> Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison.
Yeah especially on r/AmITheAsshole. Those comments never advocate for communication, forgiveness and mending things with family.
Yeah especially on r/AmITheAsshole. Those comments never advocate for communication, forgiveness and mending things with family.
Now everyone is a troll/bot by default unless proven otherwise.
The challenge is interpreting what is toxic, correctly.
Also, if everyone I know is “toxic” then that’s a good sign that the problem is me and not everyone else.
Correct. It is always case by case review.
> Also, if everyone I know is “toxic” then that’s a good sign that the problem is me and not everyone else.
Why “everyone”? Generalizations like these are the same mistake that Reddit, that you’re calling out, makes.
Also, toxic is relative to your perspective – it’s not a universal merit.
"No one owns you anything, you don't own anyone anything" mentality, without a crumb of social awareness.
Think about it, how fucked does your relationship have to be to post on Reddit for advice?
Not to mention nowadays an untold amount of posts to subreddits that invite commentary are made up stories from accounts trying to get engagement.
Since someone downvoted my parent comment, I am not hiding anything, this is just being safe in the modern world, and here are the 8 alts:
1. This same name - bay area / tech
2. entertainment - least used, but it becomes useful when i am watching something live. It was my place to be during game of thrones last season (and sadly so)
3. indian left politics + bollywood - pretty much unused.
4. indian right politics + bollywood. i got banned from one sub for an innocent comment, so i decided to just form personas. and maybe that's when i created health / finance / bay area accounts -- but memory fades after a long time. pretty much unused.
5. relationship advice - unused for a long time. it does not exist on my main phone, but i have all of them on my work phone so i know it exists
6. american politics. i do not participate much nowadays, with age my brain has dulled and it needs to shed load so this is used minimally, but at a point i was so active that my karma pulled me into the sweet reddit IPO. I kept only 100 shares btw
7. health - only health topics, also unused, but i go there and use that account when i need to read on a specific topic
8. finance - only investment, trading
nowadays you can hide reddit history, but earlier you could not, and my point is i do not want to 1) delete my comments, but 2) be hounded by them when i have a question about a different topic. but i did not care if people read my past 100 comments about politics when i talk about politics.
so i flip between 2-3 accounts on a daily basis, and maybe 4-5 in a good week. i have not been challenged by reddit, but if they do, i will adapt. Switching between them was much easier earlier in the Apollo days and even at reddit - they have made navigation worse for this specific use case.
You were banned from a Indian re subreddit or banned because being rw ?
FYI: I was banned from r/india for commenting basic info on how economy works.
I guess that makes IP banning residential nodes even more stupid.
If you use your different accounts in different subreddits and never have your accounts interact, you won't be banned.
If you happen to post to the same subreddit with another account at some point, Reddit bans all of your accounts.
I actually gave up using it because, perhaps in part because I'm behind a VPN (required in my country), any new accounts I create get banned very quickly once I start commenting.
There's nothing of much value on that website, but sometimes I try creating an account to comment on something.
The android reddit app annoyingly doesn't check for account matches. If you click a browser notification link on Account A it can open a reply form on App account B.
This might easily happen if you like to participate in political discussions.
Not that these relationships subreddits are good (often it's obviously children trying to give advice they don't have the experience for) but I don't think that telling people to break up more is less accurate advice.
Consider that if ending a relationship causes noticeable problems to external observers, it’s almost by definition because you were in it “too long”. That is you developed a strong attachment, shared assets, or had kids with what was in hindsight obviously the wrong person.
Essentially you can know which relationships a person stayed in too long, but you can’t know how things would have worked out in relationships people ended too early.
Also it’s probably good advice to tell a 19 year old to break up with her boyfriend over a half dozen serious red flag issues, but that’s not the only kind of thing Reddit relationship advice is generally dealing with. It’s not even the majority. If you’re advice is always to beak up over every petty difference or minor slight, you might reduce the number of people who stay in bad relationships, but your advice, if taken, would make good long term relationships impossible.
Reducing it to "right person / wrong person" is a very narrow viewpoint. People can change in unpredictable ways, including yourself. Relationships end - or continue - for so many reasons, both emotional and pragmatic. It's simply too reductive to say that if a relationship causes pain when it ends, there was necessarily some sort of mistake. It could even be that the pain is a price to pay for a life experience that you'd be worse off for not having...
> but I don't think that telling people to break up more is less accurate advice.
Those are subjective determinations based on personal experience. But breaking up more without addressing the underlying issues is likely to cause steadily worsening problems at both individual and societal scales. I'm not a mental health professional, but I can see several problems with this approach.
The first is that the determination of the issue is really tricky and needs careful work. The partner who seems abusive may not always be the actual perpetrator. They may be displaying stress response to hidden and chronic abuse by the other partner. For example, a short temper may be caused by anxiety about being emotionally abused. Such manipulative discrediting of the victim may even be a habitual behavior rather than a deliberate one. And it's more common than you'd imagine. When you support the second partner based on a flawed judgment, you're reaffirming their toxic behavior, while worsening the self image of the victim that has already been damaged by gaslighting.
Another issue is the degrading empathy. All relationships, even business deals, are based on sacrifices and compromises meant to bring you benefits in the long term. Stable long term romantic/marital relationships have benefits that far outweigh the sacrifices one usually has to make. But the evolving public discourse, especially those on r/AITA, is more in favor of ruining the relationship rather than make any sacrifices at all. In response, relationships are becoming loveless, transactional and so flaky that any compromise is seen as oppression by the partner. There is zero self reflection and very few advises to examine one's own behavior first. It's all about oneself and the problem is always on the other side!
And unsurprisingly, these negative tendencies are bleeding into their social lives as well. Over the past decade or so, I have observed a marked increase in unsympathetic and somewhat radicalized discourse. Amateur advice is very harmful and this is definitely a massive case for the professionals to manage. But they're also products of the same system (with exceptions, of course). So I'm going to criticize even the professional and academic community in this matter. In their drive towards hyper-individualism, many seem to have forgetten that humans are social beings who won't fare well physically or emotionally without relations, relationships and society.
At some point I think it helps to take a look at the macro, because it's so easy to get lost in the micro. And it often reveals the micro, in many domains, to be simply absurd.
Especially when you consider that the set of people asking Reddit of all places for dating advice are probably young and in bad situations (it seems like people in abusive relationships often ask the internet for advice because part of abuse is separating them from their loved ones in real life), then "stick with it" seems like the riskier statrgy generally.
Because an important part of keeping a relationship healthy is not airing your dirty laundry. It's almost like these endless hokey folksy sayings were built up over millennia of wisdom that kept society moving along in a great and healthy direction. And now that we've decided to rethink everything, we have societies that are, at the minimum, no longer self sustaining.