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I checked reddit recently for the first time in a while, and I was shocked by how radicalized its become. An echo chamber of hateful people and perhaps GPTs tha

I checked reddit recently for the first time in a while, and I was shocked by how radicalized its become. An echo chamber of hateful people and perhaps GPTs that are agitating the big subreddits. The contrast is stark with all the "no place for hate" in the rules and endless banning of microaggressions. I saw dozens of death threats. Even an explicit death threat thread with over 40,000 upvotes before reddit stepped in and shut the whole subreddit down. It reminded me of Ghostbusters 2 with all the aggressively angry people and the ooze pouring out of the sewers, all building upon itself.

gosub100 2y ago
Agreed. There is exactly one way to think and believe on Reddit. The "outrage" might be tolerable or even informative in some cases if it was equally distributed. It's disheartening when the one-track politics infects every square inch. It's a good point about bots because 1) they can be sold or rented to advertisers, 2) they are more valuable with higher karma, and 3) the easiest way to get a bot to harvest karma is by agreeing with the hive. So they're amplifying "the message" without even intending to.
input_sh 2y ago
That particular subreddit isn't shut down, it was temporarily suspended as the moderators simply got overwhelmed. There's no indication of bad faith from either the mod team nor the reddit admins, the floodgate was just too much for them to handle. It pretty much says so in the ban message, admins are gonna help them take back control and it will be up within a couple of days.
- niceice 2y ago
  To be even more precise, here's the message from the source; > This community has been banned > This subreddit has been temporarily banned due to a prevalence of violent content. Inciting and glorifying violence or doxing are against Reddit’s platform-wide Rules. It will reopen in 72 hours, during which Reddit will support moderators and provide resources to keep Reddit a healthy place for discussion and debate.
nonchalantsui 2y ago
This is just the consequence of the API protests. Despite people claiming it had no lasting impact, admins coming in and making sweeping changes to mod teams replacing them with loyalists, alongside ramping up centralized feeds to serve more ads onto meant content quality took a nosedive. This is obvious in most subs if you actually look at who is submitting the threads (something the app and All/Popular pages hides in several views), most of these subs are dominated by a handful of accounts. It's a cycle too, because often they'll continue spamming subs in order to get on All/Popular, or make up weird stories to do so, effectively karma farming taken very seriously, with mods encouraging it because of the aforementioned loyalists. It's all just driveby anger and reposts. Maybe some smaller subs with good communities here and there, but that often requires a mod team putting in substantial hours and remaining under the radar from All/Popular in any shape. Forgot to mention, Reddit also started paying these accounts for posting. So a literal financial incentive to ragebait. It' called the "Contributor Program".
- eloisius 2y ago
  RDDT was a good buy, but the site is absolutely going to be destroyed. That’s what’s valuable. I’m not selling until Reddit is Facebook-tier garbage.
- safety1st 2y ago
  It's wild how bad it has gotten since the election. It's important to remember that free speech does not protect directly inciting violence and it does not protect advocating for the murder of anyone, even a politician. These are generally illegal So what Reddit has morphed into, is an illegal content factory - there has already been a comment or two about it from the government and the Trump admin is not one that is likely to sit on my sidelines over this. Whatever your politics may be, I'm just saying this is going to burn Reddit bad.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    > It's important to remember that free speech does not protect directly inciting violence and it does not protect advocating for the murder of anyone, even a politician. These are generally illegal Under US first amendment rights, it's actually sometimes legal. For example, "Watts v. United States" established that if an anti-draft speaker tells a crowd "If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ" that's political hyperbole. So if a crowd were to set up a guillotine outside congress and chant "hang mike pence" it's not necessarily illegal.
godshatter 2y ago
I just stick to the niche subreddits (games, interests, whatever). The main subreddits have been especially aggressive echo chambers for a long time now.
- dogprez 2y ago
  I tried that with work. I created an account where I can just follow a few things related to my job. The problem is that reddit will start showing you things you didn't subscribe to. It's a battle to keep them at bay. If you look at my work account feed it's all mycology, bad tattoos, what-is-this-thing. I never subscribed to any of them. Yea, they are interesting but that's not what I wanted or need at work.
  - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
    Old Reddit still doesn't have any suggested posts. Also, the Reddit API works just fine within limit. It's unusable for scraping but as a single user it works fine.
taurknaut 2y ago
/r/worldnews is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet. Some of those commenters are so nationalist and bloodthirsty they unnerve me. The ban hammer is extremely active on this sub, and for saying completely innocuous political statements about personal preference. I'm absolutely sure this is broader than just that sub but I've probably heard this specific complaint from probably a dozen other people too. I will say, the subreddit system does a decent job of quarantining the dysfunction to that sub. The mod quality is everything and the mod drama is an absolute dumpster fire. (Extremely curiously, Ghislaine Maxwell seems to have been one of the most prolific of the mods, and one of her suspected accounts may be one of the most successful (karma-wise) posters of all reddit.) But on the flipside, /r/askhistorians is still one of the best resources on the internet. Many of the specialty subreddits I frequent (Aviation, UkraineRussiaReport, video game subs, several miscellaneous african subs) are still functioning fine.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - taurknaut 2y ago
    The concern is understandable, I suppose. It's just a convenient way to see clips from both sides of the conflict, and it's the best source for combat footage clips anywhere. I do have a working brain and can use it to identify when people have a polemic. I prefer it to telegram, which is the alternative. The comments are indeed... uh, very strident in their support for either side. So I'm not sure if it's "propaganda" so much as people regurgitating propaganda at each other at full volume. Anyway, it's a war. Propaganda is essentially impossible to avoid without ignoring the topic entirely. Still, it's what we have to work with. And to be clear my sympathies lie with the ukrainian people.
    - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
      Propaganda is big on mixing just enough 'both sides' to lend legitimacy. Again, if I'm remembering correctly this dude was called out on another sub and ended up creating this one specifically to continue his propaganda narrative. There's a lot better subs to work with on Reddit than that sub
urda 2y ago
Reddit, by far, is one of the worst echo chambers on the internet. I've seen hundreds of death threats at one political group on there, but if any veiled threat is made against the "reddit approved party" it is instantly removed or accounts suspended. This really peaked during 2020, when open calls for violence stayed up, some with reddit admin approvals. It used to be a good site, but that was many years ago.
- intended 2y ago
  Did people forget the_donald? What do people think others will do, when they see that the_donald behavior gets rewarded by electoral and political support? If its not clear, everyone is going to radicalize, because its getting success.
  - medellin 2y ago
    Likely take a break from social media and talk with some real people. Lots of people voted for trump aren’t radical actually none that i know are. I come from a small town in a red state and yes they completely disagree with democrats on pretty much everything but the stuff you read on reddit is so far fetched and extreme I don’t know how anyone would take it seriously. They believe people hate Americans and everyone should be ashamed traveling overseas. As someone who travels all the time to multiple continents not just Europe i have never encountered anyone who asked or even cared. Most people don’t live in a political bubble where they need to stop being friends with people over politics. Anyway a lot people are choosing to live in an angry little bubble. It is really sad to see.
    - marxisttemp 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      > Lots of people voted for trump aren’t radical actually none that i know are. The same can be said for the supporters of many radical and terrible historical regimes. I'm not radical, I'm simply pushing this radical boulder along, and I can stop it whenever I wan tooo-oops."
Aurornis 2y ago
> I checked reddit recently for the first time in a while, and I was shocked by how radicalized its become. Reddit has always had these elements, but they were previously isolated to certain subreddits. I noticed the biggest change when the app and website became aggressive about getting people to join other subreddits and inserting posts from other subreddits into people's feeds. Suddenly the isolated subreddits I followed were full of low effort content and angry comments. Reddit's front page is shockingly bad. The amount of misinformation and ragebait that gets upvoted to the front page is almost hard to believe. It's also interesting that many subreddits have embraced the ragebait. Subreddits like /r/AITA have been clear about how they don't care if stories are real or not, but legions of Redditors engage with obvious ChatGPT spam as if it was a real situation they need to weigh in on.
DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
> The contrast is stark with all the "no place for hate" in the rules and endless banning of microaggressions. Please be specific.
tonetheman 2y ago
[dead]

gosub100 2y ago

Agreed. There is exactly one way to think and believe on Reddit. The "outrage" might be tolerable or even informative in some cases if it was equally distributed. It's disheartening when the one-track politics infects every square inch. It's a good point about bots because 1) they can be sold or rented to advertisers, 2) they are more valuable with higher karma, and 3) the easiest way to get a bot to harvest karma is by agreeing with the hive. So they're amplifying "the message" without even intending to.

input_sh 2y ago

That particular subreddit isn't shut down, it was temporarily suspended as the moderators simply got overwhelmed. There's no indication of bad faith from either the mod team nor the reddit admins, the floodgate was just too much for them to handle. It pretty much says so in the ban message, admins are gonna help them take back control and it will be up within a couple of days.

niceice 2y ago
To be even more precise, here's the message from the source; > This community has been banned > This subreddit has been temporarily banned due to a prevalence of violent content. Inciting and glorifying violence or doxing are against Reddit’s platform-wide Rules. It will reopen in 72 hours, during which Reddit will support moderators and provide resources to keep Reddit a healthy place for discussion and debate.

nonchalantsui 2y ago

This is just the consequence of the API protests. Despite people claiming it had no lasting impact, admins coming in and making sweeping changes to mod teams replacing them with loyalists, alongside ramping up centralized feeds to serve more ads onto meant content quality took a nosedive. This is obvious in most subs if you actually look at who is submitting the threads (something the app and All/Popular pages hides in several views), most of these subs are dominated by a handful of accounts. It's a cycle too, because often they'll continue spamming subs in order to get on All/Popular, or make up weird stories to do so, effectively karma farming taken very seriously, with mods encouraging it because of the aforementioned loyalists. It's all just driveby anger and reposts. Maybe some smaller subs with good communities here and there, but that often requires a mod team putting in substantial hours and remaining under the radar from All/Popular in any shape. Forgot to mention, Reddit also started paying these accounts for posting. So a literal financial incentive to ragebait. It' called the "Contributor Program".

eloisius 2y ago
RDDT was a good buy, but the site is absolutely going to be destroyed. That’s what’s valuable. I’m not selling until Reddit is Facebook-tier garbage.
safety1st 2y ago
It's wild how bad it has gotten since the election. It's important to remember that free speech does not protect directly inciting violence and it does not protect advocating for the murder of anyone, even a politician. These are generally illegal So what Reddit has morphed into, is an illegal content factory - there has already been a comment or two about it from the government and the Trump admin is not one that is likely to sit on my sidelines over this. Whatever your politics may be, I'm just saying this is going to burn Reddit bad.
- michaelt 2y ago
  > It's important to remember that free speech does not protect directly inciting violence and it does not protect advocating for the murder of anyone, even a politician. These are generally illegal Under US first amendment rights, it's actually sometimes legal. For example, "Watts v. United States" established that if an anti-draft speaker tells a crowd "If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ" that's political hyperbole. So if a crowd were to set up a guillotine outside congress and chant "hang mike pence" it's not necessarily illegal.

godshatter 2y ago

I just stick to the niche subreddits (games, interests, whatever). The main subreddits have been especially aggressive echo chambers for a long time now.

dogprez 2y ago
I tried that with work. I created an account where I can just follow a few things related to my job. The problem is that reddit will start showing you things you didn't subscribe to. It's a battle to keep them at bay. If you look at my work account feed it's all mycology, bad tattoos, what-is-this-thing. I never subscribed to any of them. Yea, they are interesting but that's not what I wanted or need at work.
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  Old Reddit still doesn't have any suggested posts. Also, the Reddit API works just fine within limit. It's unusable for scraping but as a single user it works fine.

taurknaut 2y ago

/r/worldnews is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet. Some of those commenters are so nationalist and bloodthirsty they unnerve me. The ban hammer is extremely active on this sub, and for saying completely innocuous political statements about personal preference. I'm absolutely sure this is broader than just that sub but I've probably heard this specific complaint from probably a dozen other people too. I will say, the subreddit system does a decent job of quarantining the dysfunction to that sub. The mod quality is everything and the mod drama is an absolute dumpster fire. (Extremely curiously, Ghislaine Maxwell seems to have been one of the most prolific of the mods, and one of her suspected accounts may be one of the most successful (karma-wise) posters of all reddit.) But on the flipside, /r/askhistorians is still one of the best resources on the internet. Many of the specialty subreddits I frequent (Aviation, UkraineRussiaReport, video game subs, several miscellaneous african subs) are still functioning fine.

_DeadFred_ 2y ago
[flagged]
- taurknaut 2y ago
  The concern is understandable, I suppose. It's just a convenient way to see clips from both sides of the conflict, and it's the best source for combat footage clips anywhere. I do have a working brain and can use it to identify when people have a polemic. I prefer it to telegram, which is the alternative. The comments are indeed... uh, very strident in their support for either side. So I'm not sure if it's "propaganda" so much as people regurgitating propaganda at each other at full volume. Anyway, it's a war. Propaganda is essentially impossible to avoid without ignoring the topic entirely. Still, it's what we have to work with. And to be clear my sympathies lie with the ukrainian people.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    Propaganda is big on mixing just enough 'both sides' to lend legitimacy. Again, if I'm remembering correctly this dude was called out on another sub and ended up creating this one specifically to continue his propaganda narrative. There's a lot better subs to work with on Reddit than that sub

urda 2y ago

Reddit, by far, is one of the worst echo chambers on the internet. I've seen hundreds of death threats at one political group on there, but if any veiled threat is made against the "reddit approved party" it is instantly removed or accounts suspended. This really peaked during 2020, when open calls for violence stayed up, some with reddit admin approvals. It used to be a good site, but that was many years ago.

intended 2y ago
Did people forget the_donald? What do people think others will do, when they see that the_donald behavior gets rewarded by electoral and political support? If its not clear, everyone is going to radicalize, because its getting success.
- medellin 2y ago
  Likely take a break from social media and talk with some real people. Lots of people voted for trump aren’t radical actually none that i know are. I come from a small town in a red state and yes they completely disagree with democrats on pretty much everything but the stuff you read on reddit is so far fetched and extreme I don’t know how anyone would take it seriously. They believe people hate Americans and everyone should be ashamed traveling overseas. As someone who travels all the time to multiple continents not just Europe i have never encountered anyone who asked or even cared. Most people don’t live in a political bubble where they need to stop being friends with people over politics. Anyway a lot people are choosing to live in an angry little bubble. It is really sad to see.
  - marxisttemp 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > Lots of people voted for trump aren’t radical actually none that i know are. The same can be said for the supporters of many radical and terrible historical regimes. I'm not radical, I'm simply pushing this radical boulder along, and I can stop it whenever I wan tooo-oops."

Aurornis 2y ago

> I checked reddit recently for the first time in a while, and I was shocked by how radicalized its become. Reddit has always had these elements, but they were previously isolated to certain subreddits. I noticed the biggest change when the app and website became aggressive about getting people to join other subreddits and inserting posts from other subreddits into people's feeds. Suddenly the isolated subreddits I followed were full of low effort content and angry comments. Reddit's front page is shockingly bad. The amount of misinformation and ragebait that gets upvoted to the front page is almost hard to believe. It's also interesting that many subreddits have embraced the ragebait. Subreddits like /r/AITA have been clear about how they don't care if stories are real or not, but legions of Redditors engage with obvious ChatGPT spam as if it was a real situation they need to weigh in on.

DaiPlusPlus 2y ago

> The contrast is stark with all the "no place for hate" in the rules and endless banning of microaggressions. Please be specific.

tonetheman 2y ago

[dead]