[1] have you noticed that many of top subs are about either watching others humiliation or judging people? idiotsincar, iamatotalpieceofshit, maliciouscompliance, etc. Do I actually become a better person by following these?
This is something I've noticed too! I occasionally browse /r/all and it's awash with judgemental holier-than-thou material. Echoing many posters here, there is a lot of great content on reddit if you dig a bit, but it doesn't often seem be the stuff that gets pushed to the top for me.
Even on subs that do have good content, low effort posts seem to get the most upvotes (perhaps low effort = less effort to read = quicker to upvote?). A concrete example for me is on the /r/unresolvedmysteries subreddit - 2 line updates about a case (e.g. "Police announced no new evidence") are top of the front page daily, while longer insightful breakdowns of cases are often buried.
Perhaps a system for weighting upvote value to content length or complexity could be worth exploring?
It's still a really early version but I know the guy is still working on it
It’s not just that there’s people who make these comments - of course there’s always going to be - but that fact that they’re typically so highly upvoted anywhere there’s a voting/likes system. Anything that attempts to reflect nuance or lower the temperature has no boosters, while anything that reflects the worst, most reductive or least honest take is what bubbles to the top.
Not that it's impossible to radicalize a 30 year old, just that the less experience you've had in life the more mentally malleable you are.
I fully agree that any sub that's core content involves shitting on people has terrible inhabitants and all the quality of commentary that follows from that. Some of the more lighthearted ones are a little better (e.g. holdmybeer vs idiotsincars) when the content is conducive to such but only in the sense that someone with a crippling mental illness might have a good-ish day here and there.
I'll subscribe to programming, python, csharp, lego, starcraft. Basically anything I'm specifically interested in. To find out what's the general feel of those topics.
But I'll pop in leopardsatemyface, iamverysmart, and a few others just for fun.
any sub that’s practical is inherently less active. There’s only so much good base knowledge.
Reacting to base knowledge is endless low value content.