>Upvotes and downvotes turn the comment section into a competition to control the message, and the way comments are organized buries thoughtful posts that came a bit late, after a period of reflection. It also emphasizes junk and fluff that is easy to process and hides effort posts.

I've only started noticing this recently. In the midst of all the recent drama I've been distancing myself from Reddit and have noticed that in my ~30k karma, it's 99% jokes and one-liners, and I'd started thinking in that manner when commenting on Reddit because I wanted the meaningless internet points. I'd stopped, for the most part, trying to engage in any kind of real discussion because a one-sentence jab could net me more of a commodity I kept telling myself I don't care about. I'm an intelligent guy and have always considered myself pretty thoughtful but I noticed that the way the Reddit system works it really took my edge off. I'm sure plenty of factors in my life and mind are to blame, but I've become much more intellectually apathetic over the past two years and I think my own rearranging of my interactions online to conform to "the hivemind" as they say, really contributed to it.

I've posted all of four comments so far on hubski and feel like I've put more thought into those than I have in the past year's worth of reddit comments I made.

None of this to say reddit is inherently bad in any way, and I still plan on visiting the smaller subs like /r/Scuba and /r/Morrowind, but I don't think it was a super healthy place, mentally, for me to be all the damn time.