I deleted Reddit from my home screen when the mods did the fake strike and I’ve mostly kept off of it since then, but in the past few weeks I’ve opened it out of boredom and holy God is it just a truly awful place. My only explanation is that it’s a window into the psyche of the American middle class email job worker and they’re so fucking brain rotten that it hurts to even look at.

I thought I was misremembering or that reddit-logo was just a good meme, but that site really does represent the absolute worst of American liberalism. I don’t even have anything specific to say, I just need to scrape out the festering mass that a 15 minute scroll session there created in my brain.

    • Phish [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      I really do think that made a difference. Don’t get me wrong, it was always shitty, but I think the people who stuck around and keep commenting are mostly the ones so addicted to arguing online they downloaded the official reddit app to keep going, while the slightly less brain broken people just said fuck it.

      • stolid_agnostic@lemmy.mlEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        I gave it a chance because lemmy wasn’t quite ready yet. It’s better here now and I’m slowly spending more time here than there.

          • stolid_agnostic@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Even a month ago it was kinda a ghost town. Enough people have finally moved over to make it more interesting. Having just experienced yet another unexpected but adverse interaction with a toxic reddit mod I think I’m pretty much done there.

            • Phish [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Yeah I’ve on Hexbear since the start which has been a bit more active. I jumped on Lemmy around the same time and there wasn’t much.

      • reverendz [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        I went back a couple times because no instance has really got a large MMA community at this point and reddit had an active sub on r/mma.

        I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been away for a while, but it did seem like there was a lot of anger.

        • Phish [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Yeah I pretty much only use reddit for sports stuff and I’ve noticed there being a lot more aggressive weird shit on there lately. People are talking about sports like it’s politics. Maybe they always have and I’m just noticing it now though.

              • stolid_agnostic@lemmy.mlEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                I got a random permanent ban from the atheism sub for mentioning that some countries in Africa are asking adult men to get circumcised for HIV control. Apparently I’m advocating for mutilation, am sick, and was threatened to never contact them again. It was very strange.

    • grey_wolf_whenever [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      its soooo angry in there. I use it to keep up with manga and game communities mostly, dont feel like having 8 discord instances just to know when a new chapter drops and the difference in tone on reddit versus something like tik tok is nuts, the redditors are constantly in a near catatonic rage state. It feels like a recent development too, I dont remember it always being like this.

      • ZapataCadabra [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        It’s always been a rage bait generator. I’m sure it’s gotten worse, but people interact with reddit most when angerry enough to make comments. Always has been.

        • stolid_agnostic@lemmy.mlEnglish
          6·
          1 year ago

          I have a 15 yo account. It followed the typical ark: a lot of fun, all the people come out to game the system for personal gain, people leave because it now sucks. Reddit was indeed a great place until 2010 or so.

        • umbrella@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          dunno about always being that way, but in the last few years i def needed a loooong filter list to make the frontpage bearable

      • stolid_agnostic@lemmy.mlEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        Definitely wasn’t always that way but the number of angry people increased over the years and they don’t seem to have moved on yet.

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    39·
    1 year ago

    That part about who reddit represents is so true. I feel so alienated from those people unless it’s a niche hobby topic. They overwhelming represent a cross-section of white middle class office workers who were all told they were gifted as kids. They’re so smug and smarmy. They’re all addicted to porn too.

    • SchillMenaker [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      The part that’s even more alienating about it for me is that I’m from the same stock as them. I was the smart kid in all the gifted classes, I never wanted for anything, my parents were a Republican booster dad and a Ralph Nader volunteer mom who my dad would pay to not vote every election. I came from exactly where they all do so the fact that they choose to see the world through the obviously and brutally false lense of meritocracy just kills me.

      I have poor and working class friends in real life and their politically incoherent views don’t bother me because I can understand why they’re losing the thread. On the other hand, I make a point of really digging into the comfortable liberals I know because they have no excuse for not seeing the world for what it really is. With the personal social aspect removed in a place like Reddit, those comfortable liberals are way too dug in to get them to engage in an ounce of self reflection and they can brush you off as an agent of misinformatzyion if you press them.

      I really fucking hate it there.

  • SacredExcrement [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    32·
    1 year ago

    I found a new, fairly specific sub that seemed pretty harmless yesterday, and being bored out of my mind at my job I decided to look thru some of the top all time

    I think the fifth or so post had a top comment of a mod asking people to not be racist and someone following that with a wikipedia entry about how all Chinese eat dogs and have a holiday for it and just so much unbridled racism sooooo…no, not just a meme

    • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      17·
      1 year ago

      “upvote to scare the tankies” thing over an image of Syngman Rhee

      jesus-christ

      I thought it was like, decently common consensus that Rhee was a brutal dictator, I’ve certainly seen liberal Youtubers say as much (in a “he was just as bad as Kim” way but still), but I guess nothing is too far for Vaushite radlibs if it pisses off the tankie boogeyman.

  • Neon_Dystopia [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    22·
    1 year ago

    There’s like 5 subs I check on every now and then and none of them are mainstream. Reddit had been an astroturfed liberal hellscape for a while but I’m just completely done with it now. I think a lot of the big corporate sponsored social media is on life support, Reddit and twitter are destroying themselves, nobody cares about facebook/meta and everyone else has either moved on to smaller independent platforms or group chat. I hope this trend continues because relying on techbros and megacorps for a public forum of communication could never end well.

  • GreatWhiteNope [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    15·
    1 year ago

    I deleted my account and feel so much better. I still browse to keep up with news or interests that don’t have communities on here, but there is so much less psychic damage when I’m not engaging.

      • good_girl [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        It’s definitely not for everyone at the very least.

        For me personally it was a way to vent any bad vibes into the relative void and it ended up being one of the only communities where I could be unapologetically trans until I came here.

  • Hexbear2 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    14·
    1 year ago

    I think reddit is some sort of louche extraction machine by the archons while we’re stuck in samsara. Reddit is only suffering these days. I used to use an app that could filter out by sub, so I would never run across the emotionally draining posts (about 95% of them) and then all apps were banned, and it’s worse for my mental health than going at it without a condom.