Reddit is great when it comes to reading or watching what people have put there (especially if it’s related to a specific thing you just googled or searched on reddit), BUT -
Pretty much all (or a vast majority) of my experiences with actually posting or trying to post on Reddit have sucked big time - to actually post to most forums that actually have a significant number of visitors or members you have to earn “Respect Points” or whatever that thing is- dude, they do NOT make it easy to do that, I mean it’s a message board for God’s sakes you shouldn’t have to earn “points” in order to actually post anything in any “Good” category or group or anywhere where sign. numbers will actually see/possibly respond
There’s other snags about Reddit for me too, but I’ll leave it with this right now
I’m not sure what kind of “good” groups you want to post on, but I’ve been on-and-off active on Reddit for several years, and actively posted in both large groups (NFL, Final Fantasy XIV, D&D), and smaller groups (Tolkien fans, fans of smaller tabletop RPGs), and none of those had any sort of hurdle for a new poster to post there.
Like for example last year I tried to post in an (or the) Astronomy group and my OP was locked or whatever and it was like (humorous paraphrase of mine) “You can’t join or post in this big good Astronomy group because you have to freakin’ post in the little suckier one until you earn Big Boy Points HA HA you just got pwned” Me being funny there but that’s basically what happened and -
when I posted to the little sucky one I got a couple responses and that’s it.
Other stuff has happened or gone wrong for me while posting to Reddit too, such as “Oh you’re asking what kind of brand was on somebody’s hat you just saw? Must be a marketer, you surely must- BANNED.”
In my experience, Reddit can be really good in the right subreddit, and a toxic swamp in the wrong one. Any sort of overall blanket statement about the culture on Reddit is pretty meaningless, due to that.
It’s not the “culture” or the people, it’s whoever the Mods or Group Leaders or whatever were in those two examples I gave but also multiple other nasty roadblocks I’ve hit trying to post to Reddit in the past
The moderators are the ones who set the rules, and guide/enforce the culture, in their subreddits.
I’m sorry that you’ve had bad experiences there. We had a long thread about Reddit here a year or so ago, and it came down to some people finding it useful and interesting, and others just hating it.
There are hundreds of thousands of different subReddits, each with their own moderation community, each with their own distince preferences and practices and rules.
99.9% of them let people just walk off the street and post what they want. That means either the moderators have to invest massive work to prevent dumb drive-by engagagement, or it turns into a toxic swamp.
The more heavily curated Reddits are a nicer experience because the karma points system lets you know if someone’s more likely to be an auto-created spambot, or a blowhard passing through, or somebody who knows how to read the forum rules and not act like a nitwit.
The best forums to read are the ones that are gatekept like that. It’s not hard to accumulate karma on less-gatekept forums. And honestly if you’re just asking questions then those are really the better places to go, because there others looking to engage and buff their own scores.
Try the thing in the way it’s intended to work before you start complaining about it.
I managed to get banned about a year ago for a comment I made that was supposedly “advocating violence” or something.
I wasn’t doing anything of the sort- what I had done was hypothetically speculate about when it would be appropriate for the people to revolt against the current government. IIRC, it was if there is blatant disregard of a SCOTUS decision or unchecked disregard for an explicit provision of the Constitution. In a political thread in a general subreddit.
WHAM! Down came the ban hammer, and I don’t think I even got my appeal reviewed by a human, just their dumb-ass AI refusing to even refer it to someone.
So now I just basically lurk and read, and I’m better off for it. I’m not nearly as engaged and can just look up what I want, or not. I don’t feel like I have to look for replies, or get annoyed with any of it in any way beyond the strictly academic.
That said, there have been times in specialized subreddits when I’ve had useful stuff to contribute for other redditors, but wasn’t able to post it, which has annoyed me a time or two.
And yeah, the more diligently moderated subreddits are better, but even then, there’s a big element of mods banning posts they don’t like, rather than posts that actually break the rules. r/conservative, for example is a huge echo-chamber, because the mods remove anything that doesn’t conform or reinforce the group-think around there.
The best IMO, are the more specialized/technical subreddits that are basically run by serious hobbyists/aficionados for serious hobbyists/aficionados. Some of those are fantastic sources of information and community about your interests.
I have never used Reddit, but this seems like what happened to Usenet a couple of decades ago.
At first the only people who had access to it were connected to universities and serious software companies. The level of discourse was intelligent and the volume was manageable.
Then AOL opened it up to just about anyone, and the signal to noise ratio went down the tubes. Flamewars, vast amounts of irrelevent blathering.
Exactly this. OP has a silly chip on their shoulder and is engaging in ridiculous hyberbole.
The subreddit for my local town had to put in similar measures because it was drowned by trolls whenever someone posted warnings about ICE in the area. Other subreddits for various marginalized groups do the same thing for similar reasons. I fully support it.
Good news though @Past_Paper. Anyone can start a subreddit. You can make one of your own on the exact same subject and have any rules structure you like. Good luck with that.
Each sub Reddit is moderated by different people and some subs are stricter than others. Some are moderated by people best described as assholes. They are in control and you just put up with it. There isn’t any over riding authority there. Your username is one of millions, no one will remember you and back and forth conversations there, unlike SDMB are almost impossible.
Answer to the OP, “is it worth posting there is No” You are just noise that nobody will hear. No real follow up to whatever you say, no one will remember what you say or who posted it. If you think that you have some real input or something to say, you might as well go outside and yell at the trees.
Your ignorance and irrational antipathy about reddit is well established.
There is a wealth of good information in there about every conceivable subject. The hobbyist subreddits (not all of them) are usually fantastic and welcoming to beginners. So are the support groups for people with various rare disorders. Ditto for the ones about local news and happenings (in my maybe limited experience). One those ones people definitely know each other and have meetups and are generally well moderated.
The larger subreddits like /politics are certainly like that but that is a small fraction of reddit.
The karma system can be a bit hard to understand. I created an OP in r/Bible asking about how people interpret a certain odd phrase in the Psalms, and received almost half downvotes. The question was 100% anodyne, I insist – it could have been asked in any Bible Study group full of earnest people, and was, in fact, asked with 100% earnestness. It also was not a challenging or controversial question in the least, like “If God is all-powerful, then why is there evil in the world, huh? HUH?” It was purely academic - “what does this word mean in this context?”
The downvotes were baffling – but, I should say, I’m not well versed in the messageboard karma system, and maybe they were just indicating they didn’t think it was a question worthy of being a popular thread, which is 100% fair.
On the other hand, I have no doubt there ARE basement-dwellers who exist to downvote everything they see.
As Haj said (or implied), the quality of Reddit definitely tends to vary in inverse proportion to the number of subreddit participants.
It could have been against the arcane rules of the subreddit or they wrongly assumed you were insincere and were posting a gotcha.
My best downvote story. My dad and stepmom each bought a revolver as an overreaction to the Rodney King riots. They never used them. When dad died in ‘17, my stepmom gave them to me to dispose of them.
I posted on a gun subreddit asking them how to best do so safely. It was a simple question and wasn’t in any way anti-handgun. People were furious that I didn’t want them. It was crazy.
“Your dad bought them to protect you”
No. I was in my late 20s when he bought them and I hadn’t lived with him since I was 8.
“You’ll love them if you learn how to shoot them”
No. I do know how to shoot them. I’ve gone to the range with friends many times. I don’t like them.
“So because you don’t like them you want to make them illegal?”
Of course not. I don’t want to make onions illegal either. Calm the fuck down.
A few people did give me the good advice to sell them and I did and made several hundred dollars.
Yo Briny, I’d love to here what the phrase was , I’ve dabbled in so many translations of the psalms (including KJV et al) and relished their poetic and mystical language and especially comparing many many translations for many many parts of Psalms or anywhere in the Bible, not as a religious thing just as a love of literature and poetic writings and cool stuff like that
just curious, don’t wanna send my own thread on a tangent or nothin’.
“No can do, because then you’ll find my Reddit handle, and then the chatbot AIs will officially know more about me than I do”
Wow, I guess surveillance and the resulting (pretty understandable) paranoia around it have really come this far, haven’t they?
Oh good I just figured out why I’ve been having trouble quoting users- I’ve often been trying to quote “whole posts” and that’s not allowed! Well, I learned my lesson today!
It’s allowed; however, Discourse (the platform on which the SDMB runs) automatically deletes a quote box if you are (a) replying to the most recent post in the thread (that is, the post immediately above yours), and (b) quoting their entire post.
Because I just quoted you, in the previous post, the quote showed up because I didn’t quote your entire post.
Me being funny there but that’s basically what happened and -
