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> When I've tried to post correcting information (such as direct quotes from the link that contradict the headline) I'll get a lot of angry responses from people saying they don't actually care that it's wrong because the headline supports something they feel is true. They've already made up their mind about what reality is like and the headline merely exists as a prompt for letting them rage about it a little longer. They don't actually care if it's true or not, because they believe some bigger picture truth justifies the lie.

> because they believe some bigger picture truth justifies the lie.

I go around bleating about this issue quite often and that's the best, most empathetic [1] way I've seen it phrased.

[1] not a typo for emphatic

Yeah, I see this a lot on HN as well. "$BigCorp is secretly doing $NefariousThing!" "How good is the evidence for this, though?" "Why are you shilling for $BigCorp, we all know it's nefarious!"

Like, I can easily believe that many big corporations are doing all sorts of shady stuff, but the lack of precision makes it impossible to put everything into perspective. (And it's not like "just break them all up, regardless of the details" is a viable solution: you'll just end up with a bunch of slightly-smaller shady corporations.)

The thing that turned me off reddit is that for many years how much of it seemed to be following a script for any given topic, and that's a long time to when /r/subredditsimulator or GPT variants would be novel. Personally I'm long past the point where I found myself caring whether it's a human or bot if the value in reading the post isn't there as it's not presenting anything new. I found myself despairing a bit that if it was humans typing out responses, what's the cumulative amount of time spent doing so and not moving things forwards, just playing out the same scene over and over, and likely being angry about it so it's hard to see it as a leisure activity

I mean, nobody should be surprised since Reddit drove away almost all of their moderators and power users in mid-2023 by banning clients that actually functioned.

Reddit chose to kill itself; a maggot-ridden corpse is the expected find.

> As far as I can tell, the people who continue engaging with the ragebait slop don't actually care if it's true or not.

I've found generic/mass-appeal reddit/twitter/whatever to be mostly social hygiene where people get together to link up with their tribe. If there is interaction between tribes, it mostly follows the same patterns (but it's rare, because power accumulates on one side and you get more ideologically aligned groups). The ideal version would be one where members of other tribes are around, but they quickly get shouted down and then either join the local tribe or leave defeated, admitting they were wrong.

Whether something really happened (in some particular way) doesn't matter if discussing reality is not the point.

the only way i engage with reddit now is directly on subreddits i think arent total wastes of time(shrinking fast). which mainly means i never navigate to their main page and my first stop is directly on a subreddit rather than the front page, all, or whatever.

currently thats pretty much two humor based subreddits.

this has been slowly getting worse and worse over the years. Ive also for sure experienced the google search results from reddit that have felt manipulated. one that springs to mind is a topic about favorite bar soap... really? the consensus in a hygiene subreddit was that the most popular brand with likely the highest advertising budget of any other brand is the top comment? its also not like a defeated "xxx gets the job done and is affordable" its like a really odd praising of them.