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Comment by mahmud | Hacker News Reader

Reddit raises money for people in need. They might dabble in their fun kiddie pool subreddits, but they have consistently walked the walk when and where it matters.

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 :-)

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Maybe you haven't noticed how reddit treats the users who espouse ideas they don't like. /r/atheism redditors have launched invasions on /r/christianity multiple times now, and go in and totally destroy threads that contained nothing especially provocative; they've downvoted all the Christian viewpoints and upvoted all the mocking viewpoints. I expect most other religious subreddits have encountered similar intimidation.

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.

I don't think it's the same thing here at all. Look at the item you posted -- there's a lot of agreement and disagreement going on, and both affirmative and negative viewpoints have good scores. The discussion is relatively civil and sensible. It's not that someone occasionally posts that kind of article, it's that all those articulately and civilly offering opposing viewpoints are considered enemies instead of enrichers, as they should be and at least relatively often are here on HN.

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.

That's not really fair, though. /r/atheism is the atheist equivalent of Christian fundamentalists. If atheism is a religion like "not collecting stamps" is a hobby, /r/atheism wants everybody to stop collecting stamps.

Everyone who has been on reddit for a while knows to unsubscribe from /r/politics, /r/atheism and maybe /r/worldnews.

One would have to unsubscribe from almost every popular subreddit to avoid that kind of thing. IAmA is full of "I grew up in a Christian household where I was abused by being taught that religion is good, when I turned 24 I snapped out of it, AMA" or "I am a sex worker, AMA" or "I have sexual fantasies about gravy, AMA", and the comments are usually about what you'd expect; users congratulating each other for not being religious any more, etc., and if someone comes in and tries to defend it, just by virtue of defending a religious viewpoint, they are downvoted to oblivion.

The attitude prevails throughout almost every popular reddit.

I have no idea where you're getting this from, it sounds like prejudice. To wit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA

#3: I am a brothel keeper, AMA #13: Waitress at high-end strip club #15: "Evangelical pastor's kid". Inside: "I'm 27 now and agnostic bordering on atheist." and so on, that's just on the first page just right now.

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.

I don't understand why users shouldn't support someone of an unusual profession. Are they supposed to get all riled up because someone owns a brothel, or is a waiter in a strip club?

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?

I don't find support of these people to be a bad thing. I find the homogeneity and cruel, almost-textually-violent reactions of redditors to non-homogenous thought to be the bad thing. Look for AMAs where the subject is positive to religion ("IAmA practicing Mormon", "IAmA Catholic priest") or opposed to same-sex marriage, etc., and see how those turn out.

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.

I have seen quite a few religious IAmAs, and, as a rule, everyone was respectful. Reddit mostly has a problem with people who try to undermine rationality and critical thinking in the name of religion, not with religion itself. If you show me a post where redditors are being disrespectful to a (sane) IAmA-er, I will be very surprised.

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.

Do you remember the title or have the link? I'd be interested in reading this.

Yep, here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d3j03/iama_retired_pas...

I'm sure part of it is the size. /r/atheism has over 94 thousand subscribers. In a group of people that large, there are inevitably going to be a bunch of super-assholes. The true measure of a subreddit is its ability to keep the assholes in check and denounce them when they rampage. A quick skim of a few threads suggests that /r/atheism is fairly average in that regard.

>Reddit changes its logo site-wide to celebrate same-sex marriage victories.

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.

So is reddit intentionally trying to alienate potential older users? I see no reason to celebrate or mourn the success or failure of a given political issue site-wide like that. It just emphasizes the idea that reddit has a commonly-accepted set of political ideals and that if you don't agree, you shouldn't be there.

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.

The people who are celebrating it would say it's not a political issue, it's a human rights issue.

That's nice, but they know that idea is not commonly held. The only reason to make a logo for it is to intentionally scare off/irritate people who disagree, further contributing to reddit's homogeneity.

It will be, take another look at that graph over time. Miscegenation used to be a controversy, too.

>That's nice, but they know that idea is not commonly held.

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.

No it's not, why would they want to do that? The logo is to celebrate something they think ought to be celebrated. They're not afraid of having personalities and letting those show on the site. Given they're young, relatively liberal and techy, then they'll appear young, relatively liberal and techy. You also don't have to agree with them, as I'm sure they'd agree. It's a delicate line, having opinions and also moderating others opinions, but I think they're making a fair fist of it so far.

You reckon they are intentionally trying to create a homogenous atmosphere? How do subreddits fit into this? I don't think that makes real sense.

the illusion of freedom...

This is not a given. When I do post on that site I very often contradict the hive mind (even on religious subjects on occasion) and usually get (to my surprise) positive karma from it. I've never gotten worse than -10 ever.

There are certain subreddits that really get out of control (e.g. /r/atheism). The thing about Reddit is that the base is so huge that I don't think there is anything you can say to describe the majority of them anymore. Pretty much anyone and everyone is represented to some degree.

There are nice people on reddit, of course. You might be able to say that some subcommunity of reddit maximizes `lambda subcommunity: f(subcommunity.size) * g(subcommity.loveliness)` over all possible subcommunities of all community websites (and for some reasonable weighting functions f and g), but if you're generalizing to the entire reddit community then I can't help thinking you're mistaken.

If this was reddit, someone would take your pseudo-math prose and come up with a formal system in Coq. But the highest ranked comment would be about a cat with proper table manners.

No, some people on a website called reddit.com raised money for people in need. 'Reddit' isn't a person, it is a thing.

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