Biggest problem with Reddit is the giant echo chamber. Feels a lot like twitter. Super aggressive replies if you’re against the grain.
I'm somewhat active on niche programming topics, and people are usually helpful and respectful.
I like that on Reddit I can stay in my bubble and not worry about the world's every single problem when I just want to relax.
On Twitter, that's impossible. No matter how strictly you curate your feed, at least 1 in every 10 tweets will be something that ruins your mood (politics, drama, bullying).
Reddit became a shit show with Trump vs Clinton, but now people attack their own for every little sign of life.
We really need a better social network. Twitter, Reddit, HN, Facebook, ... They add little, but break a lot.
> I think I witness the pandemic's toll on people's capacity for empathy
There's so many widely varying ways that effects of the pandemic can hit someone pretty bad (financially, mentally, of course physically, etc), and I think that part of the problem is that it's hard to see how real those problems are if you happened to not have suffered those particular hardships.
Personally I found this with isolation through lockdown. People who live with family, a partner or even just housemates seem to not quite understand what happens when the isolation creeps up on you (it creeps). Between the waves, when I could see people again, I could easily tell ones that did know, you could see it in their eyes if they talked about the lockdown period.
My new social network is called the woods.
The problem is the voting. It's not inherently linked to the content's value to the discourse or even welfare of the collective. Wrong reward metric meets a brain evolved for social regulation in small groups of humans dependant on each other's survival. Like with all problems of modern humanity, we struggle with a novel abundance we created...
It's a shame I no longer visit Reddit, as most popular subs just fall into the echo chambers. I find IRC still pretty good for the technical conversations, and there are the odd old skool forums that are active.
Perhaps reddits success will be it's downfall?
But I've had friends who insist it's a massive shit show deserving of being blocked at the router (for at least one guy).
Same can be said with Twitter, or any social network. It's all about the company you choose to keep.