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Comment by encryptluks2 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've noticed with reddit is they constantly push violence to the frontpage and encourage it. Someone calls you a name or uses a racist word, here watch this video of someone getting beat nearly to death for speech and here are 1000 top comments as to why that is perfectly okay and acceptable.

I get the feeling the police state actually wants more violence and crime and therefore encourages it quite frequently. Slavery is legal as long as someone is in jail or prison. They have people working for less than $1/hr just for some extra snacks and perks.

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I think your second paragraph might be jumping the gun a bit but yes in my experience the Reddit algorithm also highlights the worst of humans.

Also the "general" Reddit opinion on topics tends to skew super pseudo-intellectual and shortsighted.

One remarkable thing here is the difference between comments and up-votes. It's not unusual to see a post trending where the top comment directly undermines the idea expressed in the post. Either by pointing out it's falsehoods or logical inconsistencies.

A much simpler explanation is the same thing news sites have discovered a long time ago: violence sells.

It's visceral and easily understandable: "somebody is being hurt and shouldn't be, be outraged", or "somebody is being hurt and should be, feel some schadenfreude" both work.

It also feels important and it's easy to understand. Compare, eg, "ZFS Without a Server Using the Nvidia BlueField-2 DPU". A very tiny percentage even knows what is being talked about, and even being an IT pro I don't without reading (a filesystem without a server? What's a BlueField-2 DPU?). And then considerable effort is needed to read such an article and think about whether it actually says something interesting, and whether something is badly wrong somewhere.

So content almost unavoidably gravitates towards subjects that don't require technical understanding, or thought. Outrage is also good for maximizing clicks and passing the link around.

I never see this. Maybe you subscribe to different channels?

Literally any post about ukraine will have redditors screaming for genocide against russia, upvoted to top. Same goes for China

Show me one single post about Ukraine where a top 3 voted comment is “screaming about genocide against Russia”. I will save you the time, don’t bother, because it doesn’t exist.

It exists in their fevered imagination.

I've seen posts that were calling for violence (usually directed against those directly involved, or leadership, which is natural given the circumstances), but I have not seen anyone (with significant upvotes) calling for genocide. If "any post about Ukraine" has this content, I'm sure it will be easy for you to link a handful of examples?

Just browse r/popular or r/all any day. It gives you the most trending and upvoted posts on the whole site

Browse to r/worldnews... And that subreddit generally comes on frontpage.

I consume Reddit in generally the same way I consume Twitter - I completely ignore what's trending and only look at the people/subreddits that I've made an explicit choice to follow. Twitter's algorithm gives me more leakage than Reddit's, but I find it to be a tolerable amount.

If that's what you're seeing, that sounds worthy of recording it and making a blog post. The default frontpage of Reddit is pretty political in my experience, but I don't recall violence being prevalent in any way.

It's my experience as well on /r/all. Obviously my curated homepage is different, but popular or all is filled with violence.

It used to be filled with porn. Not sure why it switched from porn to violence.

I think main problem with Reddit are echo chamber subreddits which exist only to get stuff to frontpage stuff like murderbyaoc etc.

Well the thing I have noticed their 'home feed' in the app (not showing on desktop version) is basically political news and outrage. They seem to be heading the direction of facebook. Pushing outrage content is such a '2020s' thing, I hope it's just a fad.

Reminds me of that song by Jedi Mind Tricks - Shadow Business. He said slavery is not illegal that’s a lie, it’s illegal unless it’s for conviction of a crime.

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