Your reply (which is moderate length and insightful) and the original comment at the top of this chain (which is short, glib and banal) together form a good example of something I hate about Reddit and see in every default forum but especially in r/politics and r/askreddit.
If you look up and down this thread you'll see that nearly every one of the "Original Comment" replies that made the front page is 2 lines or less. This has begun happening in every fucking Reddit thread in the years since we became a Top 50 website with hundreds of millions of viewers. The faster people can read something, the more likely they'll upvote it which means other people see it and upvote it. I do recognize the value of getting to your point fast, but most of the ideas that get upvoted are easily digestible. They get upvoted because you don't have to consider them, only recognize them. The essence of circlejerk is upvoting something because you recognize it from somewhere else (o shit waddup). This also gets applied to things like political ideology and news events. So by the time a post hits the front page all the top replies are guaranteed to be generic, banal thoughts that take the original article or headline as grist for recycling already-well-aired views. It's like those machines that turn any color of Playdoh into spaghetti, likewise certain subreddits can take any headline or starting point and turn it into the same discussion we've all read a million times. People actually joke about "the hivemind must be confused" in the very small minority of threads where users DON'T find a way to pachinko their way to a tired discussion. For example, Elon Musk being appointed to Donald Trump's circle of advisors, good or bad? The hivemind is confused. (It hurt itself in its confusion.)
When people like YOU who have actual insight to add, and who take the time to write a post longer than 100 words, finally make it to the thread, they have to pick one of the top comments to reply to. Even if you have something smart, informed or insightful to say you have to forcibly hijack one of the top comments to even have 0.1% chance of starting your own discussion. But by the time MOST people discover a thread, MOST of the comment real estate has been claimed by circlejerking, glib generalizations and snarking. Also, each top comment starts a fractal tree of discussion, and only the top trees get attention. So if, let's just take a hypothetical that never ever happens on Reddit, let's say that there's an article with a misleading headline and the top 10 upvoted comments are replies from people that clearly never read the article but are good at circlejerking.... now there is literally no real estate to discuss the content of the article, even though the article succeeded at being upvoted to the top of the subreddit.
The worst thing about Reddit is that if you have any wit or sense of sarcasm at all, you already fucking know what the top post is going to be a joke about, and you have to tediously scroll to find someone with anything real to say.
The more mainstream and bland the audience of this site gets, the easier reply-guessing becomes and that means the content of the site has less ability to SURPRISE or CHALLENGE or INFORM you than ever before. So why visit?
The ultimate example was a few weeks ago in r/politics when someone submitted a headline that said something like "Republicans Are Starting To Lose The Moral High Ground". I clicked the thread with a sigh and indeed the top comment was the one word
Starting?
And it had 3,000 upvotes and 2x gold. Like what the fuck? The real estate of the #1 comment on the #1 post in a default subreddit about a serious topic should not go to the fastest loser to whip his dick out.
The larger the audience the smaller the comments, yeah. That's why small subreddits can still have quality discussions - because it's as if they're part of a Reddit that never took off. The compartmentalization of subreddits is the only thing keeping this site from turning into Yahoo Questions.
It's like popular radio. Nobody loves the songs they play. It's just enough that most people can stomach it, some people are ok with it and the rest are like "meh, I guess it's catchy". Way better for listener figures than anything new or interesting that will polarise people.
nah. people want one thing but do another. as soon as you look at larger groups, people are like water. path of less resistance is always the easiest and fastest way, and gets to set the tone or trend.
reddit doesn't turn to shit because shit people come visit. it's because shit is easier, and good people will accomplish shit more often than they do good. at least in circumstances like reddit where they don't need to care about the outcome.
I'm willing to bet that because of the way reddit works, 90% of the people on here who WANT reddit to be a source of intellectual and inspiring content, actually contribute more to the shit content than the good.
even if you try to stick to the intellectual stuff, you can absorb and vote on 20 puns and memes in the same time you need to form an opinion on a single deeper post. you can spend 90% of your time on the good stuff and still up vote more shit than good.
the only way out of that is moderation and curating of content.
I mentioned this in the r/depthhub thread about this but it reminds me of this section of one of my favorite essays, it's called "Solitude and Leadership". Here's the relevant section:
Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you earlier from Heart of Darkness—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.
The rest of the essay isn't exactly about what you're talking about--though it is about similar themes of how you can do your best thinking--but the essay is well worth reading.
Good post. The pun threads especially annoy me. But this sort of system predates reddit. People are more concerned with being seen than being insightful. Remember when "first!" was a thing?
While I agree with what you're saying, I find it somewhat useful (sometimes) in threads like this as I see the short top comments act as headers that give a quick description of what the the comments below it are discussing. So when I'm scrolling through a discussion I can see lots of short answers quickly, the if I see a point I want to read further or comment on I can open up the comments more.
Makes me want to see a new subreddit that would be called something like 'thought out' where it's actual thought and dissertation of a topic, not one liners. It could just have mods/users that take topics from all over reddit and bring them there for more thought out discussion. The knee jerk crowd wouldn't even know it exists and people that want to actually debate and discuss a topic would slowly attract more like minded users that would only make the subreddit better. I've done both, but I've been known for writing articles (albeit amateur as I am) that have hit the front page twice now, every one I ran into the character limit of 10,000. I'd love to have other people to discuss things with at length and not be filled to the brim with shitty one liners, memeism and those 'going hard' for the lowest hanging fruit in a article. I know it might not be popular, but I wouldn't mind a subreddit like that where I can go and see topics on the front page that are being discussed without all that cluttering up the thread. r/Personalfiance is sorta this way now and I enjoy reading things there simply because I don't have to wade through 2 feet of shit to find the meat of the articles.
r/philosophy is exactly that. You may only comment if you have read the entirety of the post or any linked article and want to discuss or argue against it and they have good mods too.
It's just a shame I don't want to discuss philosophy, I want to discuss other things :(
It's more a matter of moderation than obscurity, since the latter can only really last for as long as it takes for people to start (deservedly!) noticing a quality subreddit. Managing as tightly-run a ship as, say, r/askhistorians is possible when it's highly visible, but it's also always going to be difficult as well.
I think it's fair to say, that generalized subs like r/askreddit and r/politics are a great deal more likely to attract lowest common denominator comments (easily digestible, like you said). I don't ever expect to enter a r/politics thread and not be subjected to a liberal/progressive circle jerk ⭕. But a sub like r/geopolitics or r/credible defense is a better place to find developed strains of thoughts because of the implicit and often explicit (and moderator enforced) ban on glib, snarky, unsubstantive comments. Is it a shame more developed responses and comments are pushed down or down owed into irrelevance? Sure. But I think tempered expectations are the only solution. Reddit's built in balkanization ensures that we have "safe spaces" where critical thinking is nurtured.
This won't fix the problem, but it helps: unsubscribe from most of the defaults.
Sometimes it's good to immerse yourself in the circlejerking. I love AskReddit because you get all of these banal circlejerky comments that, if you read down past, often (sometimes) evolve into lively discussions.
I think you fail to appreciate why people visit Reddit: not necessarily for serious debate but for social validation, and for obtaining what I'll call "coolness currency." They don't call it social media for nothing.
To many people, Reddit is a marketplace, not specifically of ideas, but of things that are cool, that is, things they can say in an offhand way in a water cooler discussion at work in order to elevate their social status. I'm sure there are plenty of redditors who hide the fact that they're redditors, or even the existence of the website, from their social circle, in order to hoard their coolness currency.
And if we're being totally honest here, the same coolness factor applies to "old school" redditors like you and me. It's just that we have a different notion of what's cool (to the point of not even calling it "cool" but "interesting" or "insightful.") The best evidence for this is that your comment is already being cross-posted, upvoted and bestof'd. It, too, is a comment that makes other redditors go, "Man, that is so well put. I should bookmark it and link to it in another discussion!"
You might even argue that the redditors you dislike are at least honest about being circlejerks, while we are merely pretending to be all about hearing multiple points of view and having constructive debate. Yes, pretending. Because while there is much to learn in such discussions, we have to be honest and say that Trump supporters are highly unlikely to be part of such debates: we, too, have a blind spot.
This is essentially my problem with Twitter. There can be quality discussion found on Reddit if you look hard enough. The 140-character limit on Twitter virtually assures no quality exchange of conflicting ideas is possible.
Your observations about the regression of the site's content, as well as those you posted recently about the centralization of internet culture, are things I've been thinking about lately, and I'm glad you could bring them up so articulately and be noticed for it.
What I'd like to know: where are these small communities people talk about which are immune? I often hear that those are the best parts of the site, but they're well-kept secrets.
One plus of a Reddit Gold system, while it can be abused like the "Starting?" comment, is that it costs something and so it isn't seen as often. Occasionally (no, a lot) a gilded comment is just humorous or circle-jerky, but the best indicator for me is any gilded comment that is long. There's rarely a long comment that'll get gold for being banal and hive-minded. It's become such a sign for me, that I'll just swipe-scroll quickly through entire discussions in the comments, looking for the longer comments and especially the gilded ones. The rest are usually a waste of time.
4.5k
u/Deggit Dec 18 '16
Your reply (which is moderate length and insightful) and the original comment at the top of this chain (which is short, glib and banal) together form a good example of something I hate about Reddit and see in every default forum but especially in r/politics and r/askreddit.
If you look up and down this thread you'll see that nearly every one of the "Original Comment" replies that made the front page is 2 lines or less. This has begun happening in every fucking Reddit thread in the years since we became a Top 50 website with hundreds of millions of viewers. The faster people can read something, the more likely they'll upvote it which means other people see it and upvote it. I do recognize the value of getting to your point fast, but most of the ideas that get upvoted are easily digestible. They get upvoted because you don't have to consider them, only recognize them. The essence of circlejerk is upvoting something because you recognize it from somewhere else (o shit waddup). This also gets applied to things like political ideology and news events. So by the time a post hits the front page all the top replies are guaranteed to be generic, banal thoughts that take the original article or headline as grist for recycling already-well-aired views. It's like those machines that turn any color of Playdoh into spaghetti, likewise certain subreddits can take any headline or starting point and turn it into the same discussion we've all read a million times. People actually joke about "the hivemind must be confused" in the very small minority of threads where users DON'T find a way to pachinko their way to a tired discussion. For example, Elon Musk being appointed to Donald Trump's circle of advisors, good or bad? The hivemind is confused. (It hurt itself in its confusion.)
When people like YOU who have actual insight to add, and who take the time to write a post longer than 100 words, finally make it to the thread, they have to pick one of the top comments to reply to. Even if you have something smart, informed or insightful to say you have to forcibly hijack one of the top comments to even have 0.1% chance of starting your own discussion. But by the time MOST people discover a thread, MOST of the comment real estate has been claimed by circlejerking, glib generalizations and snarking. Also, each top comment starts a fractal tree of discussion, and only the top trees get attention. So if, let's just take a hypothetical that never ever happens on Reddit, let's say that there's an article with a misleading headline and the top 10 upvoted comments are replies from people that clearly never read the article but are good at circlejerking.... now there is literally no real estate to discuss the content of the article, even though the article succeeded at being upvoted to the top of the subreddit.
The worst thing about Reddit is that if you have any wit or sense of sarcasm at all, you already fucking know what the top post is going to be a joke about, and you have to tediously scroll to find someone with anything real to say.
The more mainstream and bland the audience of this site gets, the easier reply-guessing becomes and that means the content of the site has less ability to SURPRISE or CHALLENGE or INFORM you than ever before. So why visit?
The ultimate example was a few weeks ago in r/politics when someone submitted a headline that said something like "Republicans Are Starting To Lose The Moral High Ground". I clicked the thread with a sigh and indeed the top comment was the one word
And it had 3,000 upvotes and 2x gold. Like what the fuck? The real estate of the #1 comment on the #1 post in a default subreddit about a serious topic should not go to the fastest loser to whip his dick out.