>The community is the loveliest on the internet
I hope you're being sarcastic. reddit's been a sordid mix of conspiracy theorists, political extremists, and 4chan users for the last year or two.
I hope you're being sarcastic. reddit's been a sordid mix of conspiracy theorists, political extremists, and 4chan users for the last year or two.
Let me say that I have only yesterday signed up to reddit, for the first time, under my own name. And that I would happily go elsewhere for intelligent feedback. But if I was wronged by a bigger adversary (government, business, etc.) Reddit would be the first place to air my grievance.
Even in their most sordid humor, they're both clever and humane. I just get the feeling they're nice people. People post pictures of their kids, their pets, their hand-drawings, hobbies, even their own private parts (if you know where to look.) I think Reddit covers the whole spectrum of the human experience .. if all humans were charitable, fairly well educated, suburbanite, closet-Marxists with short attention span (which I emphatically identify with :-)
Even isolated within subreddits, it's hard to get someone who is at odds with the ideas of most of reddit's userbase to visit a friendly subreddit when they visit the main page and see a bunch of f-bombs, nsfw links, militant atheist and liberal content, etc. My parents, for instance, would be offended by something on the main page at almost any time you captured it. Things are better now that /r/atheism is off the front page, but it's still not good.
Reddit changes its logo site-wide to celebrate same-sex marriage victories. Any time the Salvation Army is mentioned on reddit 100 redditors jump to write about how the Salvation Army opposes pornography so nobody should ever donate to them. And so on.
That's true of HN too, though, just in different political directions. There's a lot of polemical stuff that makes the front page, and especially a lot of fluff libertarian-partisan stuff, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1795577 . The comments often have a lot of militant-libertarian stuff too if the topic is politics/economics.
As someone who doesn't much like hardline socialism or hardline libertarianism, I don't really find reddit that much worse on this subject, especially considering its larger size. Mostly it's just skewed in the opposite direction.
Also, I think on HN a story called "Socialism saved the miners" could have been front-paged and had a similar discussion. On reddit, if you post something that doesn't fit with their preconceptions against religion, capitalism, etc., all you can hope for is < -100 karma.
Everyone who has been on reddit for a while knows to unsubscribe from /r/politics, /r/atheism and maybe /r/worldnews.
The attitude prevails throughout almost every popular reddit.
Of course, it's not necessarily bad to have these come up sometimes. It's just the amazing frequency with which they do, the universally supportive attitude of reddit, and their extreme desire to lynch and denigrate anyone who violates their universal support.
Hell, I remember a pedophile who recognised that his tendencies were harmful to children and had vowed never to act on them. Given that he can't change his condition, I think that was a brave and mature thing to do. While I obviously don't support pedophilia, I think that realizing that your desires can cause harm and restraining yourself from them is not something to condemn.
Apart from that, I find that it's really valuable to try and see things from someone's viewpoint, no matter who that person is. There have been many people doing IAmAs, and I find that critically deciding whether this person is someone to support or to condemn was eye-opening. Can you elaborate on why you find the community's support a bad thing?
reddit is extremely antagonistic toward people who they consider unenlightened. There is a culture of incivility. It's not a numbers game -- it doesn't matter for instance that a larger portion of reddit is irreligious than religious -- it's just a matter of human decency, courtesy, open-mindedness and humility, which are almost non-existent on reddit.
In fact, I remember a recent post by a theologian, it had hundreds of comments and everyone (including the poster) loved it, it was very civilized and informative.
That and the porno thing are way more about age than ideology. Old democrats are against same-sex marriage and young republicans are more likely to be for it than most other deviations from the party line. Look at a graph of opinion on that issue over age sometime.
I suppose ideology is in there a little as far as secularism (!= atheism), but hey, it's the internet.
And redditors will definitely treat you that way. They usually don't care if your objection is well-reasoned or articulately expressed, they just instantly destroy anything vaguely pro-religion, pro-life, pro-traditional-marriage, etc.
Only amongst those opposed to gay marriage. It is very much a human-rights issue for everyone I know, particularly those who are gay. As for the decisions reddit takes as a site (not the community), they are generally both popular with the community and the admins. Take, for example, the stance they took on running pro-prop 19 ads, or their decision not to run anti-gay marriage ads. The first was genuinely political, but it was also popular. The second was a matter of principle.
Can we raise the dixie flag of /r/circlejerk and rabble rouse for states rights to stupidity?
"better" is relative. To me, HN is one of the "better" communities. Reddit is comprised of 1% people that are actually smart, 20% kooks, 15% political nutjobs, and the rest are early 20-something pseudo-intellectuals that feel that anything against the US, religion, or corporations makes them more intelligent and witty in the eyes of the world. I also get the feeling that people there have very little experience beyond a keyboard in their parent's house.
When I look at any HN article, most of the comments are sane, well-articulated, and thought-out. It's quite refreshing, actually.
Reddit to communities is what Craigslist is for dating.
Once you discover the object of your irrational affection, try to sympathize with those irrationally at odds with it (i.e. haters, detractors, bashers, the Other fanboy, etc.)
Seriously, there's a disproportionate amount of irrational pro-Apple and -Microsoft posts here on HN that get upvotes.
Facebook is an interesting take on this by effectively blocking you from hearing much from people you don't wish to hear from.
Both communities serve their purpose. HN is nice in that it is specifically not trying to be big. It seems that Paul Graham is trying quite hard to avoid an Eternal September-type scenario arising from the dilution of the community as it exists now. That's great, and I respect that. The flip side of that, however, is a lack of dynamism.
There's nothing unique about either site. I find the comments on HN to be generally more knowledgeable than those on r/technology, slightly better than r/programming, and about the same as r/netsec. When you get down to the smaller subreddits, the idiocy usually goes away.
>Reddit is comprised of 1% people that are actually smart, 20% kooks, 15% political nutjobs
I'll give you the last two, but I'd say you're off by an order of magnitude on the first one. That's a generalization of the site as a whole, mind you. Your figure might be entirely accurate for, say, r/pics.
>and the rest are early 20-something pseudo-intellectuals that feel that anything against the US, religion, or corporations makes them more intelligent and witty in the eyes of the world.
Again, depends on the subreddit. On r/politics, I'd say you're probably right. Many other subreddits would defy that description.
Check out:
http://www.reddit.com/r/DepthHub/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Foodforthought/
As I said before, r/tehcnology is hit and miss, but the smaller tech subreddits are good. I personally frequent r/netsec, and I often find good links and discussion at r/python, r/linux, and other tech subreddits.
You may find this article: http://www.amerika.org/technology/the-entropy-of-reddit/ vocalizes many of your issues with reddit. I don't agree with the author on everything, but some of his points are valid.
My figure is from every subreddit on the front page (without adding any of the specific ones you can add yourself). I could find conservative/republican subreddits, but that wouldn't represent the community as a whole either.
It's pretty obvious even from the link titles users have posted.
"As I said before, r/tehcnology is hit and miss, but the smaller tech subreddits are good. I personally frequent r/netsec, and I often find good links and discussion at r/python, r/linux, and other tech subreddits."
This also doesn't represent the community as a whole. These are small subreddits.
It's easy to classify the big subreddits as "Reddit", but that's just not the case. The "community as a whole" is an ephemeral thing. You can't really judge it by the tone on some of the, admittedly larger, subreddits.
Seriously, you say how much better the community at HN is, but you dismiss the subreddits I mentioned, many of which have more users than HN. HN itself was originally supposed to be a subreddit, but the admins wouldn't give Paul what he wanted. Reddit itself is more of an umbrella than a group.
What I've been impressed with on many occasions is the community keeping in check the over-the-top commentators who are just being douches, regardless of which side of the debate they are on. The community really does moderate itself quite well considering its size.
If you hang out in r/wtf or some such, you kinda get what you would expect, but select your subreddits well and you can be part of some pretty interesting discussions and occasionally learn some really cool things. Reddit ftw in my opinion.