And I am not talking about the political stuff. You can upload video of a random dude getting beaten to death, make some absurd claims like "the guy is a pedophile caught in the act" and watch the hateful comments roll in.
Basically, you can make any claims and the ones that keep people's blood boiling seems very popular way of getting clicks and upvotes.
E.g. I was on the main gifs subreddit the other day when a gif of a wall being erected around the Whitehouse was shown. The amount of vitriol, hatred and borderline violent/violence-encouraging comments I saw that was at the top and mostly directed at conservatives/Donald Trump was just too much. It was truly hateful, but because it was directed at the right groups/people, it went unpunished and mostly upvoted.
Here's hoping that all hate and violent stuff like that gets removed from reddit, instead of just having it aimed at "the right", because that's their goal here really. Maybe we can then have an honest conversation about left/right politics.
they are getting so popular they are all over the front page.
I sometimes wonder if Reddit has resulted in a generation completely unable of critical thinking.
or the thing that bothers you is that other people like it and want to see it
At the same time, it seems impossible to find any sentence on Reddit that isn't just a few expletives mixed together with a stock catch phrase.
That combination (ie: of depravity and vapid language) makes me snort with disgust at the idea that people conduct "serious debate" on Reddit.
Maybe we should just embrace the concept of an Internet License, after all.
Likewise. Regulation of communication is beginning to look like the only way out of this trap.