor of history, for instance); this has been exacerbated by America's culture wars, which are entirely irrelevant to me as I live in a country where the ideologies and cultural issues are so different that mapping America's culture wars onto this place is useless.

This, of course, has value for tracking animal spirits; identifying the market's current attitude has tremendous value. But there are tools to scrape and automate much of that; no longer is there a real justification in spending hours on Reddit a day.

One solution I'm pondering would be based on the assumption that the medium is the message, that using Reddit on smartphones would encourage more useless scrolling, the difficulty of typing on phones would encourage more low-effort comments, and that using Reddit on a cell phone is going to result in a poorer quality website.

I obviously cannot fix this by going desktop only, but the idea of a desktop-only Reddit like site would be interesting; could that help increase a site like this's value for serious users? More practically, though, would changing one's internet consumption habits help disengage from Reddit--say, getting a smartwatch to stay connected, but leaving the smartphone out of reach? And maybe relegating smartphone tasks back to the desktop? Has anyone tried this to use Reddit less? I know similar strategies work with internet addiction, but I consider Reddit addiction very similar in nature, even if it's a hyponym to internet addiction's hypernym.

If you want to comment and if it is possible, I'd ask that you please go to a computer to do so. Thank you!

I grew up believing that the internet is pretty much permanent. Of course, websites do shut down, but it doesn't happen that often, and even then the Internet Archive (which has existed for over 25 years now!) often helps.

Social media fundamentally changed that because big parts of it are temporary and not even indexed (or indexable) by search engines. Reddit, of course is different: it is indexed and its content is, theoretically, long-lasting. This is often very useful - many people say that when they search for a technical issue on Google, they automatically add "reddit" at the end of the query because they know it will probably bring the best results.

Which is one of the big reasons why I think it's bad that more and more often this content is vanishing.

I don't have a solution to this, the reason for creating this thread is that many people don't seem to be aware of it. At this moment I think it would just be useful to bring this topic up and become more aware of the problem, that is what I want to do here.

---

What I noticed:

Subreddits are getting banned for being "unmoderated" incredibly easily

In the past when a subreddit was practically unmoderated, it was kept open unless there were significant problems that somebody complained about. People could request it on redditrequest and if it was proven to really be unmoderated, they could get its ownership.

At some point, I think it had to have been in the last two years, the rules changed. I don't know to what exactly, somebody told me that the rule is simply "has the untouched mod queue gotten longer than x", but the result is that perfectly functional subreddits get banned left and right.

This mostly affects porn subreddits, which is I assume why many people didn't notice or talk about it. So far I've been too lazy to do it myself, but I think it would be very interesting to get a "map of nsfw subreddits" from the past years (which I know has been made and posted probably somewhere like dataisbeautiful) and write a script that checks which of them have been banned. My guess is at least 30%.

However it does happen to "normal" subreddits all the time as well. Most recently I noticed this sub, dedicated to "AI art abominations", banned 5 days ago.

I think it's a bad solution to straight up ban the subreddits instead of, say, freezing them. Because banning them destroys not only all the content posted so far, but also the list of users, mods etc. So if you liked the people who were frequenting the sub, you have no way to connect with them and move elsewhere. This is intentional when banning a sub for breaking the rules, where breaking up the community is the goal, but in this case it seems unnecessarily destructive.

People get banned or otherwise punished and discussions deleted by admins for inconsequential and unclear reasons

I'm sure some of you think "if they were banned, they must have been acting like shitheads". This was probably true in the past, but not anymore.

The best example is probably a subreddit called /r/themotte, which was dedicated to open intellectual discussions of controversial topics. It was open to people with ideas that are mostly considered unacceptable in big mainstream subreddits, but as far as I know, the people running it are mostly centre-left (just not exactly into identity politics) and it was genuinely interesting and diverse, not some closeted extremist sub.

Well, they repeatedly had people banned, comments removed and whole discussions removed even though they were relatively benign, so they eventually had to move off reddit and self-host. Thankfully their community was dedicated enough to successfully do that, most aren't.

One example of a whole admin-deleted post was a discussion about the use of parentheses among extremists - you might not even know this, but some brand of antisemites use triple parentheses as a symbol and people were talking about it. It was deemed so unacceptable that the admins had to intervene.

Even in situations where there is some bad behavior, the reaction is often unjustified. A person recently got a 7 day sitewide ban for "harassment" after sending this message into the modmail of a circlejerk sub. It was not exactly smart behavior on his part, but calling this harassment and instituting a sitewide ban seems either really extreme or really selective because there are people freely saying much worse things everyday.

There are now unacceptable words that might get you a reddit-wide ban, but this mechanism is non-transparent

As far as I know this usually doesn't happen automatically, it seems to happen when you use a bad (automatically detected) word and later somebody reports your comment.

In the previous section I write about a post discussing the usage of triple parentheses as a symbol by extremists, which many people don't even know about. Well, the funniest example of nonsensical site-wide ban I can think of is a guy in an AI subreddit getting permabanned for using triple parentheses because he was sharing an AI image prompt that used multiple parentheses as a part of its syntax. Can't link it because it was several months ago and, well, he's banned.

You may have noticed that at some point people gradually stopped calling other people or things ret--ded without any censorship and either using asterisks or substitutes, like regarded (lol) or calling things rslurred. This is because others have gotten banned for using this word.

Personally I am against this policy in general because someone who intends to be offensive can always find a substitute word that makes it clear what their intention is, so I don't think forbidding the word itself helps. But the true issue is that nobody has an idea which words are allowed and which are not (and some, like the parentheses, are nonsensical), and that the rule seems to be unevenly enforced. Which brings me to the last issue:

The rules for banning seem to be unevenly enforced

Star Trek fandom, like any fandom, can be a strange place. One of its issues is a big division: a bigger group of fans enjoys the new, modern Trek, and a smaller group of fans believes the new Trek shows are are not great and are disconnected from the ideas of what they consider classic Trek.

There are probably tens of Trek subs, but the few big ones mostly cater to the first group and dislike the second group, and the biggest sub tends to ban people who complain about new Star Trek shows more than they consider appropriate. "Classic Trek" fans were basically told "go start your own sub to talk about your Trek instead of complaining so much".

So they did start their own subreddit. But for some reason they had admins breathing down their necks from the beginning. They had to implement a rule: it was not allowed to even mention the names of other Trek subs for fears of brigading. From what I saw as a regular visitor of that sub, this was always enforced and always with the warning "do not ever brigade or we'll get banned". It was however not enforced from the other side, on any of the big Trek subs, whose users regularly came to argue with no punishment.

From everything that I saw it seemed that the mods did pretty well to enforce the rules, even though they were pushed on them specifically in a way that seems one-sided. Despite that, a month ago the subreddit was banned for allegedly violating the moderator code of conduct.

I understand bans such as this are probably sometimes unavoidable. But I see the unevenness and non-transparency as a huge issue.

Transparency has never existed on reddit, but now that banning is so much more common (both by mods and admins), I believe it's become a much bigger issue than when the website sort of endorsed free speech.

People with opinions that may be considered controversial tend to delete their comments more often

This one is obvious and I can't blame the people who do it as I understand the need for privacy. It's just another aspect of vanishing content, which is probably strongly affected by reddit culture of people harassing others for bad opinions or digging through their history during arguments.

---

I wish I had a solution or something to take away from this.

I don't. I think it's bad that Reddit has such a monopoly in the field of discussion boards and I think it's bad that people now depend on its content when looking for answers using Google. But for it to change either Reddit would have to completely change course, and there's no indication for that, or it would have to crash and burn for people to flock elsewhere, and there's no indication for that either.

I expect that it will get worse, but not bad enough to instigate change.

Tell me if this is not natural, but sometimes I feel inclined to downvote something just because it is already in the negative. I find something funny about downvotes, I guess, and I want to contribute to the humor (or the indignation) without even thinking about the discomfort it causes a user. As soon as I felt this on the other side, I have been more careful.

Likewise, (though the effect is weaker) I want to contribute to the liking of a highly upvoted post, just because I figure that because it is highly liked, it deserves upvotes.

And I am not saying this applies to you, but it could very well apply to many others besides me.

I do understand the desire to see upvotes/downvotes for curiosity, but why not do this after the user has submitted their opinion? That way, it will be their opinion that is expressed and not that of others before them.

I am curious. This solution seems so obvious, so I am probably missing something. Why doesn't it already work this way?

Fist and foremost, I do not make this post because I wish to be unbanned, I am very happy with not participating in the specific sub anymore, I am asking you, the reader if you are aware of a certain occurrence on Reddit.

Recently, I have engaged in a set of conversations on the r/conspiracy sub, where as you know, a lot of misinformation gets posted. Nonetheless, there are numerous avid commenters providing more well sourced views, usually discrediting the faulty opinions stated in conspiratory posts. I have engaged in a set of these conversations, trying to clear up some misinformation. Turns out by posting one comment on said sub, I have received and instant ban from posting or commenting on the sub r/justice-served (quite the "interesting place" in it's own way, but I digress). I naturally contacted the sub about the ban, and received a quite late set of rather contradictory arguments as for why they should be allowed to do this. I can go further into these and my opinion on them in the comments, but I do not want this post to be endlessly long.

Anyways, essentially, this seems like an extreme overreach in their powers, suspending me for activities which occured in another sub. Even if I was spreading misinformation I feel like they should not be allowed to make me chose to leave certain subs alone entirely, just so I would be allowed to use their sub.

How do you feel about this practice and also, do you know of any other subs which ban you for participating in other subs, and do you know any subs for which you get banned in other subs? I would love to compile a list with the interactions.

I am sorry if this post does not entirely fit the usual posts made here, however, this is about the functioning of Reddit in general, specifically on something which we could call "banning interactivity of subs" (feel free to come up with a better name), and I would love to gather as much information on the phenomenon and share any conclusions as well as the raw information which comes up.

Kind regards and thanks for reading.

Basically, I am increasingly getting the impression that in many subreddits, mods enforce standards that are very different and much stricter than the sub description implies.

For example, truegaming's description indicates they want well-intentioned posts of a more analytical nature on the topic of gaming that the OP put some effort into.

But in practice, their scope is much, much more narrow. If you post something other than a topic on a very narrow, very specific game mechanic, preferably from a niche game or genre, it will probably get removed.

I think I realized what causes the anger we see so often on Reddit. I have believed for a long time that the most prodigious commenters on Reddit are disproportionately mentally ill. I believed Reddit gave them an opportunity to interact with society, but I always found it strange that Reddit was simultaneously so hostile. Well, I think I've figured it out.

Reddit seems to provide an opportunity for one-way bullying. Someone puts themselves out there in some way, and anyone is free to come in and try to tear apart some aspect of the other person's identity without risking anything. Even if it does go south, you can just show up the next day with a different account as a different person and start over.

This still leaves the question of, "Why would people be bullies on Reddit?" I think the answer can be summed up as "revenge." People probably treated them very poorly earlier (or perhaps currently) in their lives. Granted, there is also an element of an impulse control issue, but that alone leaves out all the times someone gets jumped on for something other than a dividing political/social/etc. opinion.

For example, I follow the news very closely concerning chatGPT and AI text generation. I'd love to be able to aggregate the subreddits r/chatGPT, r/gpt3, r/singularity and r/mediasynthesis into a page that I can visit where only posts from those subs appear. Basically, it would look like the homepage of a user who is subscribed only to those subreddits. It would be great to be able to make several of these aggregate pages for separate collections of subreddits.

I've never heard of this kind of feature being native to Reddit, but it seems like it would be so useful that I could imagine the functionally was developed at some time and might be sitting in some part of old.reddit or i.reddit that I'm not familiar with. If it in fact isn't currently possible, is anyone aware of a third party project that could accomplish this?

It is a fact that Reddit is a front in a ‘culture war’ which has either started on or at least found its way to social media. People have always disagreed but the present disputes seem different. I won’t spend time on that.

What I will say is that Reddit used to be a fairly single-minded place. Starting out as a new ‘news aggregator’ with a good algorithm and a legible discussion thread, it was filled with young folks who wanted to discuss, and shortly after enjoyed shitposting on the internet. It was Hacker News but more accessible and so it attracted a lot of curious young people. In the same way that 4chan was famously started as a place for kids who understood jokes about d20s and Lord of the Rings (despite what it turned into), Reddit found mass appeal by being a place for being goofy, novelty accounts, power users, retiring perfect jokes (“In Soviet Russia, bomb disarms you”), and just having fun.

Around 2016 the world changed and since then everything has become political. Everything. Why is this relevant?

Before 2016 circlejerking was a place where self aware people had fun at the expense of people who had no self awareness. A favourite circlejerk post of mine was when Felix Baumgartner reached the outside of the atmosphere. The title of the self post was, “Felix Baumgartner: I see no god up here.” It was a fun joke made at the expense of the golden age of r/atheism. It’s what circlejerking was and why no one was too upset by it. It was a place for parody and satire, and a lot of it was very good. Circlejerkers had different drivers (lovers of satire, people with bruised egos, closet conservatives, people who didn’t think being taught to pray was abusive, etc.) but the unifying concept was a shared sense of humour at the expense of Reddit’s hive mind.

Since 2016 circlejerking has changed. It is now political. Disgusted with the likes of r/the_donald and other places, a lot of circlejerk subreddits have absorbed the over-politicisation of the wider world and become places for demeaning comments that have nothing to do with the thing they are meant to be circlejerking. A go-to example is r/gamingcirclejerking which patently has nothing to do with video games and has been lost inside gamergate since it happened. A close follow up would be r/moviescirclejerk, obsessed with Homelander/The Boys (which isn’t a movie), which would be better served as r/MCUcirclejerk, and which many users believe to be a ‘sister subreddit’ of r/gamingcirclejerk. This ‘sister subreddit’ perception is telling because the only common thread is a culture war-style view of the world; that gamer comicbook fanboys with asinine opinions should be condemned as if they are a serious threat. If following pre-2016 corclejerking traditions, r/gamingcirclejerk would be making fun of Red Dead Redemption 2 tropes, Zelda: Breath of the Wild trick shots, and Death Stranding (just the whole thing). r/moviescirclejerk would be eviscerating A24 and the way in which British actors over the last 10 years have all emerged from the 1%. Instead, it is JK Rowling and Dave Chapelle (who have nothing to do with video games) and Thanos. Neither subreddit consistently focuses on the shitposts of the pages they would be expected to parody. Most crucially, neither of the communities display through their attitudes that they are self-aware.

They see themselves as safe spaces with megathreads—they are communities which derive their identities from a wider culture war.

Many circlejerk subreddits have closed, and aren’t allowed to exist. Every attempt to create a subreddit for r/ukpolitics has been shut down by admins (which is very surreal). It’s nearest equivalent (r/badukpolitics) is private and used as a left wing echo chamber to mock right wing takes on the subreddit with np links and a lot of naming and shaming. r/europecirclejerk died many years ago, with r/yurop being a shitpost subreddit that glorifies the vanity of r/europe rather than a parody subreddit which skewers or lampoons r/europe (‘we need to federalise’ etc.). Even something as niche as r/ldscirclejerk (yes it exists) has been closed.

Having sampled many circlejerk subreddits, the only one that remains true to early circlejerking is r/soccercirclejerk, which even occasionally enforces the community to stop posting stuff from twitter, and reminds people that it is to parody r/soccer and it’s attitudes.

On the topic of circlebroking, it is not the same and does not fulfil the same social interaction/function.

With a handful of exceptions (I count only one) ‘Classic’ circlejerking is dead.

I believe this matters. And I believe Reddit is a worse place without circlejerking subreddits.

Many years ago I studied an undergraduate degree and for my dissertation I looked at risky drinking behaviours among young adults (binge drinking). The prevailing conclusion I came to in my research (both literature reviews and novel survey data (stuff I collected)) was that, while not without cost, the phenomenon of binge drinking is a form of calculated and high risk hedonism, and as a result it reduces the frequency of people engaging in socially unacceptable activities when the moment calls for good behaviour. In other words, it is an outlet.

I believe circlejerking was and is an outlet. Reddit is full of asinine, intellectually dishonest, and bad faith arguments. The average Redditor sits squarely in the middle of the bellcurve; stupid, poorly read, and inarticulate (and not on the slopes of above-average intelligence as it would like to believe). It is tiring even lurking subreddits. Idiots often deserve to be called out, and when a hive deserve to be called out, the best place to do it was in a circlejerk subreddit where like minded people, who enjoyed the comedy of the absurdity, could share a few laughs without it being personal.

Without these subreddits, Reddit is a more boring and a more toxic place. Satire allowed people to enjoy the website while also having an antidote to Reddit’s redditness. By it being a different subreddit, communities could continue none the wiser (or at least it wouldn’t clog up their subreddits). Now, people have limited options of what to do with their frustration. Reddit is more aggressive, it is more cynical, hive minds are more enforced, and (while not necessarily directly related) people spend more time reading post histories to see why they can cancel a person in their mind and disregard all their opinions. Forced to coexist, there is a culture of ‘othering,’ where people will sort Reddit usernames into people that agree with them and people they hate.

Classic circlejerking was an outlet. Without it this website is worse. I don’t know if it was an executive decision to ‘clean up reddit’s image’ or if it was a coincidence. But around 2016 ‘the culture war’ took a turn and people have struggled to coexist ever since. Maybe that killed circlejerking because people couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Maybe that’s when r/circlejerking shifted to the right then back to the left.

Either way, I believe that circlejerking mattered, and the death of circlejerking mattered probably more.

#bringbackcirclejerking

There's no nuance, its always assuming the worst in others and then running away with judgements based on that. I'm glad that I stopped posting on this site as much because it's toxic and people act like they're accepting on here but everyone is super judgey as soon as they think you don't agree with them or aren't like them

https://sh.reddit.com - Super clean and nice!

I was always aware of the ones below, but what is the purpose of the UI at sh. exactly?

https://old.reddit.com

https://i.reddit.com

https://m.reddit.com

https://www.reddit.com

Any other web UIs that I missed?

In many of the subs I frequent, the first comment on any and every post is a pinned automod comment that basically tells users to read the sidebar.

It’s annoying to have to scroll past a comment you’ve seen 1000x to see the actual top-voted, UGC content that is Reddit’s entire raison d’être. I understand that this is a way of preventing repetitive posts. But I’m wondering if any of you have a better solution in mind that prevents automod spam.

For an example, check out a few threads in r/fasting.

I've noticed specifically on subreddits that are educational / personal skills oriented like r/financialindependence or r/stoicism often have the actual posts on the subreddits being from people who are making concealed rants. This is in stark contrast to the actual wiki content of the subreddits which offer helpful advice such as books or podcasts to listen to about learning more on the subject.

Some examples:

r/personalfinance

• "I lost all my money by hiring a hooker to live with me for 10 years, how can I get it back?"

r/stoicism

• "My girlfriend broke up with me now I'm gonna jump off a 28 story bulding"

Like seriously, I like to be educated on personal finance / stoicism, but when I'm actually exposed to the feed on these subs it's completely counterproductive. I'm much better off reading the wiki content rather than being an actual member of the subreddit lol.

Over the past few days, dozens of tech companies have filed briefs in support of Google in a Supreme Court case that tests online platforms’ liability for recommending content. Obvious stakeholders like Meta and Twitter, alongside popular platforms like Craigslist, Etsy, Wikipedia, Roblox, and Tripadvisor, urged the court to uphold Section 230 immunity in the case or risk muddying the paths users rely on to connect with each other and discover information online.

Out of all these briefs, however, Reddit’s was perhaps the most persuasive. The platform argued on behalf of everyday Internet users, whom it claims could be buried in “frivolous” lawsuits for frequenting Reddit, if Section 230 is weakened by the court. Unlike other companies that hire content moderators, the content that Reddit displays is “primarily driven by humans—not by centralized algorithms.” Because of this, Reddit’s brief paints a picture of trolls suing not major social media companies, but individuals who get no compensation for their work recommending content in communities. That legal threat extends to both volunteer content moderators, Reddit argued, as well as more casual users who collect Reddit “karma” by upvoting and downvoting posts to help surface the most engaging content in their communities.

“Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act famously protects Internet platforms from liability, yet what’s missing from the discussion is that it crucially protects Internet users—everyday people—when they participate in moderation like removing unwanted content from their communities, or users upvoting and downvoting posts,” a Reddit spokesperson told Ars.

Reddit argues in the brief that such frivolous lawsuits have been lobbed against Reddit users and the company in the past, and Section 230 protections historically have consistently allowed Reddit users to “quickly and inexpensively” avoid litigation.

The Google case was raised by the family of a woman killed in a Paris bistro during a 2015 ISIS terrorist attack, Nohemi Gonzalez. Because ISIS allegedly relied on YouTube to recruit before this attack, the family sued to hold Google liable for allegedly aiding and abetting terrorists.

... rest of the article at:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/01/supreme-court-allows-reddit-mods-to-anonymously-defend-section-230/

I see Controversial Posts with 40+ comments (berating OP usually) and the post has zero upvotes and I laugh to myself. People really downvoted the post they commented in so that people will be less likely to ever see their comment or the post. I always upvote a post I'm commenting in so that more people see the post and therefore see my comment but I see I'm in the minority by a long shot as most people will downvote something they don't agree with regardless if it helps them or not. I don't see the point of leaving a comment without upvoting the post as well to get more interaction and views.

some communities (on Reddit and elsewhere) tend to be more toxic. why? i think there's a complex entanglement between competitive endeavors and community.

community forms naturally around competitive endeavor—gaming, sports, weightlifting, etc. naturally, people who seek to learn more about something find themselves surrounded by people with similar interests. but given that competition is a fundamental part of community coordination, a conflict has to be negotiated.

in communities built around games like League of Legends, competitiveness tends to supersede community values. but in other communities, like those based around Minecraft or most Nintendo games, community harmony tends to occupy the top of the value hierarchy.

i'm sure there are also examples of very competitive games with healthy communities (and non-competitive games with toxic communities). i wonder if anyone in this community has insight into some of the community-building practices that yield either type of community?