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Comment by SJMG | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it is a toxic sub, where the notion that there can be greater happiness on the other side of forgiveness than cutting ties is all but absent.

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To be fair, it’s easier to concisely explain cutting someone off than justifying forgiveness. And the latter will land with some people versus others, while the former will only be rejected by people who have themselves concluded a theory of forgiveness. As a result, the simpler pitch gets upvoted. Even if the majority would have been swayed by a collection of arguments the other way.

It’s a good theory. My theory is, for whatever reason, jaded, narcissistic, miserable people congregate in r/AITA and try to drag other people into their misery because that’s easier than accepting responsibility and doing something to change.

Before Reddit made hiding profiles easy you'd click on a user's unreasonably scorched earth advice to the OP, and find their post history is essentially going to every story they come across and advocating for scorched earth.

Hiding profiles has genuinely made the platform profoundly worse. It's impossible to tell if you've just got a troll on your hands or someone who's making a good faith argument. It used to be enough to check their profile, and either downvote and move on, or engage with someone on a human level.

Now everyone is a troll/bot by default unless proven otherwise.

What are the chances you were seeing the anti-civ bots and now reddit makes them easier to hide? (And I'm not saying regular people acting like bots, but an anti-civ campaign.)

Except it’s not toxic to suggest that cutting toxic relationship out yields greater happiness.

Well, maybe.

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.

> The challenge is interpreting what is toxic, correctly.

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.

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