I am not a poster/user to reddit, but I’ve scanned the posts for the last few years (never joined, will not join). Apparently there is a thing called “agendaposting” which seems related to “astroturfing” and other social media jargon in which I am not fluent.
I started reading it in 2020 to get a feel for opinions, but I really don’t know what to think of that place. It seems corrupted.
Can anyone please explain Reddit to me, if it’s on the level? People seem to think it’s powerful, and it just IPO’d, lots of visibility (the antiwork and gamestop things), very influencial.
A co-worker said he doesn’t read the main threads, he reads things like the “eating mushroom” thread where people take a bite out of a mushroom, send a photo, and ask people if it’s ok to eat it. ???
It has to be the most frustrating/annoying place I’ve ever read on the internet.
Reddit is very much like the SDMB, but instead of having a few fixed forums and a few hundred(?) active users, it has thousands of forums, you can start new ones of your own, and there are millions of active users. Also, vastly less moderating of points of view.
I’m moderately active on Reddit, and from what I’ve seen, the nature of it varies wildly based on which subreddit (i.e., forum or topic area) you’re on.
I’m involved in some subreddits on topics that interest me (J.R.R. Tolkien, certain role-playing games, certain musical groups, model trains, etc.), and I’ve found that the discussions in those can be as in-depth and intelligent as those you’d find here on the SDMB.
But, as noted, there are zillions of subreddits, and a lot of them are devoted to silly/strange/weird stuff. Due to this, I don’t just randomly surf Reddit; I stick to those subreddits/topics which interest me. I see no reason to think that it’s “not on the level.”
Right. I’m not sure what it is you think is defective about Reddit, or what you think a better Reddit should look like.
For one example, here at the SMDB, there are around 20 comments about episode 4x08 of The Boys. On just the primary thread on that episode on Reddit there are 16 thousand comments. Does that thread make you feel uneasy? If yes, how? If not, what Reddit threads do, and why?
That also means that you’re looking at threads/topics in their old format, which (IMO) is very difficult to read.
Their current format is simply at reddit.com. If you go there, and go to the top of the page, it should have a “search Reddit” box; type in a topic area that interests you, see if there’s a subreddit or “community” for it (which would be denoted by an “r/”, such as “r/baseball” or “r/beatles”) – you can then look speifically at posts in that community by clicking on it.
I stay out of the giant Reddit threads just because I dislike the branching quotes and the whole thing becomes unwieldy and obnoxious. Arguably, a giant thread here does as well but I’m more comfortable with it all in one column.
I’m not a big Reddit user anyway unless I’m currently into a video game or just browsing a few casual reading style subreddits. 97% of the time, it’s more “A Google search brought me here for a specific answer”.
For the OP, I’ll just note that, while there’s plenty of good and useful information by reputable people on Reddit, assume all the advice/horror story type subs like AITA (“Am I The Asshole?”) are just clickbaity nonsense. For entertainment purposes only!
It’s just a meeting place filled with people subdivided into topics. Some subs are full of knowledgeable folks with good information, some are full of nonsense bullshit (often intentionally). There’s no single answer to whether it’s “on the level”.
In my case, let me spell it out again. I never just go onto Reddit, and read topics on the “home page.” I don’t give a darn about reading stuff from random or strange subreddits. I only look at discussions on the dozen or so subreddits that I follow.
In SDMB terms, think of this way: imagine that I only read The Game Room and Factual Questions, and that I hide all the other subforums, so I never see anything posted in, say, Politics and Elections or The BBQ Pit.
So, “what I’m ignoring” on Reddit is 99.999999% of all of the content on Reddit; I only read content on my selected subreddits.
I don’t think it’s random or strange forums, these things have thousands of comments, but it’s always the same type of topic, and it’s always the same type of topic repeated daily.
Eta requestion to explain
“a thing called “agendaposting” which seems related to “astroturfing” and other social media jargon in which I am not fluent.”
I mean, then you’re getting the default experience which is terrible because it’s made up of everyone else who is fine with the default experience (ie: mostly morons). The entire power of reddit is you subscribe to individual niche subreddits that are personalized to you.
My 2 pence is that quite a few of the weirder subreddits act as “strange attractors” for confabulating people who will post the most ridiculous (or sublime, depending on your viewpoint) fictional accounts imaginable. In some cases this is openly acknowledged in the sub’s rules to be perfectly acceptable and par for the course there, but in others the rules/description will insist that everything is on the up-and-up and fictions will be modded (but rarely are).
The thing is, if true it is striking just how many redditors have nothing better to do than post trite horseshit all day long; some say tho that these subs are almost 100% bot-driven ( Dead Internet Theory ).
My impression of Reddit is that it has a broader spectrum of both good and bad compared to the SDMB - not that I think poorly of the SDMB, but there are things that reddit does rather well that are just outside of the scope of what typically happens on the SDMB - for example the vast size of the userbase means that, say, a query of the type ‘what could have been this weird thing I saw from the road in [some place]’ is quite likely to get replies from people who close enough to it and are willing to go and find it and investigate and post pictures (that thing has happened on the SDMB too, but it seems like reddit has more coverage of different countries for that sort of thing).
But Reddit also, and very significantly, embraces the other end of the spectrum of helpfulness and intellect; some of what happens there is utterly and quite absurdly ignorant and won’t necessarily get moderated just for being aggressively wrong. The upvote/downvote system largely takes care of that though.
Also to the best of my knowledge the SDMB never tried to collectively buy an island, twice.
@DaveUnknown: Please explain in a paragraph or so what you think “on the level” means and what you think “corrupted” means. Those are buzz-phrases you keep using that you seem to have some clear understanding of; the rest of us lack your understanding since we can’t read your mind.
The short answer to Reddit, just like Facebook or YouTube comments (much less X in its current form) is that when you have no moderation, you have 1 billion monkeys typing on 1 billion typewriters. Many of them are stupid, many are ignorant, some fraction are bots or paid disinformation / propaganda spewers, and lots of them are simply trolling / teasing the world: spewing garbage for the fun of spewing garbage. And there are, I’m sure, a few good people among them.
it’s unclear to me why anyone would expect anything else of any unregulated space on the WWW. They’re all like that. They have to be. Because human nature is like that.
As a separate matter, you mention it IPO’d. Which suggests part of your curiosity is whether Reddit would be a good investment. How do you think “on the level” versus “corrupted” play into whether the company will be profitable or whether the share price is a good or bad buy right now?
I love reddit, but it’s the world’s biggest time suck. There’s a subreddit for every subject imaginable, for instance r/startledcats and r/mildlybaddrivers and r/kidsarefuckingstupid.