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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society

I'm always surprised that Reddit gets a free pass in these discussions. Reddit has been home to some of the most egregious bad communities and misinformation hives.

Their invisible-hand moderation system allows a small number of moderators to completely control the conversation in a subreddit. Banning dissenters and removing comments that don't agree with what the moderators want people to see is an easy way to make it look like everyone is in natural agreement on a topic.

The weirdest part is that most tech people readily admit that Reddit is full of terrible content, even on the front page. The common retort is that it's not so bad if you create an account and manually remove all of those bad subreddits from your list, but by the same argument Facebook isn't a problem because you can simply not subscribe to the bad content.

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I hate Reddit mostly for its hive mind.

For example: There is a video of someone blasting music and neighbor clearly being upset. The offender calls the lady Karen. Then, all the comments are bashing so called "Karen". Even though many places in the US have laws in place to prevent people from blasting music all day. Stating this brings many down votes.

I had an awful neighbor in an area where houses are close apart. He would get wasted, cut grass with a lawnmower and blast music out of his car, which he could not hear because of lawn mower. My windows would shake when I was trying to study.

Reddit is an amazing platform for niche hobbies and tech forums.

It is fucking terrible for its political news. It's so clearly biased AND it leaks into every default subreddit.

> Reddit is an amazing platform for niche hobbies and tech forums.

I tried this for a while but the flagrant low-effort karma farming even on those subreddits drove me away. The last subreddit I still read towards the end was r/skookum. It was in interesting community for a while; a lot of neat heavy industry stuff. But I had to quit after seeing about ten thousand "look I found a wrench that says skookum on it, give me uptoots xD" posts.

You're on the wrong website if you're trying to avoid karma farming.

And at such polarized extremes. I see unironic communists post in worldnews about as often as any kind of conservative.

reddit is better if you unsub from all and just add back the things you are interested in

I sometimes feel alone when I go to Reddit and have the same disgusted feeling you do-- and it's because all the dissenting opinions are downvoted and deleted.

With that kind of moderation, how is there any other outcome other than a loud, obnoxious hive-mind?

It bothers me because perhaps the younger generation will grow up in Reddit thinking that this hive-mind is normal and healthy.

I think many will, but many others won't.

There are a lot of spaces online, especially on Discord and at one point in Facebook groups where Reddit is regarded as if it were a digital North Korea.

I have a carefully curated list of subs on Reddit that are well moderated and informative. There just isn't an easy way to do that with Facebook or Twitter. Both of those platforms will show me "related" content I don't want to see.

Reddit might do that with their app (I don't use it so I don't know) but with a third party client or the old website I can pretty effectively avoid trolls and nonsense.

It's a controversial topic but I personally think the downvote makes a huge difference in my experience on social media. You see it here on HN as well.

> Banning dissenters and removing comments that don't agree with what the moderators want people to see is an easy way to make it look like everyone is in natural agreement on a topic.

This happens way more than people know, by the way. Some of the moderators on large subreddits are complete dicks to people who go against the grain. Good luck appealing. All you can do is create another account for that subreddit or just never visit it again.

The hate train in the press is for Twitter because that's the cesspool where all the journalists spend their days. They neglect to mention the foul stench of Reddit because they don't generally go there unless it's to do a quick hit piece after a disgruntled powermod gives them a lead to force the admin team to take their own ToS seriously.

Because there is no such thing as Reddit. Every sub is different. SilphRoad and the fandom subs for Dark and Twin Peaks were terrific communities when I participated there. Hobbyist subs for modding PC cases and programming languages have consistently great communities. Front-page Reddit is a totally different animal, but assuming you can remember words or deal with six bookmarks instead of one, you can go to the specific subs you want without ever having to see the front page at all.

I have a browser extension ('leechblock') to stop me from viewing r/all and r/popular, and it really is night and day. If I happen to somehow end up on those pages on another device, it's jarring. I don't recognize the site as what it was when I first started using it.

I think the hypocrisy isn't as much as you might think. Think of it like this: Facebook is like Walmart, Reddit is like a shopping mall. Malls and Walmarts have plenty of garbage products alike, but at Walmart you HAVE to walk past garbage to get to the thing you want, whereas at a mall you can just beeline straight to the one store you want to go to.

I can't avoid things I don't want to see in facebook unless I have zero friends and only subscribe to community topics (eventually a friend will post a link or opinion on a topic I don't want to see in social media), but if I literally only care about pictures of bees, I can just exclusively follow the pictures of bees subreddit.

There are intelligent, well educated people that I personally hold in high esteem that take Twitter seriously and it weirds me out because they ostensibly to know better. I do not know anyone that takes Reddit seriously. I’m guessing that I’m not the only one here who feels that way.

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