I didn’t really start visiting reddit until this year because I had assumed it was just the wild west (4chan style) and wouldn’t be a very interesting place to visit.
Iv’e been very surprised though at how civilized the place seems to be. People post pictures and don’t trash each other much (you’re so fat, ugly, that sucks, you suck etc…). Post stories and they don’t patronize each other (nice story bro. Who gives a shit?).
Even the “adult” reddits (aka porno) very few people post negative comments about stuff. Doesn’t even seem to be a tone of downvoting in most cases. Most folks seem to either upvote/compliment or just walk on by if they don’t care for the subject.
How did this happen? For such a massive online community it really seems to be an actual example of the internet being civil without being heavily moderated.
?
ETA: Jesus. Can someone please fix my subject so it looks like I wasn’t drunk when I wrote it?
Reddit is heavily moderated, I don’t know why you’d assume otherwise. A lot of the moderation is invisible but it is still there. For example, Reddit uses shadowbans, where a user’s post will not be visible to anyone but they are not alerted to the fact, or downvoted posts being hidden at the bottom of the page. Most people on the internet are pretty nice–there’s a small but visible minority than messes everything up.
Also, 4chan really isn’t as bad as people think it is. The main boards can be pretty awful, and it’s not the dope by any means but the less-trafficked boards are surprisingly high quality.
You’re right that reddit is very civil, but I once made a post post commenting on how unmoderated it was because there is a reddit for loans where people loan money using paypal which is expressly against paypal terms, they advise lies if questioned.
Also reddits with open selling of legal and illegal drugs, and no I’m not talking about vendor reviews on the darknet reddit. I mean actual sellers doing deals in open reddit(just restocked Alpha-Methyl-Kethyl PM for details!). This doesn’t bother me, I’m just shocked a big company is cool with it.
Reddit also has the advantage of subreddits, where the userbase is split to specific focuses. The defaults regularly get snubbed for having crap posts (read the comments on /r/funny sometime), but the vast majority of sub get only people interested in that topic, which cuts down on trolls.
And every sub has a moderator, (I’m one for a couple of small subs) and the moderation tools let you do a lot to keep the crap out of your sub.
It’s an interesting system, since the upvote / downvote system means the good stuff is more visible. There’s plenty of low quality, lousy chaff, but you have to dig more for it. Or just subscribe to /r/funny. Zing.
The default subs are wildly hit or miss, but a lot of the niche-ier ones are pretty excellent. Reddit has ALMOST replaced my RSS addiction, but I don’t find it quite as easy to flip through.
I wouldn’t call it successful at all. Well, it’s successful if you want to avoid any complexity in your discussions. Because it’s not only the nastiness that gets downvoted, it’s most of the time any meaningful opinion that some may disagree with. In the r/soccer subreddit, for instance, any opinion whatsoever, negative or positive gets shafted systematically.
This paragraph you just read now? You wouldn’t read it in reddit. It would get downvoted to oblivion in seconds.
I’ve mastered the art of writing any comment in the blandest, most apologetic way possible when I feel like I must participate in the comments of some post, but that still makes most threads way too lightweight to be truly enjoyable. Reading a bunch of people agreeing with each other is not that entertaining.
Totally depends on your /sub.
Fr’instance /Montreal is a hive of scum and villainy with downvoting and naysaying by any and all assorted characters, shadowbans, and mods deleting posts and lying about it.