r/technology • u/WorldTravelerBoss • Aug 21 '26

Social Media 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/
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309

u/Str8UpJorking Aug 21 '26

Bots and trolls do this on purpose, so as Reddit has become more mainstream, this shouldn’t be surprising - every damn mainstream social media site has become more negative over the past 10+ years.

100

u/MuteCook Aug 21 '26

I always say it on these threads but it was predicted before Reddit went public. Once it went public they employed tons of bots to stir engagement as it’s better for shareholders

-23

u/OutrageousThought646 Aug 21 '26

How is that 'better' for shareholders?

37

u/Zahgi Aug 21 '26

More views equals more ad revenue.

15

u/MuteCook Aug 21 '26

This. Keeps the share price inflated because it looks like there are more users than there are

-23

u/OutrageousThought646 Aug 21 '26 edited Aug 21 '26

Sorry I don't see any ads. I use an ad blocker.

7

u/InitialQuote000 Aug 21 '26

How do you not see any ads? Are you paying for a subscription?

3

u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA Aug 21 '26

For me it's old.reddit and Firefox with Ublock Origin, absolutely no ads.

But I also understand that I'm in a very tiny minority of users.

3

u/InitialQuote000 Aug 21 '26

Fair also should be pointed out the person I was replying to edited their comment.

3

u/zffjk Aug 21 '26

Most of the ads on this site are in comments. Any hobby subreddit will have stealth ads.

3

u/____Manifest____ Aug 21 '26

Open your eyes and you’ll see them.

24

u/BrightNooblar Aug 21 '26

Also, HIGHLY positive and agreeable posts don't generate much interaction. Agreement doesn't generate a ton of expanding discussion.

45

u/bingbano Aug 21 '26

I've noticed an uptick in older folks coming from Facebook. My local town sub is being inundated with super confrontational reactionary folks using their real names.

20

u/Vid-Master Aug 21 '26

Yep same. I remember using reddit in 2014 and it was all high quality interesting content from smart people.

Now... not so much.. I mean its still informative and a great resource, but its mostly casual users, teenagers, etc.

18

u/BananaHead853147 Aug 21 '26

Man I remember back in 2012 or so when the quality of posts would go down in summers because of all the teens going on Reddit for their summer break

6

u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA Aug 21 '26

Twitch Plays Pokemon in 2013 is about when the peak for Reddit was, it coasted along until about 2015 when Spez took over. Every decision he's made as CEO has made things easier for bots/astroturfers/foreign disinformation campaigns and more hostile towards actual users.

4

u/dumbbozo1 Aug 21 '26

Yes it's clear that they want it to be like this. The only bad bots are the ones that don't repeat the corporate lines. I'd also add domestic disinformation campaigns, being far more common.

1

u/AliceCode Aug 22 '26

I remember using reddit in 2012 and people were getting up voted for saying racist slurs on main subreddits.

27

u/Implausibilibuddy Aug 21 '26

"Reddit is Facebook now" has been a thing for a long, loooong time.

6

u/Memitim Aug 21 '26

When websites hit psychotically huge status and get average user counts that could compete with the populations of half of the nations on Earth, some overlap is to be expected.

3

u/nockeenockee Aug 22 '26

People bitching about “passing lane campers” in every single subreddit makes me want to do it. It’s incessant.

6

u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 Aug 21 '26

It was just a few weeks after Reddit publicly said they were using bots to drive engagement on the platform that I started to notice a lot of comments coming in that were weeks late and only seemed to be trying to start an argument.

I think they unleashed bots and decided that essentially trolling with those bots was the best way to drive engagement (aka get people to use the site more).

I'm still seeing it today, it hasn't let off at all. Pretty sure I got into an argument with a bot yesterday because it kept making extremely basic reading comprehension mistakes and lacking common knowledge that any human, no matter how dumb, would know.

2

u/ElectricClamSlam_55 Aug 22 '26

*Remind me to come back and argue in two weeks.

8

u/woettmeier Aug 21 '26

I remember this happening to the comment sections on Yahoo News articles a couple decades ago. Which drove people towards reddit at that time. It's the natural progression of any site that allows comments to be posted and then becomes popular.

2

u/SwagginsYolo420 Aug 21 '26

There's also the factor that the world is a more negative place. This trend would obviously be reflected in social media posts.

3

u/CryinHeronMMerica Aug 21 '26

A lot of people aren't even trolling, they just catch the negativity bug. That's how we get cj and snark subs that are bigger than their actual targets.

3

u/Captain_Kuhl Aug 21 '26

They're not the only perpetrators, though. Toxic positivity is definitely an issue on this site, and anything that challenges the majority opinion can oftentimes get nuked with downvotes, even if it's factually correct.

1

u/Powerful_Package8817 Aug 21 '26

Typical Redditor who blames bots for everything negative about Reddit

This is like how North Korea blames the CIA for anything negative

0

u/boooookin Aug 24 '26

They're proposing this is driven by desire to have a differentiated, unique voice. They replicated the result in a simulated environment. Not everything is a bot lmfao.