Because Reddit is horrible. Everything about the way Reddit is designed obliterates any hope of reasonable discussion:
- Reddit segregates people into distinct forums of people who all agree with each other, inducing them to engage in groupthink and shift towards increasingly extreme views.
- It then establishes a set of "defaults" and entertainment subs and more or less forces multiple factions of increasingly radicalized people into them (otherwise they miss out on nice content), leading to a constant battle over the politics of the site, radicalizing people further, and drawing in people who just come at first to be entertained. It truly is, as PZ Meyers described it once, "a hate site with a thin veneer of entertainment".
- This process hooks you on the addictive joy of righteous indignation, further incentivizing conflict and de-incentivizing real discussion. This is why meta-subs have such a big draw.
- 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.
Often when I'm browsing Hubski, I catch myself getting reflexively angry or defensive at someone who innocently disagrees with me, and I have to remind myself that conflict and emotion aren't conducive to thoughtful discussion, and that most Hubskians are awesome people and not trolls, bigots, or extremists at all. Are there other people who migrated from Reddit who can relate?
No. However I think the Reddit culture has had a negative influence on itself. I think that when you are posting on reddit, you self editorialise in order to make the post conform to whatever you think will be successful on the subreddit or thread, because otherwise you will find yourself downvoted to oblivion. Posting elsewhere, I don't do that. The way hubski works is pure genius. If you disagree with me it's far more likely you're going to just say so and have a discussion with me, rather than squelch my posts (for you). And disagreement with me doesn't make my posts disappear for other people. My ideas feel more valued here. And I see that in almost every post. People are respectful, because they know if they are not, people who actually make thoughtful posts and replies will just remove them from their view, like a pest. For the most part this is true though certain celibrity posters do end up garnering upvotes even when their comment is contrary to the general sentiment. But it's rare. Look I get what you're saying. I don't think it's going to be a huge problem for hubski. I think people will very quickly work out that this is not a reddit clone, at all, things work differently here, and those that don't? Well ... if they have to, they can always start a new account and try again :-) edit: this is a great question, btw.- 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 agree that Hubski has more intelligent discussions, but I'm not convinced it's a result of the Hubski system itself. I think it's just a more thoughtful community. Reddit had thoughtful discussions before it became mainstream. Same as Facebook and others. Hubski still encourages group think by pushing voted comments and posts to the top. The advantage it does have is a lack of a downvote mechanism. On Reddit, a single person can hide a post or comment by downvoting early. So there's greater incentive to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.
I think you've hit on a key issue that community size plays a large factor in the quality of discussion. Many of the niche subreddits I visit still have thoughtful dialog. I think any community will suffer an Eternal September effect as they grow more popular. One of the ways reddit avoided this was by allowing new communities to form to mitigate this (see /r/gaming -> /r/games -> /r/VideoGameAnalysis) but I'm not sure if there's any way to completely avoid this fate. Another way some communities have handled this is through strict moderation/curation (e.g. metafilter's cost for signing up, strict moderation of /r/askscience ) I think Hubski's method of following users and being self moderating is an interesting idea, especially combined with the focus on slower, long form material rather than "fast food" content. Though I'm sure there will be some people who will complain that the recent influx of users from reddit (of which I am one) has degraded the quality of content. But hopefully that will not be the case.
Wow, I never knew about the Eternal September phenomenon but now I understand why online communities take a turn for the worst after becoming popular. The same thing happened to YouTube after 2009.
And as for hubski, only time will tell, however I'm not so sure any kind of moderation could solve the problem, only delay it. Let's say hubsky gets flooded with people posting shit content and comments. The people you follow will have a harder time finding good discussions, thus you'll have a tougher time. This creates a pressure to conform to the tone of the newcomers and before we know it, we're back to where reddit is now. At least that's my hypothesis.
I think the big problem is in wanting the entire community to be the same way. We can chastise reddit or digg or 4chan or whoever for having group think, but it's the groupthink here to want "intelligent conversation". The problem is that anyone who doesn't adhere to this culture, or any internal culture, is then shunned by that culture. It's a side effect of scale that eventually the values and culture of the community becomes fragmented. No matter how good a site is at giving you the ability to filter based on your preference the simple knowledge that 'your community' has dissent in it, even if you don't see it, is enough enough to get most people complaining about the state of the community. It's more a humanity issue than a service issue.
I hope the atmosphere here doesn't change that much. Already a lot more conversing than I've ever seen in reddit. And this is just one thread! On a thread such as this on reddit, everyone would be screaming, tl;dr
I think the system prevents opinions from being buried through downvotes, which helps preserve a wider variety of opinion.
I saw a few posts after the reddit influx. The thing about some people from reddit is that they try to turn other sites into reddit. That's not what we need. Hubski is different and for only being here for ~2 days, I already love it. I agree with your answer
I came here from Voat. It is not a direct clone. Voat offers considerable improvement over Reddit. For example you have only 10 upvotes/day until you collect 20 upvotes from your posts. You also need 100 upvotes to be able to downvote anything. After your first 100 karma the restrictions are relaxed but there are still upper limits. This forces users to be better behaved and almost eliminates vote brigading and spam. It is an improvement but definitely nowhere near the sophistication of Hubski. For example they still need moderators which always skews the discussion and creates undue workload.
Reddit is great for the specialized sharing of content. If you want to see the latest videos, or cat pictures, or read Seinfeld fan fiction, theres a subreddit for it. The problem is that it doesn't allow for great discussion between users without messages being hidden behind the most upvoted and gilded posts. The competition puts users at each other's throats instead of having actual discussion. Hubski is such a brilliant platform because it prioritizes thoughtful discussion above anything else.
And the motivations that come with karma don't help across the whole of Reddit. If you write a stupid one-liner in a default sub, it's an easy way to get thousands of points. If you write a valuable, in-depth discussion in some niche sub, you're lucky to get a dozen points.
Yeah, having a meaningful discussion rarely happens on reddit and often it's just those who want to pick a fight. I'm glad this site is not another Reddit clone, it's better than that. You can't downvote and upvotes have greater weight to them. The lack of subcommunities actually unifies the site and prevents stupid moderation and censorship.
No. I feel Reddit culture has had a negative influence on the Internet's ability to hold reasoned discussion. I got my first email address in September 1994. That doesn't quite make me part of Eternal September but that's only 'cuz I took a year off. Prior to having an email address I'd seen CompuServe and had done MUDs on green'n'white scroll paper daisywheel printers using acoustic coupling modems. I say this to establish that I've been on the Internet since before it was the Internet. I was a full-time denizen of several rec. and alt. newsgroups before DejaNews, my first IRC experiences were over a 2400 baud modem, and I remember the BBS. My first experiences with Reddit were shocking. Even back in 2007 Reddit was far and away the most vitriolic, abusive place I'd ever bothered to venture. 4chan is worse, no doubt. But 4chan was relatively isolated. See: Cracked, July 2007. 4chan also did not gamify caustic aggression the way Reddit did. I mean, I got 700 points for a caustic beatdown of a spammer back when /r/pics had 60,000 subscribers and it's only gotten worse. /b/ was effectively the origin point for most of the Internet's memes... but /b/ didn't gamify. Reddit did. So the people who wanted to be rewarded ventured over to Reddit where they got points. So Reddit became the origin point. It also allows ranking which makes the content browsable by casual users, whereas 4chan is linear. By the time /b/ figured out they could get points for f7u12 cartoons it was over. Reddit is one of the meanest places on the Internet, and it rewards meanness. The more Reddit spreads, the less personable the Internet becomes.
As another ancient old thing - I was on Fidonet and Citanet, and I used to bangpath my way to anon.penet.fi - I agree in general, but I'm not sure I agree with you about the unusually caustic nature of Reddit. It reminds me very much of parts of the old Alt hierarchy; a fetid swamp of scum and villainy. EDIT: Update begins here, I somehow posted too early, and now the servers are cranky. Up to a certain point, that sort of chaos can be invigorating. And for a time it was. I've seen Reddit become exponentially more toxic over the last year, and it's far less likely to find something interesting floating on top of the scum. The most toxic thing about reddit is that it's hardly chaotic at all. Everyone has gotten sorted into their own epistemic bubbles, which are defended to the last ditch. But I do love a bit of chaos. I like a place where people mingle and a discussion may turn in very unpredictable directions. That has it's upsides and downsides; for one thing, it's metastable at best. Usenet really was never the same after it was discovered by the spammers. But before then, there had been trolls. Even then, it was a game to certain sorts to find an innocent community and disrupt it "for the lulz." That phrase might even date back to Alt.flame. But that's only one source of friction. There's the spammer/monetize/exploiter mindset, the ones who see no good thing without thinking "wow, wouldn't it be great if we could strip-mine that?" And then there's the control-freaks. There are several subcategories of control-freak and some are not particularly toxic. Keeping the packets running on time is pretty important. But it can become hilariously unproductive very quickly. I think the Scientology flap was one of the best examples of that - when Scientology tried to sue the Internet. I see the most problematic ones as Social Conservatives with religious motivations. Some focus on disruption - some on exploitation. But they have learned, and Reddit is definitely a big fat juicy target. There was a huge influx of that sort from Digg - /r/conservative seems much like the old Digg Patriots. Reddit is simply too large and too fast moving for them to wreck the place - or perhaps they have learned from an obvious mistake; you can't control the message if the means of control are simply eliminated. Pao was possibly the single worst possible choice to bring Reddit into line - but that assumes the people who chose her understood what was even possible. I'm going to assume she was hired on her merits as a control freak and power-junkie. Without judgement - that's just not going to work. Having said that, I'm not sure it would be possible to salvage both community AND have a revenue stream to monetize. That's because - well, I think there is very little understanding of people in general and toxic behaviors in particular. Certainly if management is itself toxic, they won't welcome inquiry, much less change strategy. AOL, Facebook, Yahoo Groups... All of these have or had thriving communities that they managed to kill off. And I think this may be that people qualified to manage a company are the last people who should be consulted on the quality of conversation and human interactions. The simple sadists who bring us the dregs of reddit and the howling lunatics that fuel the activist right object to reasonable discussion, for very different reasons, I would imagine. So if the /b/tards don't get you, the concern trolls will. And if you become the focus of media attention - if you become fashionable - the signal-to-noise ratio becomes untenable. After a few decades of seeing places come and go, due to various combinations of toxic communities, ham-fisted community management and inept attempts to monetize, it's likely reddit's turn. Or perhaps it will be lucky and become the next livejournal - a quiet, unfashionable backwater, covered in moss and memories, but still worth a visit from time to time. So here's to hubski. May it never become popular. If asked what a good place to move on to would be by someone you don't know - suggest voat to the howling twits and snapzu to those who are simply too nice to ever permit an actual discussion to occur.
An important distinction for Usenet and 4Chan is the lack of a front page. Sure - there were bitter trolls all over usenet, and there were corners full of fire. However, it was necessary to seek them out. There was no algorithm that would hold them up to the light if they got enough traffic. That's enough to set Reddit apart - the fact that an eyesore can be brought out into the shining light through activity alone. It incentivizes trolling and disruption far more than either 4chan or usenet ever could. This leads to the stratification you describe: the thugs can hang out in their own private Idahos until they feel like setting off on an adventure. The lack of friction between subreddits is something else unseen on usenet or 4chan - there remains a 'homepage' to exploit and if you exploit it enough, you exploit everyone's homepage. Control of Reddit is fully in the hands of the VCs now. You've got Ellen Pao (ex-Kleiner Perkins), Sam Altman (Y-Combinator) and Alexis Ohanian (Y-Combinator) in direct control of five dozen untenured, unempowered serfs. When Marissa Mayer bought Tumblr and said she wouldn't fuck with it, people believed her; when she burned Tumblr's community into a gif engine it was immediately obvious that Tumblr's monetization strategy was immune from its community. I suspect Reddit is in a similar place.
About 15 years ago, just before the last tech bubble burst, I was working for an ISP in London, doing sysadmin stuff on their forums (vbulletin), running their IRC server that was hooked up to DALnet, amongst all the other stuff as well expected of a sysadmin of that era. (Radius, LDAP, MySQL, blah blah blah). Before the company was bought by a large italian carrier, and before the bubble burst, we had somewhere around 600,000 customers (which was a big number back then!), with a vibrant community that was flourishing on the vbulletin forums, and with a fairly large number who liked to engage in IRC. The company spent no money on hardware at all for the entire time I was there. They were also running around and spending most of their time trying to figure out how much we were worth. At some point someone valued the company at over $800 per customer - $0.5Bn valuation, roughly. For a company that wasn't public, just a privately own company, a subsidiary of several other well known companies (hence being evasive who they are not that it probably matters anymore). Anyway, the management was throwing millions of dollars every month at marketing, sending out CDs to every man woman child and rabbit in the United Kingdom. They spent no money at all on hardware to support the influx of customers we were getting, even though we were hemorrhaging customers hand over fist because apparently it was an acceptable level of churn. All that mattered was, each user was worth $800 a year to someone, if only we can figure out how to extract that money from them. Of course it was bullshit. Just as we were being shopped around to be sold, the arse fell out of the market, and we ended up being sold to aforementioned italian carrier for ~$50Mn. (Can't remember the exact figures but the orders of magnitude should be about right) Sorry, I've rambled. My point, MBA types don't see a community. They see dollar signs. They see a user base to be converted into a revenue stream. They will not care if they lose 20%, or even maybe 50% of the community base as long as they can extract some magic amount of dollars from the remainder. According to https://www.reddit.com/about/, they handled 3,176,546 logged in users last month. Somewhere, someone has put a dollar figure on how much on average a reddit user is "worth", lets say $1000 a year, and they looking at the resultant $3Bn potential (bullshit) dollars, and wondering how, exactly, they can extract even just 10% of that. They will not give a flying fuck about whether or not the community will survive the experience.Control of Reddit is fully in the hands of the VCs now. You've got Ellen Pao (ex-Kleiner Perkins), Sam Altman (Y-Combinator) and Alexis Ohanian (Y-Combinator) in direct control of five dozen untenured, unempowered serfs. When Marissa Mayer bought Tumblr and said she wouldn't fuck with it, people believed her; when she burned Tumblr's community into a gif engine it was immediately obvious that Tumblr's monetization strategy was immune from its community.
I'm not yet convinced. The whole self moderation thing is so far incomplete and trivially circumvented with sockpuppets. The moderating tools seem to be merely encouraging a situation where there are (for example) people literally using hubski as a platform on which to incite racial hatred which those who've moderated out those folks won't realize the extent of, but they're nonetheless associated with in the eyes of potential community members who are then going to self select whether they want to be here.
What we have today isn't what we will have tomorrow. mk might want to jump in here, but I would expect that as problems arise there will be discussion and thought about how to deal with specific issues. For example, take a look at anti-spam solutions (I work at an anti-spam company). You can look at the entire user base and see how well they moderate, and whether they are accurate at moderating against obvious spam and other evils, or whether they just follow the herd. You can then weight those users higher, lets call them a canary. They are an early indicator that someone is a fuckwit. You could then use that data to generate a list of "low quality" submitters, that a user can opt into hiding posts from on their profile. "Hide low quality submitters" checkbox. The default "public" not-logged-in feed would show only "high quality submitters". Hubski could also generate a internal list of "high quality" members. These are members who consistently get badged for their content, and are rarely hidden or muted. A user could opt to sort "high quality members" to the top of threads. Again, the not-logged-in experience could have this enabled by default. This is just one idea that I came up with after reading your comment and thinking for a few minutes. mk etc are likely to be able to do better. I'm sure it has obvious flaws that haven't occurred to me yet. If you're not restrained by trying to make money and just care about the quality of the community, you can do things that you ordinarily wouldn't do.
This has to be the most succinct lambasting of Reddit culture I've seen so far. Nice job. I find it hard to go there, now that I know Hubski exists. I know that here at least you can have a reasoned debate, and the unreasonable can just be ignored.What does exist on Reddit is the abuse of speech as a "heckler's veto." Censorship by the mob. And the worst aspect of it is, management's laissez faire attitude toward it enables ripples across the internet.
>They will not give a flying fuck about whether or not the community will survive the experience. Well, of course not. Thing is, though, that's part of the huge reaction. I mean, it's also racist and misogynist, juvenile and intensely personal - but aside from all of that there is the sense of being disrespected. And if the past is any guide, all this butthurt will lead to the creation of wonderful things. Maybe one of those angry children will devise a way to automate management and venture capitalism.
>An important distinction for Usenet and 4Chan is the lack of a front page. ... That's enough to set Reddit apart - the fact that an eyesore can be brought out into the shining light through activity alone. It incentivizes trolling and disruption far more than either 4chan or usenet ever could. It's almost a search engine for it. Well, no it is. And in the last few years, I've been confronted with things I've managed to entirely avoid for 50-odd years. Now that I think of it, that's not an entirely bad thing - but it is exhausting. >Control of Reddit is fully in the hands of the VCs now. Well, it was doomed to happen. But in more precise terms - the logo and the servers are in the hands of VC's. All the rest is both ephemeral and rather pissed off. I do wonder if Pao's placement at Reddit was a step up - or the equivalent of being sent as the Czar's representative to Siberia.
Graphictruth, I really enjoyed your insight and your style of writing in this reply. Should you ever get bored, I'd happily read your thoughts about how the internet of yesterday compares to today's net - and where and how the better aspects of those times can be found/replicated today.
:) Well, I'm not sure it was better - but it was smaller, more intimate and the rather technical requirements kept some of the idiots out from underfoot. And I think we did well. It was a new thing and it took everyone by surprise. Mostly with she sheer volume of crap it could spew, as Spafford observed, but it turned out that all that stuff was pent up. The internet of today is built on stacks of formfeed filled with ASCII porn. :) And looking back, everything is so much better for that getting out in the open. Our collective unconsciousness was spewed onto our screens and - well, it wasn't nearly as dark as we had all feared. And it brings the possibility of tyranny of course - but it also brought us notice that we had been living under various more or less gentle tyrannies for many years. It was not entirely pleasant to learn these things - but it's better that we know.
I ran a Fidonet node for a few years. Whee. Pretty much. Couldn't have said it better myself.As another ancient old thing - I was on Fidonet and Citanet, and I used to bangpath my way to anon.penet.fi - I agree in general, but I'm not sure I agree with you about the unusually caustic nature of Reddit. It reminds me very much of parts of the old Alt hierarchy; a fetid swamp of scum and villainy.
So if the /b/tards don't get you, the concern trolls will. And if you become the focus of media attention - if you become fashionable - the signal-to-noise ratio becomes untenable. After a few decades of seeing places come and go, due to various combinations of toxic communities, ham-fisted community management and inept attempts to monetize, it's likely reddit's turn.
>I ran a Fidonet node for a few years. Whee. Good old Fight-o-Net! I was a Citanet sysop for a while. Strangely, both still exist. I can't say I quite understand why, but they do.
Reddit today reminds me of the heyday of kuro5hin. It too had been a revamp of another site, Slashdot. Just as Reddit was a competitor to Digg. And it too had a toxic community who fractured the site spewing hate and vitriol. And then it died. Reddit seems lively. There remains a huge influx of unique visitors. Advertisers salivate at what Alexis and the board plans. But it won't last. They better maximize that revenue generation quick or they'll not have a chance to sell at the top. Because the rollercoaster has already started heading downhill.
Hey bud. I have said basically the same. I am now IP banned over there! And haven't bothered to VPN in.
Back in the day, trolling and troll communities used to be a niche. Once reddit commodified input in a way that allowed opinions and agendas to be popularized to the forefront of mainstream consumption, the trolls had an incentive to overrun reddit and in turn the mainstream.
My earliest exposure to internet discussion boards was as a teenager in the late 90s and early 00s posting on message boards for games like Civilization, the Final Fantasy series, and the Legend of Zelda series. the user base of all those sites were fairly young, but the discussion in all of them was far more mature and polite than Reddit because the moderation was generally strict. IMO any message boards that are not moderated enough inevitably degenerate into cesspits. The founders of Reddit were too ideologically wedded to "Free Speech" as an ideal that they put the ideal ahead of the proper functioning of the site.
I think there is more reasons why Reddit is commonly credited with being the origin of memes over /b/. If you were to ask the common internet surfer (maybe even a 4chan user) what they think about 4chan, some will say that they've heard of it but never ventured there due to the negative connotations that come along with the site. 4chan is most infamous for being the starting point of anonymous and there are many people who are scared of that. With putting aside the self gratification that the point system on Reddit has on its user base 4chan was already at a disadvantage due to its social standing.
4chan suffered for its reputation, but not because it developed a stigma. After a year or two most of its new users came because of the stories they heard about /b/'s antics, and so tried to reenact them over and over. Even the ones that were actually funny the first time stoped being funny the billionth, but anything other than endless repition got drowned out.
Let's also not forget that SomethingAwful migrants were the origin of the SRS movement.
I got attacked by someone for discussing a rape experience on a rape support subreddit very early on in my reddit days so I stopped clicking the envelope altogether. I didn't stop sharing my views and personal experiences in subreddits because I know there are people in the world who could use the knowledge that others have been through the same thing (my aforementioned post was basically a detailed "me too" in response to someone else) but I just had too much anxiety to see whether another jerk had come out of the woodworks. By just reading the subreddits themselves I knew there were moderators and down votes to handle the worst offenders and well, the attacks weren't likely to be personal since the front page has a high turnover rate and I was unlikely to come back across a comment I made.
And of course if you tried scolding them they call you an evil Fascist SJW and make juvinile jokes about being triggered. I have a friend who was raped several years ago and when I mentioned it as why these jokers piss me off so much I got called a "White Knight cuck".
This was several years ago, before trigger warnings were quite so prevalent, but I've certainly seen plenty of negativity towards them since then. I've never personally seen a need for trigger warnings, but I don't understand why people are so hateful towards those who want a bit more politeness. The SJW hate is a little baffling to me as well. I can understand being uncomfortable with extremists on either end of the conservative - progressive spectrum, but SJW seems to be used on reddit about how socialism is used on Fox news - as a scare word to attach to anyone you feel remotely in disagreement with. It seems to not have a very specific meaning. It's more of a boogeyman I think. It's a shame that people get accused of being a white knight so much when they express sympathy for a woman's situation. Most of the supposed white knight behaviors seem like showing some basic empathy, solidarity, and respect. If anything, the world could use more of these supposed white knight stereotypes, but some people online ostracize that behavior as if it's as shameful as pedophilia. I can understand it being off-putting if a guy has a history of showing fake or exaggerated sympathy to woo women, but there should be nothing wrong with guys showing a bit of compassion now and then. Of all the slurs that get directed at men, I think white knight is probably the best of the lot. What many consider a white knight falls under what I would consider well adjusted. I'm sorry your friend got raped, but thanks for sticking up for victims. I'll respect folks like you way more than I'd ever respect a juvenile minded person who thinks insulting a person's sympathy and their partner's faithfulness is better than having a respectful dialogue.
I think a lot of these people have a macho mentality reinforced by shitty pop-sci nonsense that "White Knights" are pathetic, submissive, effeminate "beta" liberal weenies and that women are really instinctively attracted to "macho alpha males". It's the same BS behind the Red Pill crap, basically.It's a shame that people get accused of being a white knight so much when they express sympathy for a woman's situation. Most of the supposed white knight behaviors seem like showing some basic empathy, solidarity, and respect. If anything, the world could use more of these supposed white knight stereotypes, but some people online ostracize that behavior as if it's as shameful as pedophilia. I can understand it being off-putting if a guy has a history of showing fake or exaggerated sympathy to woo women, but there should be nothing wrong with guys showing a bit of compassion now and then. Of all the slurs that get directed at men, I think white knight is probably the best of the lot. What many consider a white knight falls under what I would consider well adjusted. I'm sorry your friend got raped, but thanks for sticking up for victims. I'll respect folks like you way more than I'd ever respect a juvenile minded person who thinks insulting a person's sympathy and their partner's faithfulness is better than having a respectful dialogue.
You fell into the age old trap of the internet. "Do not feed the troll""White Knight cuck".
Favorite shot at the bar I work at is called a Don's Johnson. Pour 4 ounces of any raddler beer in a rocks glass. Make a small margarita shot in a shot glass, 4oz. Pour the shot into the rocks and slam it. If someone claimes to hate tequila substitute vodka and call it a Crockett's Chub. Sorry to interrupt.
No need to apologize! That sounds delicious. I tended bar for ~2 years before my current gig, so I can see how that would sell itself. My wife is slowly reintroducing gluten to her diet, so I'm trying to open her up to the world of beer. Actually started her out on raddlers and she loves them, annnnnd who doesn't love a margarita? Win + win. Since we're on the topic of "panty droppers", have you tried deep eddy ruby red vodka? Dee-licious. I drink it with a couple of rocks just to cool it, while I'm sipping on a light summer beer. Serve it on the rocks with soda and a lime wedge to make a basic cocktail. You really can't go wrong with it. See if your liqour distributor can get it for you, introduce it to your regulars, and before you know it it it'll be flying off the shelf (or out of wherever you keep the Jäger). Try out deep eddy rub red and I'll make myself and/or my wife a Don's Johnson? Pic or it didn't happen. You in? I have no connection to deep eddy, it's just so well done. Not at all sickly sweet or syrupy like smirnoff and the like. PS I came upon the handle of Don Johnson because my sloppy signature once read as such.
I just left that job but am picking up shifts here and there while my next thing gets going. Not in the loop enough to get any one to buy anything. Not that management listened to what employees wanted anyway. Strange job, work from the neck down. Never bother management and they'll never bother you as long as the till was right, the cops didn't show up and no customers complained. I only saw the owner every few months, he'd come in the morning before any one else, count the till, do paperwork and leave. We'd text if there was a problem. One manager was a big dummy who no one in their right mind paid any attention too the other was vaguely useful and cool for the 3-4 hours you might see her on any given day.
Wow that's a shame, and I've heard it from so many people in the industry. Management should really listen to people behind the bar. They have their ears to the ground and know the happenings better than anyone. I have no idea what your bar was/is like but the one I worked at made its money from the regulars. Gotta keep em happy. I suppose if you're in a bar with a ton of walkins all the time it wouldn't matter as much but still...
No one was breathing get down your neck and telling you how to do your job or harassing you creates a fun and positive environment. I found it very conductive to maintaining a good crowd of regulars. The management blessed a large pour as well. Do your job, pour huge shots, be cool and make great money during the summer. No fancy drink list to be enslaved to, each bartender was their own drink list. Fantastic job for the most part.
Sounds similar to my experience at the bar I worked at. I was mostly referring to the fact that management doesn't listen to suggestions from bar staff and think they know everything despite only mainly working during off hours. I miss coming home with wads of cash in my pockets but glad to ditch that lifestyle. Cheers
> Because Reddit is horrible. You're absolutely entitled to this opinion, but I don't think it's fair or accurate to lump a site that is composed of almost 10,000 communities into one category or descriptor. It seems to me that categorizing Reddit as an "it" is only applicable when referring to Reddit corporate or the Reddit administration. Reddit is many communities with millions of contributors. Take Yahoo Groups and give it a "front page" where you could access all the posts from the groups you subscribe to in one handy place and you'd have something very similar to Reddit - the difference being that most subreddits on Reddit are public posts and require no membership to view/comment. My point is that few would make the mistake of holding Yahoo Groups itself responsible for the culture of individual groups or say that "Yahoo Groups is horrible" because they disliked the content of individual groups. I'm not denying that what you describe in your post can happen and does happen frequently, especially in default subreddits subscribed to by large numbers of people. You'll find that kind of mob rule in practically any large public community on the internet and it's ugly. What I'm saying is that such interactions are not the only experience that Reddit has to offer and there are plenty of places to have quality discussion and respectful disagreements. The key is to seek out subreddits where that kind of culture is encouraged and actively moderated. If your front page on Reddit is made up of default subs, then yes, what you've described above is a pretty accurate description of the experience you're going to have. If you put some time and effort into subscribing to subreddits that favor quality content and interaction, your Reddit experience can be both enjoyable and rewarding. Edit: Hah...and in all of that I didn't actually answer your main question; shame on me. My answer is that I found myself self-censoring or not contributing at all in larger sudreddits because of the prevailing culture of those groups. In smaller and more fairly moderated subreddits, I found the opposite to be true. I contributed more frequently and generously, forged beneficial connections with other members, and was mindful of the feelings of those I was communicating with.
I don't think so, no, but now that you've mentioned it I'll check it out. I tend to gravitate towards hobby and interest subreddits versus ones that are political, social interest, or meme-based. I've found that the narrower the focus a sub has, the more people are likely to stay on track with the topic and have a genuine desire to engage in a positive way with other commenters. This can promote groupthink, as you've touched on in your original post, but that's not inevitable. People have always made connections through mutual interests and a desire to share the things that give them joy with others.
Yeah, even though I may have unconsciously fallen victim of the Reddit system, I still can't be hostile to it, since it has opened me up to amazing things, hobbies, creative works and philosophies/ mirrors to my inner workings Eg: fountain pens, calligraphy, wicked_edge straight razor shaving, INTJ, short scary stories, LGBT subs, minimalism, atheism (I know everyone in the world hates the atheism sub, but after 23 years of being a conservative fundamentalist Seventh-day Adventist Christian, I needed an outlet for my anger and frustration) Someone mentioned that INTJ had really good spelling and grammar compared to other subs, and maybe it's because of the mainstream-ness, here's to hubski ~ may it be civil and thoughtful ever into the bright and majestic day ~~
> I know everyone in the world hates the atheism sub, but after 23 years of being a conservative fundamentalist Seventh-day Adventist Christian, I needed an outlet for my anger and frustration I can appreciate that. When someone finds themselves in any kind of situation where they see a popular or long-held belief to be in error I think many people find themselves wanting to metaphorically run through the streets yelling "the emperor's new clothes are a lie! Don't you see?!" This applies to much more than atheism, too, though it's a very predictable kind of backlash when so much of the world's day-to-day workings are influenced by some form of religion or another. On one hand, the common perception of /r/atheism is pretty spot-on. It really is kind of a circlejerk, and I'm not sure that being involved with it for a long period of time is healthy. On the other hand, I think that having a place like that to rage and commiserate with others is an important aspect of transitioning to atheism from a lifetime of religious belief. When someone feels like they've been tricked by everyone around them, it's good to have others they can go to to be reassured that they're not crazy.
I’ve been on reddit since like 2008 or something. After twelve years my account got banned. Now. I seem to get banned every month or two. I mainly use it to ask questions about new topics I’m interested in or getting updates On a topic. I also used it primarily for sharing things but now self promotion is an instantaneous ban.
I'm loving this thread. :) STICK AROUND, WE APPARENTLY HAVE RETENTION PROBLEMS
I'd have to say I was more of a lurker on reddit. What I noticed was, what seemed like every comment, was made just to get votes. Like everyone was trying to think of the most clever thing they could say quickly to get votes.
That does seem to be the biggest problem. It's not necessarily about saying something informative and valuable as it is about being a karma grab.
I'll say this. I've been unreasonable on Reddit as well as Hubski before. Hubski is the only aggregator that has led me to make an active effort to do better. Much like riding a motorcycle has made be a better driver, Hubski as made me a (slightly?) better participant in discussions on Reddit and other net forums in general. After well over half a decade on Reddit, to this day there is no part of its culture or mechanics that make me want to do better honestly. (And I do think that the differentiator at least in Hubski's case is a mixture of both mechanics and culture. The two are aligned here better than on a lot of other sites).
Agreed completely, here -- but I think it's all about where you want to look on Reddit. There are plenty of thought provoking, intelligent, wonderful subs on the site, you just have to dig past the defaults and shitty memes. I think it's also a great way to connect with like-minded people. When I get a new game that I like and want to find other fans of, I just type "reddit.com/r/whatevergameimplaying" and it usually pops up. That's a pretty cool thing -- that whatever it is you're thinking of, there's probably a community for it already.I'll say this. I've been unreasonable on Reddit as well as Hubski before. Hubski is the only aggregator that has led me to make an active effort to do better. Much like riding a motorcycle has made be a better driver, Hubski as made me a (slightly?) better participant in discussions on Reddit and other net forums in general. After well over half a decade on Reddit, to this day there is no part of its culture or mechanics that make me want to do better honestly. (And I do think that the differentiator at least in Hubski's case is a mixture of both mechanics and culture. The two are aligned here better than on a lot of other sites).
That's what I experienced at first, but after some time on one one sub you realise the lack of new thoughts. That's why I reached out for even more deeper subs to gain a diversity simulating a platform that kept me interested. Now I'm really excited for the follow persons not topics setup
Can you explain why? Following persons is the biggest part of Twitter and I don't think Twitter allows for a quality discussion. Also I came here from reddit a couple days ago and I'm a huge fan of the tag mechanic as opposed to subreddits.Now I'm really excited for the follow persons not topics setup
Not familiar with twitter I'd assume that twitter is not in first place meant for 'a quality discussion' but for self portrayal and quick updates/feedback as the charakter limitation suggests. also I'm curious because to me that's a new mechanic I hope to explore more content this way and for a higher diversity of commenters
It really changed the way I looked at and commented on things. Reddit made me realize that going out of my way to thoughtfully argue a point is, in itself, pointless. I can spend an hour crafting a perfect response to something, and it will just get completely ignored. The only way you can get points (which are important in some cases, because they affect how likely your post is to be seen), or even have anyone see your post, is to be the first person in a thread to make some kinda clever one liner. I would spend time crafting a post, only for it to sit buried at 1 and receive no responses. Then, I'd turn around and see some pun get voted into the thousands and gilded multiple times. It was just frustrating to me. I started trying to make comments that barely explained my point, but mostly just worked on top of an existent circle jerk that I knew people were going to vote up and discuss. At the same time, I would get really polarized on issues, because it was either that or have people ignore you. Nobody wanted to hear about your qualification, they wanted to hear you shout the message of their cause. It eventually wore off on me and I just moved on to meta subs, where at least some effort and moderation is appreciated.
This is very true. I've only been on Reddit a few months so I haven't had a lot of comments (and never started a discussion), but I've noticed that most of my carefully crafted comments tend to stay at 1 or a couple of points over. But the one quick throw-away comment I made in a moment of light-hearted fun? Double digits.
I can definitely relate! I think my biggest problem is that you have to reply to someone very fast and with a very short amount of text. No one will read your comment if it's long, and if you aren't fast enough, someone else will have replied and then no one will see your comment. This quick+short combination results in people making really shitty quality arguments, and then making a long, good-quality argument reply to them is just not worth it. So then, the comments just spiral into ad-hominem attacks and are generally just a hate-filled mess. I also agree with your sentiment about subreddits and the hives mind mentality it breeds. This is slightly better in the small subreddits, but even then sometimes they'll have this issue (for example, /r/linguistics is filled with generative grammarians and expressing that you're against that theoretical framework never ends well). I've only been on Hubski for a little bit, but I'm liking it very much! People seem generally nice and open-minded. Whether this is because of the structure or just the size of the community is unclear to me though.
That's another problem I see with Reddit. There's an extra meta-game you have to play if you want yourself heard, that really shouldn't exist. Discussion should be just that: discussion. Not a bunch of flaming hoops you have to jump through, at just the right time, in just the right way. No one will read your comment if it's long, and if you aren't fast enough, someone else will have replied and then no one will see your comment.
As TeaMistress pointed out below, I would say that this really depends on the community. Smaller subreddits definitely provide much better spaces for lengthy responses and discussion, and places like AskHistorians are able to maintain an emphasis on long-form responses through careful moderation.
Most posts that are over 10 lines will almost always contain a TL;DR. I think the problem stems from the fact that comments are supposed to be short and so if you make a long comment without a TL;DR your post is not going to be read. Another problem stems from the fact that people expect to get as much information with as little actual thought possible in a short amount of time; they always want new topics to stop their boredom. That stops actual discussions from taking place as in a few days people will have already moved on to another thing without enough time to have a think and create a discussion. The structure of the website also makes it so that if you disagree with someone you can simply downvote them, and a -1 score will mean that nobody else will see your post. You could describe this as censorship, the 'hive mind' of the subreddit at hand will silence you for not following their exact beliefs and acting in the manner they themselves act. Of course this is not true for all subreddits, many of which engage in well thought discussion, but the website overall creates an aggressive environment for everyone else that detters any sort of argument.
I have to agree with you on this. I catch myself reading a comment and getting distracted by other comments because the comment I was reading was going on for too long. I caught myself doing this with your comment actually. After I passed the sixth line I just went to the next comment. Ended up returning to your statement and laughing at how I fit in as the person you're describing.
Haha, I would lie if I said that i don't skip over long posts as well. That's entirely fine if all you wish to get is a quick fix of information and news which is what most redditors want and what reddit seems to be best for, but it doesn't abide so well with thoughtful discussion.
I noticed a huge drop in my ability to read long articles after being on reddit for so many years. Especially because of the whole "Didn't read the article, went straight to the comments" mentality. Even reading books that I'm not too interested in has become a struggle, especially when I'm in school. I'm glad that this community is discussion based, I'm trying to make a conscious effort in what I'm reading and this is a great change a pace.
Funnily enough i experienced the opposite. Before joining reddit I wouldn't read articles if they were too long, or books in general. This was mainly because the articles or books that i read didn't interest me, but after joining a number of subreddits i found stuff that i was interested in. Now i usually look forward to a 2000 word article, and I have a number of books that i wish to read on my bucket list. I do have to agree that sometimes i go to the comment section first to get a TL;DR of the article but at least now i do read more that before.
If anything I've realized that spending time online fighting with others is a complete waste of time. When I am on Reddit I choose to spend my time wisely. I do this by going ahead and participating in mental health and other support based subreddits to encourage and offer support to users who need it!
What mental health subreddits would you suggest? I struggled with mental health two years ago and have since recovered thanks to prozac. I would love to be able to help give advice and support others who are struggling with similar issues that I struggled with.
on Reddit I mod http://www.reddit.com/r/schizoaffective we have an outstanding (but I'm biased) wiki ( http://www.reddit.com/r/schizoaffective/wiki) there that can really help people. I basically wrote the entire thing based off of knowledge from multiple treatment facilities that I have been to. There is also: Kind Voice Anxiety Subreddit Get Motivated DBT Self Help and so forth!
Reddit made me extremely defensive about commenting because of the responses I got. Every time I saw my mailbox was red, I panicked. I mostly stuck to non-political subs and discussions, but even commenting on something mundane would lead to people attacking me and being rude. I started prefacing everything with, "this is just my opinion, but..." and other placating words. Really dumb when you think about it.
It was so eye opening when I had just spent months researching a topic and felt I knew what I was talking about, only to have a redditor declare I was wrong and began making false claims. When I saw how much confidence this guy had talking utter shit I realized that the comment section on Reddit is a facade of people pretending to be experts and speaking with authority despite having no knowledge on the topic at all
It's more then dumb, it's hurting discussion. Some of my views are not well accepted, trying to explain my view in a mannered way would lead to a lot of negative comments. About me, about my kind, about my mother and so on. Other times the my message will just get down voted to oblivion. But there was no discussion, my actual views got challenged very rarely. That led my to delete my account and creating a new one, one which I avoided a lot of subreddits with, nothing political. Even in the none-political subreddits I've avoided a commenting most of the time. When I did comment, the comments had to be self-censored, dumbed down. Late edit: that's not to say I think reddit is bad or irrelevant, the web-site stills works as a good content aggarator, it just mostly fails miserably when it comes to encourage well-rounded open discussion and leads to echo chambers.
>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.
Wanted to comment about this part: I recently looked through my history and the only really upvoted posts were either agreeing with the viewpoint or making jokes like "Straight from the horse's mouth!" about a comment that was by a guy named thehorsesmouth.have noticed that in my ~30k karma, it's 99% jokes and one-liners
It's definitely the karma factor that turns it into an echo chamber. It's hard because all the users subscribe to subs that interest them, so of course on TV show subs, people are going to quote the show nonstop and get upvoted for simply repeating lines. And reddit loves meta humor. I completely understand new users over there not having any idea of what the hell is going on because the top comments are usually self referential. I don't have much of a karma score despite being a user for 3 years because I couldn't bring myself to play that game. Not saying you're wrong for doing it, it is fun and it's fun to watch if you're in on it. It just makes the actual interaction less valuable because it's a facade of social interaction. Sure, you might be talking with someone from across the globe, but when all you're doing is quoting Doctor Who or making Anchorman references, what's the point?
I guess part of the issue is that reddit used to be a news aggregator. Sometime after the Digg migration it became 4chan-ified and turned into a toxic meme-fest. Hubski seems to be much better focused on promoting good discussion, which was the reason I started using reddit 8-ish years ago. Of course, that's just because probably because the users right now are interested in good discussion. Hopefully Voat can keep their servers running so that more such folks are diverted that was.
Actually, I think it's how it's been designed. Yes, right now, there's definitely a natural slant to good behavior (sigh, so hard to get used to american spelling), but hubski's main feature of "being your own moderator" means simply that people who regularly post bad comments will find themselves ignored, permanently, by the rest of the community. It will be interesting when we get some people who deliberately try to game the system and see how they dance around trying to inject their poisonous methods of discussion into threads. My feeling is that the self moderating functionality will do a good job. Hahaha you cynic :-) Had the same though :-) Yeah, the contraction reddit is feeling right now is causing them to lose the very worst and the very best of Reddit. If the very best come here? Oh my.Of course, that's just because probably because the users right now are interested in good discussion.
Hopefully Voat can keep their servers running so that more such folks are diverted that was.
Well, the main problem there is that those kinds of people are often accompanied by other people who agree with them and do appreciate their poisonous methods as "spreading the truth at any cost". It's possible that those people will end up forming their own "network" following each other, and then the same political tensions that make Reddit and Twitter toxic places will destroy Hubski as well.It will be interesting when we get some people who deliberately try to game the system and see how they dance around trying to inject their poisonous methods of discussion into threads. My feeling is that the self moderating functionality will do a good job.
There's a certain danger in self-curation where you walk the line between following those who present you with new and interesting things, and creating a walled garden where you don't have to listen to anyone you disagree with. For now, my first impression of this site is that most people are here for the former, rather than the latter. But just in the way reddiquette went by the wayside in favor of a "like/dislike" model, I'll be curious to see what a larger userbase might eventually change things.
I think there is a process problem that links 'group think' with the tools. In practice the 'up vote' and 'down vote' make sense, provided all human beings were perfect in their intellectualism and objectivity. Does anyone actually think this is the case? Does anyone think having a rule, never enforced, that one should not 'down vote' comments merely because of disagreement will help human nature? Does anyone think it helps to have a system in which excessive down votes actually limit and restrict a users ability to use the site - or is that just hanging temptation for those who will abuse the system? At best, users who engage with a position that is unpopular, violating the group think hoard on any subject, will find even the best reasoned contributions down voted into oblivion. If you run across the wrong crowd, you get the train and any hope of reasonable conversation is destroyed. Simply put, reddit gives users tools that pander to the worse in them, dangling them like temptation to be their worst - not surprisingly that is exactly what happens. A typical problem: Engaged in discussion where the overall thread was running well over five to one in terms of up votes against down votes. After engaging with one poster who disagreed with me, in what was otherwise a polite conversation - she decided that my opinion was intolerable (without saying anything), and then proceeded to down vote every comment I had made in the thread. The result of a thread that was overall extremely positive, but generated a loss of 50 karma points from one angry user. When she brought in a friend or two, it quickly reached several hundred negative karma points. Nothing was wrong in the conversation, just a well reasoned argument from a position that was not liked by a very small minority of 'group thinkers'. Good luck bringing this to the admins attention, who, at best, say the down vote function is necessary for their algorithm (its really, really easy to change the algorithm), and even in cases of obvious violation of the vote system, I have yet to see corrective action taken to adjust the behavior. It really is about the process that reddit has built, and the bland indifference to the problems, the complete lack of proactivity, the deafness to both user and moderator, eventually reap what they sew. "- This process hooks you on the addictive joy of righteous indignation, further incentivizing conflict and de-incentivizing real discussion. This is why meta-subs have such a big draw." That about hit it in the head. Reddit is designed to do precisely what is said there.
I can see where you are coming from, I have just left Reddit and I've got to say that the discussions on Hubski are much better. I don't think that Reddit had any negative influence on my ability to hold a reasonable discussion mainly because on Reddit I was too intimidated to try to have a discussion. On Hubski I do not feel this intimidation, furthermore I actually find that seeing opposing points of view is enjoyable, and it is enjoyable to post my point of view.
Agreed. Posting on Reddit often feels pointless and unsatisfying. If you rarely get upvoted, you feel like you might as well not be posting at all. What's to enjoy about making posts that feel like they're not liked or even seen? That's why karma feels good. It's validation that, hey, my posts aren't pointless! Someone is enjoying them! I should keep doing it! On Hubski, though, the max visible amount is 8. That was off-putting at first, but it's great for promoting discussion in a non-intimidating and continuously satisfying way. This is because comments tend to get dots if they add to the discussion in any way. So, to put this in other words... Rather than the occasional:
You get a consistent:
Cool, my post got 50 upvotes. It's nothing compared to the thousand-upvote posts up there, but hey, it's something.
My last few posts are half-wheel! And that one even got a full wheel! Awesome.
I also like the difference between up-voting and sharing. When I'm using reddit, I up-vote a lot. Not because that thing deserves to be shared, but just because OP deserved to be upvoted. If something made me chuckle, I subconsciously upvote. Heck, after some amount of time it becomes an addiction: "See new content, consume it in seconds, upvote and repeat" I love hubski. I love its sharing model instead of up-voting and tags are really cool indeed. Also I believe that the corruption is inevitable as a community grows and hubski offers a mod-less filtering system which is also nice.
When I got on Hubski, I acted as if the wheel was an upvote button. Accidentally shared a lot of posts right at first. But then again, that's not a bad thing.
What does the half wheel, full wheel indicate? I'm on mobile and I think some of the functionality is missing or maybe less obvious.
I only found the voting system to be a serious impediment for submitting content, not commenting. I just recently got my first truly visible post on reddit and it certainly felt quite satisfying. Even with that I can't be bothered to do actual posts. I don't much care about comment karma as comments have a much smaller target audience, if the person you reply to and the few people following the relevant subthread see it then it's good enough. The actual rewarding moments with comments (not just reddit) were rare. Every once in a while someone would reply on how useful/comprehensive/opinion shifting my comment was and it made it worthwhile all over again. As for the actual topic here I don't think reddit had any influence on my ability to hold a reasoned discussion. I'm not good at that, all I can do is withold my unreasonable, and "unreasonable", comments. Reddit definitely didn't encourage such self censorship but sometimes people would find value in my unreasonablness so I can't say it is a bad thing.
I got 3 spokes on my first post. I'm super happy with that :D I too am/was a redditor. Lots of...very angry and hateful people just going along with what others say. It's sad.
There's no discussion to be had on reddit. The best you can hope for is to say something and hope some swinging dick who wants useless karma doesn't pop up later to tell you how wrong you are technically, on a detail or regarding a subjective topic with no answer. Good or bad, it's informed the way I write. I try not to overextend my intellect and can get neurotic about fact checking.
I think beyond the way the site is set up that the sheer volume of users on Reddit is a large contributing factor to the decreasing quality of the discussion and the increasing mob mentality and dumbed down discussion. This increase also made Reddit a target for numerous political and cultural groups to spread propaganda. There's plenty out there on how China and Russia use social media to great effect and it's no stretch to believe that America and other groups were doing so tok, we know white supremacist groups were doing it as well and Reddit made a great target. Likewise marketers came in too, there's a shocking amount of posts that are clearly to advertise products such as Cola but disguised as innocent that users fall for. The site used to have far better quality of content and discussion , go on way back machine if you don't believe me, but this changed as the user base grew even though the way the site was designed stayed the same. If anything I'd say the site needed to change its algorithms and design somehow in order to facilitate discussion better with a larger user base but it didn't so you got the fragmented hostility that caters towards the lowest common denominator as you point out. Beyond that I think any site , including this one , can be susceptible to the same thing if their user base grew to those levels and honestly I'm not sure what the solution is.
Oddly enough, Reddit helped me. Before last week, I was a daily visitor to Reddit, would spend hours perusing comment threads. Over time, I started to notice patterns, outliers; and at the same time I found myself growing slowly anesthetized to what I previously found hostile and insulting. I became less of a social justice warrior, learned to appreciate chaos, conflict. In being exposed to a wide variety of voices, hostility, ignorance and whatnot, I learned to take it less personally, to lower my expectation, and I became more detached, c'est la vie. Whereas before I was a ragged monkey caught in the fray, voice getting clobbered in the din, feeling attacked and confused... now I am the monkey sitting up in a tree, quietly munching on leaves, watching with a calm smile all the drama of the monkeys on the ground.
How did you manage to say all that with a straight face?
(I suspend myself in time and ponder the relative dimensions of my face)-- Yet still I'm perplexed. And at this point I consider that I may truly be an alien, and so I genuinely ask: in what way is my "Oddly enough..." comment assumed to be satire? I will take notes if someone answers, and put them in the notebook I carry around with me entitled "How to appear to be human."
IMO the worst part of Reddit is the vote-brigading and comment-history stalking. Tiny groups of extremists mass-downvote opinions they don't like into oblivion and the most recent AMA from the new CEO shows that they don't give a damn shit about it. I've been getting stalked by a couple of Redditors who downvote my new posts down to 0 or -1 because I made fun of Gamergate for well over a month. I messaged the admins and I never got a response.
I feel like reddit has had a negative influence on my ability to participate in the internet altogether. I've been reading Reddit like a news website: clicking on content and reading comments. I've stopped contributing to the internet. I don't know how to find or create new content for the internet anymore, and I've stopped actally participating in discussion. Now that reddit has split, I'm being forced out of <strike>hiding<strike> lurking. I want to be able to produce content that is liked and popular, but I'm afraid.
Reddit has certainly hurt my attention span. I'm now so used to bite size factoids and summaries that I've found my desire for longer (and more informative) discussion has lessened.
https://medium.com/@hughmcguire/why-can-t-we-read-anymore-503c38c131fe
I find the default Reddit homepage to be exactly like this, but subreddits devoted to specific activities or enthusiast groups seems to actually be quite good. I personally read a lot on /r/homebrewing, /r/kerbalspaceprogram, /r/rust among many others, I've received good advice on /r/guineapigs, and had semi-civil debates on other subs. From my experience, Reddit is what you make it. The default homepage is atrocious, and a lot of the people are awful, but hiding in the corners are some great communities with a lot of very valuable information. Maybe I'm missing the point of the question though, since I would agree 80% of Reddit is exactly as you described it, but I'd also argue the entire internet is that way at the moment. Loads of clickbait and junk articles with people foaming at the mouth yelling at each other, but still tons of really good easy to access information if you look for it.
I dislike the volume of it's upvotes and downvotes system. The majority of Reddit is very liberal young people and people upvote things that confirm their biases while downvoting anything they disagree with so you're left with only one point of view. Reddit showed me a lot of interesting things, but I feel most of my time is wasted on it. I'm glad to be free from it now, I would rather be part of smaller quality networks. Where my comments or input may be seen by more than a few eyes before downvoted or lost into the abyss.
The hivemind kills me. Especially in subs like /r/politics, where people will take your head off if you aren't a big government, Obama loving liberal - and there is nothing wrong with being a big government, Obama loving liberal, and I love to debate with those people. Not so much when they scream at me for my political alignment.
Last time it happened to me was when I was using RES to tag people based on their self-proclaimed professions. Whenever I found someone I'd tagged profoundly in the negative in a conversation, I'd make a concerted effort to keep the conversation going by appealing to their career and approaching the conversation with an implicit understanding of where they're coming from. When everyone is just a faceless name, it's a lot easier to stop treating people as human beings with an entire ethos that drives their opinions and interactions.
I think whenever you start using terms like "conservative" or "liberal" as disparagements, like /r/politics or Fox News, respectively, you've immediately fallen so far into an echo chamber that you'll have a hard time having any kind of reasonable discussion with anyone.
It's really funny to watch vaccine "debates" on Reddit. You often see two incredibly hyperbolic sides: "vaccines are giving everyone autism and don't even work" and "vaccines are perfect and anyone who can't or won't be vaccinated with everything should be killed", and both sides play with "you're either with us or against us". Of course, there's a bit of selection bias here. People who don't really care much about the issue won't speak up, so the passionate far fringes end up being a vocal minority, but that's just how these arguments go.
You know, I just realised how much reddit's fucked with me. One thing specifically, the constant one-upmanship, the infighting, the ' this is better than that'. I don't have specific experiences but I will say that I never found it, nor do i now, as a safe place to say anything. I very rarely post comments out of fear that someone might say ' FUCK YOU SUCK A DUCK!'. I'm not particularly fond of ducks, frankly. Neither am I fond of the down voting and upvoting, which in my case, led to me being unnecessarily anxious about my comments; knowing that some duck-loving person will tell me to suck one. to clarify, the ducks i talk of above aren't a way of mocking hubski but instead to represent the absurdity of internet trolls and their weird creative manners of trolling people whereupon anything can be turned ANGRY and RIGHTEOUS and used to make me or others feel lesser about themselves. Thank you @kaliYugaz for the reminder as to how horrible Reddit is. TL;DR Yes, I no longer want to live on an internet site where I fear for criticism from anonymous hate-filled others. I'm glad to know of sites that aren't simply an iteration of youtube commenters.
@dashnhammit You said it. Consent. Big one, that. If and it's a pretty big 'IF' we can establish a way in which your ducks would be able to communicate and in fact, consent. Then I and your ducks, yes all of them, will gladly have a big duck sucking party. Then, we'll do the worst thing, the worst, and just forget to invite you. Thank you for letting me unnecessarily explain my point and the absurdity within what I was attempting to say, and yet, replying back to it. I wish you much duck-loving, friend. (by the way, did the '@' sign summon you into conversation? According to these tips it should but I have no way of verifying whether it's functioning or not)
I'm not so sure about summoning; all I know is that if you put the "@" sign before and after the username, like so---Winterfond, it turns into a link to that user's profile. Even if I were to be officially summoned, my ducks are also my guard ducks, and they protect me, and if anyone wishes to summon me, my ducks insist on a long, thorough vetting process, with stringent security measures. Then they nuzzle their beaks against me softly.
That's a quite an imaginative and tedious process. May your ducks always guard you and keep you safe. If ducks could actually do that... not saying they can't, not saying you're crazy. Not at all. Just being sceptical. The dashnhammit thing works. I got an email, in my junk mail, with a notification from you. So thanks for helping me figure that thing out!
Hmm I think people who are creating new discussion-based sites are learning from reddit's mistakes/successes, and are creating better places that know how to combat groupthink/hate-mongering/spam while allowing great content to float to them top. In that way, reddit was a stepping stone for better things to come. I definitely felt like the vibe of indignation and ease of burying other people's opinions made me less friendly towards other people.
How many one word responses have you seen receive massive upvotes? That short of shit creates an atmosphere of juvenilism. Given that the shortest response I have seen on Hubski is several sentences, I can easily say that quality of discourse is far higher. Plus you can't push unpopular opinions into the oblivion with downvotes, and that helps as well.
It does make me wish that every site had an RES equivalent. A way to tag people so I know that person has nothing of value to say to me.
I miss the days before the Digg mass exodus. Reddit was actually a great place for news, geeky things, politics, and discussion. Then they general attitudes changed. Most of the site became a place to post pictures, and it was rather unfriendly outside of that. Difference in opinion or provoking thought would get you buried.
Pretty much. It's definitely not the best place for reasonable discussion and I believe it does influence its users; at least slightly. After four years of reddit, I get a bit of 'culture' shock on smaller sites like Hubski because of the variety of ideas being thrown around. People here have tendencies, but those tendencies are not overbearing or all-consuming. Hubski and similar sites aren't an echo chamber or hivemind like Reddit often is. There's no downvoting, so controversial posts and viewpoints going against the grain aren't silenced and crammed to the bottom of the barrel. They're nestled among the others like they should be. I really like that. As for getting angry/defensive at people who disagree with me...I think that's more to do with my own personality, and, honestly, human nature - than Reddit's influence.
I have been on Reddit for three years now. I only went there because I heard it was a big place and I wanted to check it out for the hell of it. The main reason why I stuck around Reddit for as long as I have is because of meetups in New Jersey. I was about 23 or 24 when I first joined and I was looking to meet new people. I wasn't really looking for profound discussion when I joined Reddit. As I started to know the site, I saw that a lot of discussions really went nowhere as both sides of an argument could be really nasty. So I wanted no part of it. I was used to message board arguments and saw most arguments as pointless because no one really learned anything from them. All they did was shout at each other and I saw it as a waste of time. Since I was never really ingrained in the Reddit Community, I have never developed any Reddit argument traits.
Meetups. Ohh meetups. I never got to see any except for that single time that a bunch of redditors went to meet the frisbee guy. It was kinda funny and cool how they kinda made his day meeting him and stuff, but IMO reddit meetups are way too big. You'd see a hundred people and never know any of them. Hell, some of them might not even be from reddit. They might be there just because other people were congregating there. But I don't know a whole lot about meetups, so tell me if I'm wrong. If Hubski had a meetup I'd go. Because Hubski is out of Michigan, I'd be able to get there easily. Assuming it's in Michigan.
NYC meetups can be pretty big but the ones I went to in New Jersey weren't as big. The biggest meetup I went to had 50 people but most meetups are around 15-25 people. I do agree that sometimes you don't really get to know everybody but it's still a fun way to meet people.
Exactly the opposite. I am fairly confrontational IRL. I modded many reddits and was always trying to be understanding and helpful when I made a mod action and was also very restrained or hopefully helpful in my other comments. I drafted removal reasons that were adopted by modtools. I remember the first time I had something removed and I was angry and the mod was very responsive and helpful which I aspired to be.
I think unsubscribing from the defaults made it better. There were some small groups where it wasn't so much "we'll never disagree!" But "we share common interests" and polite disagreement actually happened.
Comment sections on any of the defaults were frustrating for me, especially when the stupid inside jokes would rise to the top and people with actual interesting comments would be lost down in the other two thousand something replies.
I feel like there was also more of a culture of cynicism there thanks to trolls that went well beyond "trust but verify" to "everyone on this site lies" which made me have no desire to post about personal experiences that I thought were relevant because I didn't want to have to justify myself. I don't know. So far Hubski is feeling like a nice change. The comment sections aren't making me facepalm yet at any rate.
Nope. I dont agree with you saying that "Reddit is horrible" either. Most of the default subreddits are crap. A lot of users recommend to unsuscribe for them. The beauty of Reddit comes when your frontpage is full things only you like. The Science subreddit -which I really like- is a great place to discuss and talk about diferent topics of the science community. A lot of subreddits are like that.
I don't think reddit has had any negative impact on my ability to hold reasonable discussions. We have to admit that there are some aspects of reddit that are useful, e.g. specialized and dedicated subreddits (subreddits dedicated to a specific musician, for example, are very useful). Larger populations have always been a problem on the internet w.r.t discussion quality, but smaller subreddits are great for finding a (usually) chill and focused group of people. The drawback is that specialization itself, however. If you already know what you're looking for there's a subreddit for it, but exploring new ideas and discovering new interests is harder. I've never had any luck with the random subreddit option.
No. I do think it's had a negative effect on internet discourse in general. But since I abhor it so much and strive to be better than that, I feel like working against it has made me a better, smarter, even friendlier and more amiable person.
When I first tried Reddit, I posted an article about gardening that I wrote on my blog. The rules said that you could do that. Just to be clear, it's a friendly gardening blog about permaculture and organic gardening and not what I would think the average person would consider to be a spam site. I figured that some people in the subreddit would find it useful, which is why I write articles on my hobby in the first place. The reaction was very surprising to me. It reminded me of the scene from the Omen when the monkeys started jumping on the car, only in this case they were giant nerds. I remember the first comment I got said something to the effect of "didn't read, but I hate these people who think lawns are bad." As an aside, my article had nothing to do with that and was not controversial at all. Anyway, if you didn't read it, why are you commenting on it?? Then I was told that I needed to comment on other posts and post other things I thought were interesting, so I did and got secretly banned. Secretly banned? When I checked to see what the more popular people were doing, I saw a lot of crazy racists posts and a lot of spam garbage everywhere. To boot, these folks think they are superior. I just don't get it at all. It was truly shocking.
It's a problem on reddit for sure but i don't think it's just reddit. People all over the internet are just really fucking angry about everything. Go to the comments section on any site where something slightly controversial is being talked about and count the percentage of commenters who would like to tear each other a new one, I'd be surprised if you didn't find even higher levels of general spite and vitriol. And an eye opener for me was seeing all the 'bad neighbour' videos on YouTube. IDK why I ended up watching them.... but I tell you there is so much murderous rage pent up rage out there.
I feel like Reddit improved my ability to hold a reasoned discussion -- not in a "oh, Reddit helped me out here!" sort of way, but a "oh my god I could become this, I need to take as many steps to NOT be this" sort of way. Between the whole Sunil Tripathi fiasco, the current drama, love of low-hanging memes/puns, its constant need to jerk off to the idea of even the most disgusting portions of free speech being embraced, its love of vomiting up logical fallacy terms and using 'SJW' buzzwords to try to 'win' discussions... Yeah. I'm not gonna say I'm perfect, but it's definitely influenced me. I don't know if it deserves praise for that, though.
If I could ask a couple questions in reaction to your text, they would be: What informed your expectations of the reddit experience? Was it reddit's own marketing? Recommendations from people you know? Did you have a preconceived notion of how a site like reddit would feel and work? Maybe the dissonance you're feeling results from being let down by what the reddit is vs. what you hoped it would be. I mention this not to disparage your desires because they are as legitimate as anyone elses. I would wager though that for every person that seeks deep discussion and thoughtful consideration there is another looking to laugh at some absurd memes and move on with their day, or yet another who finds enjoyment in the "karma race". I don't think we could say that their desires are less legitimate than yours. One other thought: It is my understanding that the intention of reddit was for users to find these small community subreddits rather than spend time in a global feed. It's easy to get hung up on the fact that a bunch of bigotry gets posted in the frontpage articles, but I for one don't see any of it because I have unsubscribed from all of it.
Damn straight. Hubski, if someone radically disagrees or find my claims outlandish, the WORST that happened was "I disagree and let's leave it at that". On Reddit? "Lol no, you're wrong."
I find this to be true sometimes, though I tend for the most part to stay in sub-reddits involving specific hobbies rather than whatever the throng is doing. Having said that, I do find that reddit generally has a hive mind mentality and it leans towards a dim view of women and relationships with them that frankly doesn't exist in real life. The thing is this idea of communicating via the internet in the manner we are is a very new concept. As such, the rules and mores of this new frontier are being defined and re-defined, changing over time into something else. Whether or not that something else is for better or for worse will itself change as time goes on.
I'll never say that Reddit didn't enable some incredible discourse - especially in subreddits that really focused their communities in to focus on meaningful discussion. However, I will openly admit that it did subconsciously, through groupthink enabled by the voting system, pull me in directions I didn't expect to go in. Notably, I came to support Bernie Sanders because, frankly, he's all there was.
This is why I've quit. I'm in the process of deleting all comments and posts. I've seen where there are scripts that can do that for you, but it's been interesting to look back over the past 4 years and see what I thought I contributed. Sadly, not much.
There was talk today about people removing their posts one by one and leaving anti-pao messages. IDK it seems like a lot of effort for no reward.
You can but it doesn't remove any posts or comments.
Oh, I see. Well that's hugely inconvenient, but it makes sense in terms of contextualizing archived threads.
No, not really. I think it has sharpened my arguments because if I make a mistake, then someone will find it and call me out on it. In real life, this has made me able to see debating from a better perspective. I can see holes in people's arguments much easier. This doesn't mean I call them out on it. Probably the opposite. Since I see the flaws in their arguments, I can pick and choose when/if I debate or argue with them.
I just think that because Hubski's format in itself tends to steer away from what people call the 'hive-mind' mentality, it often gets people into having less of an intense discussion, as far as I've seen. I never really got involved in Reddit 'arguments' as they were - I was a lurker, but it seemed to me that it was a format that could sometimes bring out the worst in people.
Yeah, Reddit got to be really polarized . What makes this place great is that nothing can get downvoted below a threshold that will hide their comments. I think that, combined with the lack of a negative number next to a post, is really what makes people more willing to actually discuss things on here. On Reddit, the people with the "wrong" opinion were afraid of the back lash. The brave that opened their mouths were downvoted and hidden, essentially muting them. The only thing that gets left in a system like that is a single stance and a bunch of people essentially saying "I agree".
You may be on to something, but what do you see as "increasingly extreme" or "radicalized" views?
I don't think so, reddit can surely be awful but that is manly because of reddit reasons: especially the karma system and the fact that people tend to downvote when they disagree. this makes discussions non-existing because people with differing opinions either get downvoted to hell, or are afraid of that. but outside of reddit I have never had this problem, so no.
I think it's just the nature of the internet. I say nature, but there's much nurture. We've been conditioned to expect trolls, being blatantly cruel and hiding behind an account name. It's not Reddit's fault, necessarily. It's just comes with the territory and that's why I like Hubski. It's changing the scope of thought.
Reddit has definitely messed with my ability to discuss topics on the web. I usually browse imageboards, so the vitriol and political incorrectness is just water off my back, but with imageboards it's a lot less serious. I never had an impluse to hunt someone down until reddit, because everything was transient anyway. I feel that reddit at times combines the worst of sites like Facebook and imageboards together. But then again, every community has it's own problems, it's just up to people to decide what they would rather deal with.
I don't think it really has. I'm blessed to have plenty of fascinating discussion in my life in general, so the little bit I've tried to have on Reddit hasn't really affected my general ability to talk about things. What I think Reddit has done, is made me wary of attempting that sort of discussion online. Why bother attempting to have a reasoned, well thought-out argument, when you're just going to get flamed into oblivion if you happen to disagree with the "hivemind". That said, there are places on Reddit that had, and still have, very good discussion. The smaller, fringe boards have always been fantastic for me. The ones that were tightly focused on one hobby or issue and didn't have more than a few thousand subscribers. I think the problem Reddit has, is that for the larger site, it has lost any sense of community.
In my experience, reddit culture wasn't responsible for negatively influencing my ability to discuss things reasonably. Instead, it influenced my propensity to do so. Rather than being unable to make a reasoned argument, it was a place where angry, unreasonable arguments thrived, and I became in less and less of a mood to engage with people like that after some time. I sometimes find myself wondering what a more reasonable argument is to a point that I disagree with compared to the ones that are currently there. Sometimes I even take the plunge and try and post it to counter the groupthink. In some places, it works. In other places where it doesn't, I usually end up avoiding doing so.
I think the main thing that really appealed to me was being able to see photo stories on subs like /r/hiking and /r/travel. I don't think I've ever felt welcome to join in conversations because most things resulted in some fairly rude responses or little to no recognition. I think that's the best thing about this sit is that it's just discussion and not much more.
eh reddit isnt all bad., if anything the recent shitstorm has made me WANT to try other sites for once
>buries thoughtful posts that came a bit late Have a suggestion that gets around this? It's true everywhere with large userbases.
No I don't think it has, if anything it has taught me what not to do by watching others get angry or defensive at someone who holds a different opinion to themselves.
I think Reddit is a big circle jerk in a lot of ways, but it has its moments too. I think I'll always go back to Reddit to be entertained but not to post anything (something I hardly did anyway). I do think there is also a hive-mind thing going on because of the general opinion on different things. The majority is always going to rise to the top. Hell, I'll go to comments sections just to see that other people are thinking/referencing the same things I was thinking of about whatever the post was, so I never NEEDED to post anything. It was all already said. Bottom line, I think when sites get big and popular enough there will always be hive-minds and some bad eggs. What we have here on hubski is really great because it gives everybody a fair chance to contribute and make discussions. I would never comment stuff like this on Reddit. And I have a feeling that this won't last forever, just judging by the track record of pretty much any media site that got popular. But who knows, we could have something special and long-lasting. Only time will tell.
I think the problem isn't with reddit itself but more likely with the size of the groups trying to have discussion. I want to just touch in your first point: My favorite subreddits have always been the really niche ones; fountain pens, pipe tobacco, coffee, midori, notebooks, urbansurvivalist, etc. And in these smaller communities I think a lot of good discussion happens within the purview of the sub. Take fountain pens for example, while we might all agree that rollerballs are bad, few of us would agree on what the best nib size/material/design is. I have had the pleasure of reading over many civil and deep discussions over a wide variety of topics in that forum. Most of them are well reasoned and articulate. It's when you get into the default subs that you lose all capacity for discussion. There you are just a single voice crying out to be heard in a sea of humanity. If you only spent your time in the defaults of /r/all then you would never have a chance to speak. But in those smaller spaces real discussion can and does happen.Reddit segregates people into distinct forums of people who all agree with each other, inducing them to engage in groupthink and shift towards increasingly extreme views.
Somewhat yes. Even if you mention that you hold an 'unpopular opinion', you will get downvoted 'till you meet the dark abyss.
However, I can comment freely on any post without any regret or hesitation; but there will always be someone who will always disagree with you backing with their irrelevant reasonings and ending on a negative note about anything that doesn't relate to the topic.
It helped me learn to say, "No, this guy's a nitwit, I'm not talking to him," and also to make sure that I say what I mean, being specific. I can't say that it hurt my ability to converse or argue.
I'm seeing a lot of reddit hate here, and a lot of the points are valid. However, I disagree that the structure of reddit - communities focused around a topic or theme - is a bad thing. A lot of amazing things have happened on reddit over the years, and a large part of it was because a group of like-minded people were able to come together around a common interest. I dislike facebook simply because it is too general: I never have confidence that people will be interested in what is on my mind. On reddit, I simply find the subreddit devoted to it and start a discussion there. The problem subs are mostly the ones that are too general - think "funny" or "pics". Unsubscribing from them mostly solves that problem. I'm new here and I'm still uncertain how this kind of a structure will facilitate that. Where do I go if I want to discuss Nodejs? Or issues related to my city? Also, I feel like the biggest problems sites like reddit and hubski have to solve is the algorithm for determining the comment order users see. Will a comment be buried simply because it came late? Reddit does an OK job of dealing with it. How about hubski?
That's not true. That's like saying all Christians are against gay marriage. In some of the subs I've been in, they have rational discussions. Even if you don't conform to what people want, you can still voice out your opinion. Unfortunately, people may not be able to see it.
I can definitely relate. Reddit and various sites like it has made people harsh and fast to criticize others so quickly that it turns most people cynical just like them. Another problem is that there are so many users on the site that there's just not enough chances to be heard. Unless you have a VERY popular opinion and/or very fast on the posting, you'll likely be ignored, downvoted, and usually both. I admire the positive feel and crowd of Hubski. Looks like I'll be here for a while!
Not quite. Sometimes it depends on where in Reddit do you roam around that you can get an actual discussion and exchanging of ideas without throwing in pointless memes and inside jokes that only Redditors will get. I do agree with you on the upvotes/down votes having a competitive nature, especially in those threads that unless if you switch the comments sorting from top/best to new, chances are your opinion on things wouldn't be heard. Either you have to be lucky to be an early commenter before the thread blows up to be front page worthy, be a well known poster of some sort, or say something rather mind blowing for your post to get attention. There are subreddits and threads that don't have the upvote/downvote system influence how the comments are sorted out (only one that comes to mind is the Check out My Blog sticky at /r/blogging). However the issue of having reasonable discussions is not limited to Reddit. I have frequented a well known forum in the past before calling it quits because that place is nothing more than screaming fans that feel the need to orgasm over their favorite celebrity, tv show, what have you. Nothing wrong with being a fan but they have taken their fandoms so seriously where being contrary will either get you slammed by other posters or warned by the mods or admins. Some of the topics seem normal such as said celebrity's taste of fashion and their acting abilities but there are those that go far as to title their love for that person's style as wanting to have sex with their hair. Positivity is promoted throughout that forum. Nothing wrong with keeping positive but that mentality didn't leave much room for balanced discussion. They were usually found in the smaller sub-forums that didn't garner as much traffic. I tried to start and engage in discussion of things that was beyond the blind worship but often times it wouldn't pan out. I joined that forum not understanding fandom and quit that forum still not understanding it. Mind you, I thought shipping dealt with mailing things (plus shipping and handling) until someone pointed out it dealt with fans pitting characters together as couples. I have been lurking here for the past few hours. With the variety of discussion going on, I think I'm going to like it here.
I don't think it has had any effect on me, but I don't think I go to Reddit for reasonable discussions anymore. With the competitive nature of posting/commenting it made it a great place to find up-to-date news, but beyond that I never found a huge need to comment on anything. Most of the stuff being submitted didn't really pose any questions worth being discussed, and the submissions that did warrant some discussion usually became toxic very quickly. That's what I like about Hubski, most submissions are aimed at bringing forth meaningful discussion.
Reddit improved my ability to sort of pick my battles, really. There are a lot of things I'd normally comment on but after some time you just realize it isn't worth it to be attacked on some website for posting an opposing view. The community here seems more open-minded and more respectful. I don't think it has had a negative influence on my ability to hold discussion, but I see how it could for others. I've enjoyed the short time I've spent on Hubski so far and it's refreshing to see people not getting super pissed off when someone disagrees with them.