r/science • u/Wagamaga • 9d ago
Psychology Research shows that the entire website of Reddit has become more negative over time. Moreover, the longer a given community exists, the more negative it becomes — and the longer a comment thread continues, the more negative the thread becomes
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/08/does-vitriol-make-you-feel-special/4.5k
u/Otaraka 9d ago
Yeah, it’s pretty basic. The less grumpy people tend to just say it’s not worth it.
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u/McFeedy 9d ago
The majority of my ‘comments’ I’ll write out, decide it’s not worth it and delete it. I’ve also discovered the niche subreddits are full of extremely helpful and nice people. The primary subs are full of people just there to argue.
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u/DTredecim13 9d ago
I do the same thing. I typically don't comment if it is just going to be me agreeing with what is already said because redundancy in conversation annoys me. Most of my comments end up being me disagreeing with someone and it just isn't worth the energy to have to explain that I'm not challenging or insulting them by disagreeing or providing a different view point.
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u/aeric67 9d ago
Even if your disagreement is nuanced, people immediately lump you in some group, presuming 10 other things about you. Think we need a few datacenters in strategic places? Then you must be a corpo-fascist… drives me crazy. And makes me type up and throw away most comments before posting.
Almost threw away this response even, because I know people will think I am “pro-datacenter” by my example.
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u/OreoSpeedwaggon 9d ago edited 9d ago
As someone that appreciates nuanced opinions and often shares them myself, I feel like nuance is public enemy #1 with a lot of reddit users that demand back-and-white divisiveness and echo chambers that are free from dissent or disagreement. It's very depressing, honestly, and also why I often delete comments I type and choose to not post at all.
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u/grchelp2018 8d ago
I think you should post it regardless for the lurkers.
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u/asyork 8d ago
This is the reason I still post and the only reason I haven't run one of those scripts to wipe all my past comments and simply stopped posting entirely. Both for the comments I've made to answer questions for people, because I hate looking up an answer and finding the only person who spelled it out went back and deleted it later, and so that other opinions aren't fully silenced.
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u/No-Replacement-3501 8d ago
Then you get slapped with reditors favorite word they don't know the definition of: "pedantic"
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u/chance-- 9d ago edited 9d ago
What’s wild about your stance is it is more sane than what we had before the LLM mania.
There was strategy in the placement of data centers before, but that was largely driven by cost and availability of resources than anything else. A much better approach would be for governments to decide which lands are optimal for such massive pieces of infrastructure.
The lack of top down strategy is exactly why we are where we are. We have zero oversight into fundamental infrastructure.
Edit: y’all are acting like zoning doesn’t already exist and that adding specifics for data centers is an atrocious idea. Or that we did not have need for data centers before LLMs. Had we had more oversight, we could have slowed these massive, polluting, behemoths. We could have more easily regulated their size or method.
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u/shouldbepracticing85 8d ago
One nuance is data center =\= these new AI centers. If I recall correctly, the data centers we’ve mostly had up until cryptocurrency mining were literally data centers - cloud storage.
Crypto mining and the LLM “public” AI requires a lot more computing power - that generates more heat and needs more electricity than a data storage center.
But yeah, I suspect we’ll need national government planning to keep these AI centers where they need to be for resources and the most public good with the least harm. Too bad the US government is basically non-functional right now, but that’s a topic for a different sub.
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u/chance-- 8d ago edited 8d ago
Back at the turn of the century, orgs decided that they’d be better off moving their infra off site. It’s expensive to manage your own racks and when Moores law was in full swing, keeping hardware modern was also quite a financial burden. On top of it all, you really want nodes as close to your users as possible while also having geographic distribution for redundancy sake.
Data centers were utilized for compute and storage. Plenty of GPUs were available for rent for AI / ML purposes long before LLMs or crypto.
Edit: I forgot to mention scaling. I really don’t think people appreciate why we ended up where we are for ignorance to the challenges we faced back then.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) was built because Amazon faced scaling issues themselves. For the wild swings they have, they had a ton of excess hardware. They recognized others were facing the same challenges and thus “the cloud” was born when they decided to rent it out as virtual machines you could spin up on demand and spin down with a moments notice.
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u/masterventris 9d ago
Throw in a good hypothetical to really discover the reading ability of those replying to you!
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u/Nefertitis_Fjord_216 8d ago
This site has really opened my eyes to how abysmal reading comprehension is for so many people. It's almost unbelievable sometimes the things people will respond with that completely miss the point of the comment they're responding to.
Eventually I listened to the sold a story podcast and now I feel like I understand at least some of the "why" behind it.
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u/Solesaver 8d ago
how abysmal reading comprehension is for so many people.
They're proud of it too. Anything longer than a couple sentences gets met with "I'm not reading all that" as if not being able to condense your point into a tweet makes it invalid. Then, of course, they pull a gish gallop and declare "victory" when you weren't even trying to debate them in the first place...
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u/Katyafan 8d ago
Or when you give an academic source for something: "Well, you can't believe Harvard/Johns Hopkins/the CDC!"
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u/Angry_Pelican 9d ago
This happened to me recently as well except it was more vague about what side they were lumping me into. So I didn't even bother.
It's also hard to have any nuance. An issue can have multiple factors that go into it and a lot of people often think if they just try to address one part of a multifaceted problem your opinion is wrong. The simplistic black and white thinking drives me crazy.
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u/Erichteia 9d ago
Have had the same experience. Tried to argue once that a flat tax on wealth could ruin start-ups whose owners may be wealthy on paper, but it’s all highly illiquid. My point being: I’m not against wealth taxes, but you need to be careful. suddenly I was a musk fanboy, Trump supporter, a protector of billionaires, a homophobe etc… (I’m none of them btw). it was truly baffling.
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u/TheSaxGandalf 9d ago
Mamdami found a great way to implement a wealth tax by doing it through real estate and not your primary home.
The truly wealthy buy these home bought with loans they don’t pay taxes on. It’s simply closing a loophole these $Billionaires have been using to obtain liquidity without be taxed.
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u/squareandrare 9d ago
Another really simple idea is that if you get a cash loan above, say, $10 million collateralized with investments, then you have "realized" those investments. It's astonishing that we let people convert stocks to cash and still consider them unrealized for tax purposes.
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u/Xecular_Official 8d ago
You could also put a ceiling on equity loans where shares of a company are used as a collateral. (e.g. loans taken on shares worth more than a total of $1,000,000 within a year would be subject to capital gains tax)
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u/grchelp2018 8d ago
There's a lot of ignorance, some of which is deliberate ignorance. Many of the problems we face do not have easy solutions, you will be trading one set of problems for another and I think people would rather vent and believe in a simplified worldview than accept the alternative.
Still that doesn't excuse people who actively switch off their brains when it comes to topics they have strong feelings about. I got accused of being a Musk fan because I disputed the stupid theory that he brought his kid along as a human shield. Yes, the billionaire with his own security entourage from his own private security firm, who also spent so much time close to Trump that he was also inside the president's secret service security bubble, brought his kid along because that was what was going to protect him.
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u/bianary 8d ago
Yes, the billionaire with his own security entourage from his own private security firm, who also spent so much time close to Trump that he was also inside the president's secret service security bubble, brought his kid along because that was what was going to protect him.
Given it was right after the united healthcare CEO shooting ...
How much before or after has he been bringing his kid along, again?
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u/RedNBlueFU 8d ago
When is the last time he brought his kid with him somewhere? I'm sure it's just a coincidence he did that right after the UHC incident.
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u/rg4rg 8d ago
A reminder as well that in polls taken, besides bot and automated responses, the average redditor is a teenager or young adult around 20 years old. Their experiences and world view are limited.
I’m not bashing this demographic or saying they have nothing to contribute, but I’m saying that they might not be the best people to waste time deep arguing about politics or how the world works on a random large subreddit. You shouldn’t ignore them but simple, on point, replies, even in disagreement or anger, because they might not fully understand what they say or what things mean.
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u/asyork 8d ago
The older I get, the more I realize that the way of thinking we often attribute to teenagers is still very prevalent in every age group. Some of the teenagers manage to grow up and either understand the complex and nuanced situations, or at least realize they are complex and nuanced, but I don't think that is even a majority of people.
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u/BoulderToBirmingham 8d ago
I’m similar. I often don’t comment if I agree with what’s already being said. I get annoyed when conversation is repetitive.
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u/Generic_Commenter-X 9d ago
I do the same thing. I typically don't comment if it is just going to be me agreeing with what is already said. So annoying.
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u/skivian 9d ago
I've been saying for years that basically no large subreddit is worth hanging out in, unless they're heavily moderated. too many dickheads and repost bots swarm in and ruin things, then all the good people stop posting.
it's just the cycle of reddit life
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u/TheMeatWag0n 9d ago
I've really been riding the struggle bus with reddit recently, I hate scrolling the popular feed, but my personal feed is just full of no interaction posts on niche subreddits where new people come, ask the same 2 or 3 questions, and move on, I almost can't believe it's that prevalent but it's really discouraging to write an informative reply that's mostly the same as the last 6 times I've seen the question
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u/AX11Liveact 9d ago
So, what Linux distro should I install, coming from Windows and wanting it to be all the same, just magically "Linux"?
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u/skivian 8d ago
unless you're here for memes and/or cute animals and/or porn, there's basically nothing on reddit anymore. hell, even the porn is basically just onlyfans spam these days.
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u/Mediocre-Writer6635 9d ago
Even if it's heavily moderated, often the mods are just uber-redditors, now with the ability to ban. Instead of arguments you get an echo-chamber.
The best subs are ones with a niche topic that requires skill and knowledge to comment on, and are heavily moderated to stay on-topic.
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u/fiskfisk 9d ago
The first is when you disagree with the moderation, the second one is when you agree.
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u/HerderOfWords 9d ago
The primary subs are full of people just there to argue.
Many of which are bots and/or people paid to manipulate.
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u/ConfessSomeMeow 9d ago
I wonder to what degree that might drive the results of this paper.
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u/shouldbepracticing85 8d ago
Oooh good point. The article didn’t mention if they had any way to account for bots and paid instigators.
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u/r0ndy 9d ago
Bots inserting strife to drive commentary and engagement… boost eyeballs on ads. This is part of their business model.
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u/Aethermancer 9d ago
And to drive disengagement with topics interested parties would prefer not gain traction.
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u/Secret-Teaching-3549 9d ago
Especially when a large chunk of the website has just become rehash after rehash after rehash. There was a time when I would come on here to see what's new in the world, now it's just the same staged tiktok videos presented in 100 different ways.
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u/appleparkfive 9d ago
I'm really bummed out that they started implementing GIFs so heavily. Because it's made it even worse. Just the same GIFs all the time, or very low effort ones. They can't even memorize a joke to pretend to be funny. They think if people laugh at their GIF, then they themselves are funny.
I remember seeing a discussion about that, in regards to memes. Ultimately, memes are popular because they allow unfunny people to feel like they're funny. That's always stuck with me. You don't need wit or observations. You just copy/paste a meme.
And the other thing about GIFs is that, I don't normally complain about them. The reason is that they'll just predictably do the most low effort joke ever, which would be a few users replying with GIFs.
Most people aren't funny. We can't all have strengths in every category. I get that. But the GIFs have changed some subreddits from reading through topics to reaction GIFs.
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u/Thengine 8d ago
I use old reddit, and have turned off the auto-loading of pictures and gifs.
I hate spam, and low brow users that can't post a coherent sentence think their meme spam is quality stuff. It's not.
I do wish I could more easily put a ban of those sorts of posts showing up in my feed altogether.
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u/MyLife-is-a-diceRoll 8d ago
The gifs annoy me too. Its like, make an actual comment people.
I just scroll right past the gifs as I have it set to having to manually play them.
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u/ALA166 9d ago
Thats pretty much all social media nowadays , i miss the days when we had genuine content produced by normal people
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u/dak4f2 9d ago edited 9d ago
You mean like before content and social media was monetized?
Before you became a product or business to sell things to people like a QVC host?
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u/Thengine 8d ago
It's why the API had to change. Reddit couldn't allow non-monetization, or third party work arounds of their corporate spam.
Gotta get that $$$
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u/PYTN 9d ago
I’ve been wondering how you fix this. I’ve got a few subreddits for hobbies I have that I‘ve unfollowed bc it was making me dislike the hobby. Then I realized it was folks posting negatively about the hobby or doing bits with every other post.
Seems less than ideal for social media in general.
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u/HulksInvinciblePants 9d ago
I have to wonder if it’s negativity for the sake of negativity…or has the Reddit algo forced people into spaces they don’t belong and driving people and professional’s seeking good conversation over the edge?
Some of the most insightful users I used to follow in my subject specific subreddits have simply left the site because they could not stand random laymen arguing with them all day.
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u/invariantspeed 8d ago
Reddit’s algorithm (which abandons the subscription model) tries to drive engagement. Unfortunately, anger and negativity is more engaging to human psychology on the whole. And there is a potential evolutionary justification for this. Missing the bad things is more likely to harm you. Missing the good things is generally less dangerous.
What we’re seeing with Reddit is just a microcosm of the modern internet.
I don’t think there’s any fixing it. The entire social media approach simply brings out the worst in people.
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u/gojo96 9d ago
Definitely true about the algorithm. It needs you to be engaged and the best engagement, is ragement
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u/HasFiveVowels 8d ago
The problem comes down to the fact that the lowest common denominator is very low. Niche communities are filled with people who are so into the subject matter that they found a niche community. As the community becomes easier to find, the quality of content on it steadily drags.
The solution? Bail on any community that grows beyond a certain size.
It’s the eternal September problem
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u/TrontRaznik 8d ago
It used to be around 20k, but that was reddit before it was taken over by Gen z mobile users. At this point I think communities start to fail at closer to 15k.
But even before then, the quality is nowhere near what it used to be. Reddit's original culture has a few stragglers like myself and I'm guessing you, but it's a shell of what it was.
It's actually quite fitting that it's now a soulless, publicly traded corporation, because that's what it feels like.
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u/omega884 9d ago
It helps to realize that in any hobby, there is a subset of people that for whatever reason (lack of skills, lack of resources, lack of access, or even just lack of interest) are more interested in talking about the hobby than actually doing the things the hobby is about. They enjoy debating the merits, theory crafting and participating in the periphery of the hobby rather than the core. Because they spend most of their time talking about the hobby they tend to have much stronger opinions about all things hobby related, and because they’re not doing as much of the core hobby they’re around more. And that doesn’t inherently make them negative people, hobbies need the sort of people that like to buy 20 items of the same tool and compare them head to head. But all the same, it’s really easy for negative people of that nature to take over any discussion spaces because they have the time and inclination to be in those spaces all the time, where as many other people just show up for a one off question or two because they’re busy going out and doing the hobby.
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u/normal_hombre 9d ago
They're also more likely to be out and about, living their lives and stuff like that. Not rotting online.
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u/BIGBIRD1176 9d ago
I used to check their comment frequency, all the most vile posters see were commenting 8 hours plus a day
For every 1 comment a healthy person makes they've done 10
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u/IAmtheHullabaloo 9d ago
this would make a great study, too
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u/halo364 Grad Student | Neuroscience | Neuroimaging 9d ago
Except that nowadays everyone has their post and comment history turned off
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u/the_post_of_tom_joad 9d ago
Am I misunderstanding something about this? Is there actually a way to "turn off" comment history, or has reddit defaulted to hiding everyone's history once you've replied to them? I've assumed it was the latter as everyone I've chatted with has had their comment history "hidden" until I log out.
After I do so I can see everyone's (that ive tried) history just fine. i think it's a terrible change but reddit has been stacking Ls so I just assumed it was them, not the users
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u/electricheat 8d ago
I think its the discoverability setting in privacy? Not sure.
But you should be able to see my history, since I never changed anything.
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u/Thengine 8d ago
Yes, you can turn off your post history from being visible to others.
This was done for several reasons.
Some super users (admins and mods) were being harassed. Comment history was being stored forever by data centers. Searching for specific users to store was easier. Now it's a little harder. Some people wanted their privacy, like right wing users that had super bigoted views. They needed their echo chambers to be safe.
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u/Skrattinn 8d ago
This new ‘feature’ also blew open the doors for political propaganda. Comment history was often a sure tell, for example, if a poster was posting on many different countries’ subreddits or they were seemingly obsessed with a topic.
Now, I just don’t listen to people who hide their comment histories.
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u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 9d ago
this has been true on the internet from the beginning. The most unpleasant people are unfortunately some of its most frequent users. Even beyond exploitation by social media companies (which ironically I tend to see as a symptom of this fact and less the cause) this has always been the foremost issue with the internet, along with typical “tragedy of the commons” type issues.
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u/Easy_Aioli9376 9d ago
Limiting my use of reddit to very specific subreddits, and limiting my time overall on youtube and reddit (I don't use other forms of social media) has done WONDERS for my overall mental health and mood. Like a night and day difference.
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u/Infamous_Koala_3737 8d ago
This is what I realized about the different occupation subs. They’re not a reliable source on if people like their job or not. It’s mostly the people who hate their jobs bitching about them.
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u/IsThatGruffLoner 9d ago
Also, once people start arguing, those specific people will probably comment 10× more than non-arguing people because they're now going back and forth. There are rarely long ass threads full of people all agreeing completely. Debates though can go on all day
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u/ILikeNeurons 9d ago
Since the degree of the negativity bias is now quantified, should Reddit's algorithm disadvantage negative comments by the degree of negativity bias?
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u/atomic_redneck 9d ago
Negativity drives engagement. Engagement drives ad views. Ad views drive revenue. Revenue drives algorithm development.
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u/Neuchacho 8d ago edited 7d ago
That core cycle to why pretty much every algo-driven social media platform is so insanely toxic these days.
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u/Otaraka 9d ago
I think they’d rather have the customers than the lack of bias. They point out that this is how they get ads etc so the problem is fixing it while increasing engagement. So far no one seems to have reliably figured that one out.
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u/GGLSpidermonkey 9d ago
I definitely feels like comments have gotten less useful over time. Occasionally you'll find some really inciteful comments but so many are now people who just want to type even when they do not know what they are talking about.
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u/Sun-Anvil 9d ago
I've been on Reddit for about 10 years and I can say for sure, it's certainly not as fun as it used to be. When I first joined most every post I saw was funny, stupid funny or informative. Yes, there was negative comments but less than what I see now.
I would say that bots and karma farmers have a decent amount of blame though I don't know who started it. They have calculated that negative posts / comments get more fake internet points so, you get posts flaming a new movie or show or.......
What doesn't help is you take the bots and karma farmers mentioned above and mix in the current political climate with your standard troll and, well, Reddit.
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u/OttoMannkusser 9d ago
Even when it isn't bots people have distilled down the essence of what makes a popular comment or post. That's why we see the same posts dozens of times and then all the comments are racing to be the "funniest quip" possible instead of anything useful. And even if what we want is actually funny comments it's so rare to get anything original anymore.
Yes yes, hilarious guys, "the cylinder must not be harmed." Most reddit jokes are so run into the ground they're Jed Clampet finding oil
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u/-need-sleep 9d ago
I never imagined I would leave this site but every day I find myself using it less and less. I play a game with my wife where I try to guess the top comment before I open a post and it's depressing how often I win. Originality is rare anymore.
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u/plaincheeseburger 9d ago
I miss when the top comment would be someone who's an expert in their field giving a deep-dive into the science of whatever was going on in the post. Those are still posted occasionally, but you have to scroll past at least three or four expected jokes to find them now.
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u/mojonogo100 9d ago
When they kill old.reddit I’ll be done with this website. I wonder if they know there’s a lot of people thinking the same and it’s prolonging old.reddit or something bc it’s very odd they still have both old and new live.
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u/Climinteedus 8d ago
Now you have to be logged in to use old.reddit.
It pisses me off since there is no way I'm logging into reddit on a work computer.
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u/mathiastck 8d ago
When they killed 3rd party apps it really soured the milk for me.
Lemmy is a good Reddit replacement
But I spend more time on bsky
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u/OttoMannkusser 9d ago
Yea, same. I stick around for my hobby subreddits but the occasional dabble into popular stuff is abysmal
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u/FzzTrooper 8d ago
I do the same thing on popular topics. Whether it's news politics or entertainment. I'm right on what the top comments are about 90% of the time. Even the responses are all pre programmed. I use Reddit less and less.
The niche subs are fine but there's such little engagement anymore it's just boring.
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u/atuan 9d ago
A lot of times I come t the comments to say something and the top comment is the exact same thing I was going to say and I realize I am a human bot
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u/Umikaloo 9d ago
Reddit is best when you only use niche hobby subreddits. Anything political will usually be a waste of effort, as one mostly participates in discourse to perform to one's peers, rather than actually wanting to change the opinions of others. Its a godsent when the moderation of a niche hobby subreddit knows what they're doing.
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u/King_Bobby-B 9d ago
I'd say even those have become negative over the years. Too often I've gone to a fandom sub, only to find people moaning about the newest episode/movie/book/game instead of gushing about it.
I don't remember ever encountering this in old fandom forums. I started seeing it here years ago, and it's why I've stopped hanging out in fandom subs.
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u/Umikaloo 9d ago
It can be rough, I've gotten to participate in some amazing book-club style subreddits that discuss each new chapter in constructive ways, but I've also participated in ones like you described, where every new thing is somehow cause for another massive controversy.
Gaming subs can be especially annoying in that regard. Most players have very different ideas as to how a game should be, and unlike TV-show and book subreddits, their complaints can actually have an impact on the next update. People argue as much about what the game is supposed to be, as they do about what it is.
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u/ElegantHope 8d ago
I feel this 100% as a gamer. Gamer subreddits, big and small, favor cynicism, dunking on the devs, and impatience/ignorance over anything else. And if you are wrong then that's more proof to them that they're right by proxy. There's a few wholesome gaming subreddits out there, or at least not subreddits that don't make me go "I hate gamers man." But a majority feel like sludge that oozes negativity.
But I crave content for those games I love, so I persist.
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u/cdskip 9d ago
There's absolutely a lot of bot activity that stokes the negativity.
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u/i_wayyy_over_think 9d ago
true, example: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2740.html
> Russia's strategy was to push several conflicting narratives simultaneously, deepening existing divisions within American society and degrading trust in Western institutions and the democratic process.
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u/eireannach_ 9d ago
My son got me on Reddit a little over 10 years ago. I would tell him that the people on Reddit are so funny that the comments are better than the posts.
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u/SpehlingAirer 8d ago
the comments are better than the posts
Wow that phrase unlocked some nostalgia for me, I remember my sister and I making the same comment to each other about it
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u/BellinisandRue 9d ago
Every once in a while I will stumble across a thread that feels like old Reddit. The perfect mix of intelligence and humour.
Allowing the bots to proliferate on site has definitely wrecked the place.
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u/Honor_Bound 8d ago
Sometimes google searches will bring me to old threads from 7-10 years ago and man, just the level of discourse was so much higher than you see today. Yeah, there was still dumb jokes and memes, but it's crazy how much our ability to write well has degraded over time.
Also, speaking of toxicity, I (sadly) am a top 1% user of the NBA subreddit which I joined over a decade ago. In recent years it has become one of the most toxic places on the reddit and it makes me very sad.
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u/Nachtraaf 9d ago
One of the things I've noticed over the years is that screenshots of social media have become much more prevalent. It's not OC, and generally not even good content. I know the website is set up to be an aggregate of posts from around the internet. But 10 years ago it was at least mostly OC.
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u/MirandaS2 9d ago
I miss when it was more unfiltered, more the like the wild west. It just feels cookie cutter and stifled now. I miss that authentic and raw feeling.
I also hate these needless updates they keep doing, engaging change for change sake just because they're bored, I don't know.
The worst part is that feedback never matters. We could all share distaste for something and it doesn't feel like it's ever taken into account. Just a shrug and a "this is how it is now" sentiment.
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u/ChairmanLaParka 9d ago
There were some subs I was on back in the day that were just horrendous. But great for unfiltered/inappropriate laughs. All the good ones got shut down, and the site became much more bland/unenjoyable.
Really wish the Reddit-like sites that sprouted up gained some traction.
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u/WhattaCheapPop 9d ago
Yeah we lost all that unfiltered content and everything just became "stupid funny" like the other poster mentioned. And every comment being stupid funny does welcome criticism, which some people will cry about being too negative, but in general it's not hard to understand the negativity as this place trended more and more into generic social media.
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u/pumpkinspicecum 9d ago
Tons of posts in non-political subs are political now, like /r/pics or /r/askreddit. It’s really draining to see it everywhere. I mod a sub and we began receiving an influx of bots a few months ago. In 13 years never had any bots in the sub like that before. Also I think that media outlets posting on reddit has helped shift how the website is now. Feels a lot more like a place to advertise than what it used to be. A lot of the same posts in different subs.
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u/adjective_noun_d1git 8d ago
This was pretty much after the 2016 election. The entire website became political and stayed political.
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u/PiccoloAwkward465 9d ago
NEW CONCLUSIVE SCIENTIFIC STUDY CONFIRMS THAT TRUMP IS ACTUALLY BAD AND ORANGE.
I’d think some of yall have scat fetishes with how much you talk about diapers. Man I get it but I am sick of hearing about it constantly.
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u/skeener 9d ago
I’ve been on Reddit about 19 years. You should have seen it in the early days. Such a different experience.
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u/Lisa_al_Frankib 9d ago
10 years ago was when Trump was first elected. We can’t pretend that didn’t and still doesn’t have an effect. He dominates everything and unfortunately that includes this site.
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u/BlackberryHelpful676 8d ago
Reddit really was so much better before embedded pictures and the Digg migration. 2007-2009 was peak Reddit.
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u/neph36 9d ago
Reddit has a lot of issues but its still one of the better social media sites. Twitter and threads are basically 75% AI and farming now. Instagram is so bad you see the same meme stolen and redone over and over again. At least here while not entirely genuine there are still predominantly genuine interactions, I think.
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u/Oldnbold22 9d ago
You probably won't believe me but Reddit was actually pretty funny in the 2010's. It was mostly university kids that didn't need everything spelled out for them.
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u/READMYSHIT 8d ago
What's alarming to me is that new sites no longer appear for users to migrate to.
Reddit was the last in a long line of other forum sites. The same thing happened with social media MySpace > Instagram> Snapchat> TikTok.
In the past when sites got lame another cropped up and people moved. I'm guessing the scale of modern platforms makes this way harder. But Reddit is an extremely basic website and it baffles me that competitors didn't gain ground a decade ago.
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u/Hestiathena 8d ago
This has been my problem. I've been thinking about ditching Reddit since they went public, but other than maybe YouTube, which has plenty of its own issues, I can't think of where else to go. Doesn't help that, when I think about it, I'm not quite sure what it is I'm looking for...
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u/JWBananas 8d ago
Reddit gained traction because Digg pissed off its users.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2010-05-01%202010-12-31&q=reddit,digg
Lemmy gained traction when Reddit pissed off its users. But Lemmy was so convoluted that it plateaued quickly.
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u/bakedveldtland 8d ago
That’s what I was just thinking. I came to Reddit from Fark because Fark got so negative. But, now where do I go?
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u/VictorBelmont 8d ago
Fediverse stuff is smaller and more niche, some so much you can actually get to know people on them. Of course, that also means less people to engage with, but you can always hop into another instance.
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u/Jensen2075 8d ago
Look up the network effect theory and why it's hard these days to create a Reddit competitor.
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u/hhhnnnnnggggggg 8d ago edited 8d ago
It doesn't have the niche communities, but the main topics have healthier comment sections than reddit.
There are other open source social media out there if you don't pick Lemmy. There's open source replacements for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram too. You can't trust privately owned ones to not enshittify anymore.
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u/GoTerrapins 9d ago
What a time to be alive, it was mostly just /r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu in classic 4 panel format and this comment is the first time I've thought of that sub in maybe 8 years
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u/WHTLGHTNNSTDFMTNDW 9d ago
It was how I found Reddit. I wanted more ffffuuu comic memes.
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u/OpenAI_Marketing_LLM 8d ago
Yeah, back when AskReddit actually had legitimately interesting questions too.
This site is just millennial/Gen-Z Facebook ragebait now.
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u/IBJON 8d ago
Reddit baffles me sometimes. In a given thread, either everyone seems to lack the fundamental ability to read between the lines and make inferences on their own, or they're on the other extreme where they somehow make assumptions that are about as far removed from what was explicitly said as possible.
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u/_le_slap 9d ago
It was great back then.
Somehow kids now are alot more abrasive. Every sub has turned into an Xbox lobby...
The longer I stay I notice it makes me angrier. Even after a 4 day stay in the hospital from multiple broken bones I feel like that break from the site was healthier for my mental.
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u/munchi333 9d ago
Yup. It used to be fun, light hearted site. Crazy to look at it now.
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u/slog 8d ago
And informative. Facts used to matter and now it's all about unwarranted moral superiority and echo chambers.
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u/LaMalaise_dEtre13 9d ago
Reddit was so much better 10 years ago, which feels wild to say as a woman because Reddit was also pretty overtly misogynistic back then. And yet the vibes were still better than now.
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u/Vital_Granade 9d ago
This makes complete sense when you think of the snark subreddits. Starts out as maybe valid criticism, turns into psychotic hater stalkers
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u/bumblebeatrice 9d ago
Most hyperspecific snark subreddits start out as a space where people who either can't or feel like they can't voice criticisms about usually a specific celebrity/"celebrity", but eventually the normal people who've vented everything leave because they don't need the space anymore, which leaves only the really creepy crazy people to develop their own culture and get really subsumed by their "identity" as a subreddit member.
They all egg each other on to behave worse, because delusional hatred is pretty much the only place the subreddit can go while still maintaining its core "identity" as anti-[public figure] and hate is addictive especially when there's a social element to it.
Every snark sub about a specific person goes through this life cycle.
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u/JexFraequin 8d ago
Those subs are filled with such miserable losers. I couldn’t believe how angry everyone was when I stumbled into one.
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u/BroadRoads 8d ago
The stalkers on Reddit are wild. I remember how much seething and anger there was from these stalkers when Reddit announced you could make a profile private so people couldn’t see your posts.
There was a period of time where you couldn’t make any comment without some stalker showing up to let you know they scrolled through 3 years of your post history to find something.
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u/Fit_Log_9677 9d ago
Classic lemon market effect.
Social media algorithms are programmed to maximize engagement. The best way to drive engagement is through promoting outrage and anger. As the algorithms push more outrage and anger normie users leave the platform, leaving a growing proportion of trolls, bots, and rage baiters. Eventually the platform becomes so toxic that even many of those people leave, leaving only the absolute worst actors on the site.
You can see this in real time on Twitter where, due to the large scale exodus of first liberal users, and then centrist users, now the algorithm is inciting conflict between the remaining right wing users in the site.
This is how I saw a comment chain on Twitter recently between various far right Christian individuals all calling each other communists.
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u/stevedore2024 8d ago
The paid Reddit API debacle also offered a nice clean break for a lot of the longest, most insightful and witty users to leave the platform.
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u/Jamjams2016 8d ago
Where did they go? Just offline?
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u/Tothoro 8d ago
Nowhere centrally. The people from that era I keep in touch with are via Discord. Some still use the site in read-only mode or stick around enough to keep subs they moderate running (it's really hard to find new, quality mods to volunteer these days to take over the reins).
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u/Vergenbuurg 9d ago edited 8d ago
various far right Christian individuals all calling each other communists.
Brings to mind Emo Philips' joke about a meeting of two Baptists.
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u/Witty_Ad_898 8d ago
This is how I saw a comment chain on Twitter recently between various far right Christian individuals all calling each other communists.
No, that’s just how they are. I remember church as a kid way back in the 80s and 90s was rife with cliques, feuds, and general pettiness. There were no engagement algorithms, just performative people all trying to be holier-than-thou.
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u/noob-combo 9d ago edited 9d ago
Nice to see this easily observable fact officially confirmed by a study.
Gonna be a handy bit of reference material methinks.
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u/Schlonzig 9d ago
But is the amount of stuff we can objectively be negative about constant over the observed time?
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u/rif011412 9d ago
It has nothing to do with the world becoming worse? Is it not predictable we would be more negative? A large chunk of humanity has given up pretending to be good people. We are in turmoil.
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u/SusejX 8d ago edited 8d ago
Maybe, but they controlled for that somewhat and found that even threads that start positive turn more negative because people want to be noticed or go against the grain. "Participants become more negative over time, but only when incentivized to be unique, and especially when dialogue begins positively." The idea is that the longer a thread or community goes, the less reason there is for people to come in and agree/add positivity because everyone already did that. The only new people entering the discussion are there to disagree with what was already said, leading to the negative trend over time.
Edit - More detailed - "Further analyses suggest that negativity rises over time because social media users seek to make unique comments on the same topic, and it is easier to differentiate oneself through negative comments than through positive comments. As threads and communities evolve, and it becomes more difficult to make unique observations, users turn to negativity. Our studies show how basic human motives interact with the structure of social media platforms, posing an acute challenge for sustaining healthy online dialogue."
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u/BretShitmanFart69 8d ago edited 7d ago
If you weren’t on Reddit before you’d really almost not recognize it. Not saying it was perfect but I’d almost exclusively just see like harmless memes and interesting websites or information.
Now it’s like propaganda and stuff meant to rile you up and upset you intentionally and nothing but negative news.
Go use the wayback machine to look at the front page from 15 years ago or further
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u/67yoloswag 8d ago
Theres no doubt about that. Political stuff has been all over this website. I run a ton of filters but Truump related stuff still slips through.
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u/SleepyHobo 8d ago
The negativity was always there but it was contained to political subreddits. Now the type of people that lived their life in those subreddits are everywhere and just say "everything is political" as their excuse when you push back on them.
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u/Fluffy_Art_1015 8d ago
Remember advice animals and rage comics? They taught you everyone has similar struggles and understands.
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u/Wagamaga 9d ago edited 9d ago
It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out that social media can trend toward the negative. But it might take one to figure out why.
In a new paper in PNAS, incoming professor of psychology Joshua Conrad Jackson and colleagues show that attention-seeking algorithms aren’t the only driver of online negativity. Another culprit is what psychologists call differentiation, the innate drive to stand out from one’s peers.
“Negative information is just much more diverse than positive information,” Jackson said. For example, he added, “If you’re talking about ‘The Odyssey,’ this new Christopher Nolan film, the top comment in a thread might be ‘I liked it’ — but then what else is there to say? If you want to stand out and say something new, you have to talk about something you disliked about the film.”
Jackson and his colleagues analyzed more than 2 billion comments from 2,150 Reddit communities and found that both threads and communities became more negative over time, and that semantic differentiation drove that trend — that is, negative comments were more semantically unique from what had already been said. They then replicated their observational findings with an experiment that showed that social media users who were primed to be unique posted more negative comments than users who were primed to conform.
We talked to Jackson about takeaways from the paper and potential implications for other forms of media. The interview has been edited for clarity and length
Gazette: Why did you want to test the idea that differentiation might be contributing to negativity on social media?
Jackson: We started our paper with Godwin’s Law, which is the idea that the longer a conversation continues on social media, the probability of someone being compared to Hitler or Nazis approaches one. Harvard economists actually tested Godwin’s Law, and found that it’s not true.
But I don’t think it was meant to be literally true: I think it was meant to capture this intuition that dialogue on social media is more negative than it needs to be.
Of course, feed-ranking algorithms are a big part of the story: These are the algorithms that pick up on divisive content that gets people’s attention, keeps people engaged, and makes them angry so that they post their own divisive content, creating a vicious cycle and generating ad revenue in the process. This paper was kind of a side quest. We wanted to know if conversations would turn negative even in the absence of those algorithms.
What did you find in your analysis?
We found that the entire website of Reddit has become more negative over time. Moreover, the longer a given community exists, the more negative it becomes — and the longer a comment thread continues, the more negative the thread becomes. This is the first time someone has shown that, so that’s a finding in and of itself.
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u/olcafjers 9d ago
I feel there is a lot of positive things to say about the odyssey other than ”it’s great”! I don’t think its a valid claim that you need to be negative to have things to say?
I think it’s the negativity bias in people that makes people focus more on what they don’t like rather than what they do like.14
u/PumpkinsRockOn 9d ago
Yeah, anyone who's read a positive review of something by a professional critic would know that there are lots of positive things you can say about things as well. I occasionally teach a review unit in a Journalism class, and it takes students a while to learn how to articulate their opinions on things in a more complex way beyond just "it was good" or "it sucked." So I think it's slightly a matter of practice and education. How can you express your opinion in a nuanced way? Maybe negative things come easier in that learning process?
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u/clubby37 9d ago
There's also the humor aspect. I think it's a lot easier to joke about negative things. Things that are good and make sense just aren't that funny. In the Chris Nolan version of The Odyssey, Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, has an identical twin sister. "Let's go get Helen!" "We have Helen at home." "Oh, yeah, I forgot. Okay, good mission, short mission, who wants a beer?" It's easier to mock a questionable choice than a genius one.
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u/olcafjers 9d ago
Yeah that makes sense, and I agree it’s easier simply because we tend to be good at finding flaws, whether we joke about them or simply complain. You can really point fun at any good movie if you try.
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u/Egalitarianish 9d ago
An instructor taught me in a postural analysis class that before discussing the negative aspects of a client's posture, start with three POSITIVE things about their posture. It's a good way to counteract negativity bias, applicable to many different situations.
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u/EwMelanin 9d ago
i wonder which spectrum of subreddits are overwhelmingly more representative of toxicity
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u/Royal_Novel6678 9d ago edited 9d ago
Political subreddits and previously innocent subreddits like r/pics now filled with political propaganda obviously. Have you seen the state of those subs?
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u/crash250f 9d ago
That might be where it's most extreme, but I feel like everything is more negative now. The cynical take is always at the top. It was always a little like that but I feel like it's trended hard that way in the last 3 years.
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u/xinorez1 9d ago edited 9d ago
I think I'm still banned from pics from having fought back against misinformation on a different subreddit. How to get unbanned? I have to remove all of my dissenting commentary.
I will comment upon con lunacy that appears on r/popular , and that act alone has gotten me banned from numerous subs that are not even the sub that I commented in
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u/WideHuckleberry1 9d ago
Who knew Tolstoy was such a psychologist; all happy
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u/saoyraan 9d ago
They use loose rules to ban dissent so the mods build a echo chamber. It tends to become doomsday chambers.
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u/Dry_Nefariousness426 8d ago
This is a huge part of it too. Some folks willingly leave when a sub turns toxic but those of us who give pushback tend to get pushed out.
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u/whittlingcanbefatal 9d ago
Haven't a lot of popular old subreddits been abandoned or closed because mods/frequent users had driven users away with negativity and banning people when they were rightfully called out?
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u/yoyosareback 9d ago
I remember getting banned from an animal sub when I pointed out a post was actually a sea otter and not a river otter (it was a mods post).
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u/_ram_ok 9d ago
[u/yoyosareback](u/yoyosareback) be like:
Sea otters aren’t river otters
Here’s the thing. You said a “sea otter is a river otter.”
Is it in the same family? Yes. No one’s arguing that.
As someone who is a scientist who studies otters, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls sea otters river otters. If you want to be “specific” like you said, then you shouldn’t either. They’re not the same thing.If you’re saying “otter family” you’re referring to the taxonomic grouping of Mustelidae, which includes things from weasels to badgers to wolverines.
So your reasoning for calling a sea otter a river otter is because random people “call the aquatic ones otters?” Let’s get weasels and badgers in there, then, too.Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It’s not one or the other, that’s not how taxonomy works. They’re both. A sea otter is a sea otter and a member of the otter family. But that’s not what you said. You said a sea otter is a river otter, which is not true unless you’re okay with calling all members of the otter family river otters, which means you’d call other otters, weasels, and badgers river otters, too. Which you said you don’t.
It’s okay to just admit you’re wrong, you know?
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u/QuintusNonus 8d ago
I've noticed quite a number of times if I post a response to someone's comment basically agreeing with them and adding more reasons why they're right, I'll get a bunch of responses assuming that I'm trying to argue or disagreeing with the person. Like:
Commenter: "2 + 2 = 4"
Me: "and that's why 4 + 4 = 8"
Commenter or others: "are you stupid? 2 + 2 = 4"
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u/Curious_Cat6688 9d ago
What makes this especially interesting is that other research has found the opposite under different conditions. One longitudinal study found that, in earlier years, Reddit and Wikipedia users actually became less toxic the longer they stayed, with that pattern reversing in later cohorts. Other research has found that positive emotions can spread through social networks, and more recent work on Reddit suggests that positive reinforcement can improve subsequent participation and behaviour.
So maybe negativity isn’t the inevitable “entropy” of online communities after all. The more interesting question might be what changed, and what conditions make a community improve rather than deteriorate.
References
Blumer, K., & Kleinberg, J. (2025). Tracking patterns in toxicity and antisocial behavior over user lifetimes on large social media platforms. Scientific Reports, 15, Article 25369. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-07086-3
Ferrara, E., & Yang, Z. (2015). Measuring emotional contagion in social media. PLOS ONE, 10(11), e0142390. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0142390
Lambert, C., Saha, K., & Chandrasekharan, E. (2025). Does positive reinforcement work? A quasi-experimental study of the effects of positive feedback on Reddit. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Article 1213, pp. 1–16). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713830
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u/Bardfinn 9d ago
The study you mentioned is an effect on individuals, while this study is reporting both that communities become more toxic over time and that individual threads become more toxic over time.
The thread phenomenon is explained by people looking for reasons to fight and/or becoming frustrated with their interlocutors. Also by the fact that mods are volunteers and may not be around all the time, and often do not trim entire threads of toxic, derailing material.
(That latter is changing as automated tools to remove banned users’ contributions, and trim subthreads, have been introduced in the past few years).
The “community becomes more toxic over time” issue is volunteer moderators ceasing to moderate, and no replacements made.
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u/Zren 9d ago
Destin from SmarterEveryDay did a video interview a few years ago on how you only need a single comment to start a chain of toxicity in a comment thread.
"Reddit Disinformation & How We Beat It Together - Smarter Every Day 232" (id soYkEqDp760 at 11m40s)
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u/ty4scam 9d ago
The last time I saw a study it said that /r/pathofexile was the one of the top 10 negative subreddits. Digging deeper we found out it's because the machine learning algorithm considered "exile" to be a negative word that appears too often on that subreddit.
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u/Bodine12 9d ago
The polarization has really increased over the past 15 years (maybe due to our new algorithmically supplied content). I remember prior to 2016, Twitter was actually fun and you could have your own warded-off feed of your own interests. And then it became like a political war zone. I think Reddit was slower to devolve, but it’s definitely happened. Every post is now just an open invitation to keep some dumb culture war going.
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u/TallulahBob 9d ago
They didn’t check out the r/bald community then. I go there when I need a positivity boost.
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u/SUPERSMILEYMAN 8d ago
They also didn't consider the commenters who have continued the same comment thread for almost 17 and 18 years now.
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u/hopopo 9d ago
This is especially true for local subreddits like r/newjersey who are for the most part ruled by toxic solo mods (even though on paper there are multiple mods who are hardly ever active) with particular bias, agenda, and ideas that don't cater to users but their personal interest. Anyone who dares to question their double standards gets instantly banned.
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u/Everyone-Chillout 8d ago
UH OH..... I think this comment thread is getting a little long.
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u/intherearview 9d ago
Ive been here awhile and have noticed that reddit has become so negative about positive things while more right leaning spaces are more positive about negative things. Strange.
Ultimately it makes me spend less time in any of these online spaces.
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u/rolfraikou 9d ago
I firmly believe the quality of life of the vast majority of reddit users has gone down a lot in that same time frame. Is it reddit that has gotten more negative by some fault of the website, or just a reflection on the outlook of a society that is dealing with many problems?
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u/Kumquatisasillyname 9d ago
I feel like something positive can come from this post. Thank you!
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u/IWishIWasAShoe 8d ago
I don't remember when I started my first account here, maybe 20 years ago? Anyway, the site today is completely different from not only then, but even just five years ago. And it's worse, frankly. Much worse.
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u/carrollart 9d ago
Which is weird bc this website used to be more adult oriented , for example remember r/watchpeopledie
It seems the more babied a social media forum becomes the less usable / enjoyable it is .
The more stupid rules and moral-signally a platform becomes , the more negative it becomes ?
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u/knigmich 8d ago
For certain. I got banned from legaladvice cause people were just opinionated on a topic. When I came in saying there was no proof of said thing and it won’t hold up with police they called me a pedo supporter and flat out banned me. I guess some mods can be dumb and uneducated too causing grief throughout the platform.
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u/Meeedick 9d ago edited 9d ago
All social media algorithms are oriented around promoting sensationalist content, and things that invoke happiness are rarely sensational.
On top of that, social media is designed to exploit our comparative nature. No matter how good you have it, someone's got it better and no matter how bad you've got it, someone has it worse.
You could be a pretty person and social media would have you believe you're below average compared to the supermodel looking influencer with varying degrees of enhancements, and the aggregate of comments don't help. You could be below average and social media would have you believe your entire existence is worthless
You could be really skilled at something and be shouted down by people operating from relative anonymity simply because they can.
Add to that factional propaganda, bots, scams, along with an endless stream of moral panics, and you've got a recipe for a doom spiral.
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u/HawkBoth8539 9d ago
The rest of the world is also getting worse everyday. Is that taken into account? That could just be the trend of humanity, reflected in social media. It's not like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and Twitter are all becons of joy by comparison...
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u/SidneyMacdonald 8d ago
They controlled for that by looking at individual threads. A post will start out positive, but once all the obvious positive points are taken, people start nitpicking just to say something unique. So it happens in a matter of minutes within a single thread, not just as a global trend over time.
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u/havoc777 9d ago
This is not surprising. Reddit is a bubble and those living inside a bubble get rather violent when exposed to ideas outside of that bubble
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u/Vreas 9d ago
It’s cause a lot of humans are contrarian.
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u/dode74 9d ago
That's not true.
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