Comment by california-og
4 days ago
Back when Reddit allowed API access, I used a reader (rif) which allowed blocking subreddits. I did an experiment where I would browse /r/all and block any subreddit that had a toxic, gruesome, nsfw, or other content playing on negative emotions (like a pseudo feel-good post based on an otherwise negative phenomena). After a few years, and hundreds of banned subreddits, my /r/all was very wholesome, but contained only animal or niche hobby related subreddits. It was quite eye-opening on how negative reddit is, and also revealed how boring it is without the kind of algorithmic reaction seeking content.
In other words, if 35% of hn content is positive (or neutral?), compared to reddit and most mainstream social media, it's actually very positive!
Edit: I found the list of blocked subreddits if anyone is curious to see:
https://hlnet.neocities.org/RIF_filters_categorized.txt
Note that it also includes stuff I wasn't interested in at the time, like anime, and only has subreddits up until I quit, around the API ban.
The cynical doomerism of reddit is like an infectious disease that ensnares you in their pit of misery with it's initial blast of catharsis. People whose lives bring them out of that swamp leave reddit and stop contributing, so it's mainly populated with miserable cynical doomers all jerking each other off about how screwed they are. Most of them are teenage/college kids working bottom rung jobs/entry level work/unemployed, with all the naivete that comes with it. Stay away from it.
their cynicism is perfectly understandable once you correctly identified the demographics (which you did), so I'm not sure why you're holding pessimism against poor people with a bleak future; like it or not that's far more anchored in reality than anything around these parts, as there are far more people with "bottom rung jobs" than software developers and VC investors in the bay area.
Most people in the US begin life poor, and most of them are not poor forever. I wouldn't call this a "bleak future". I was definitely poor when I was 18, but I wasn't pessimistic. Pessimism at such a young age is almost always a mistake.
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The subtext is that most Redditors have significantly better lives than 90% of people on Earth.
Life is bleak if you perceive it to be bleak.
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> like it or not that's far more anchored in reality than anything around these parts
TRUTH.
I don’t think Reddit is representative of poor people. It skews educated and white collar.
Cynical doomerism isn't limited to low pay jobs. Another super negative place is Team blind, where a lot of contributors are extremely well-paid.
I don't use Blind often, but whenever I do I always feel better about my job afterwards. Yeah, there are definitely parts about my job that suck, but at least it's not that bad.
In my experience, this depends a lot on the subreddits you are subscribed to. Even in that set, the general mood sometimes changes significantly over time, e.g. because moderators change, a flood of new people is coming in because of some trends (AI), or some reddit meta events (eg a post being bestoffed). Generally speaking, a few vocal asshles can spoil your subreddit and drag the overall sentiment down.
The assholes on reddit aren't the problem, often they are the people who are closest to breaking free from the swamp (yes, some are just assholes).
The problem reddit has is the celebration of it's doomerism, even in the small hobby subs the vibe is still present. The highest upvoted comments are so nauseatingly repetitive and formulaic, ridden with whatever the contemporary dogma of reddit is, substantiated by snowballs of echo-chamber fallacy with pebbles of truth in the middle.
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This is currently the top reply to the top comment. It’s classified at 89% negative by this model: https://huggingface.co/distilbert/distilbert-base-uncased-fi...
Ironically, the above comment scored 99.9% negativity.
Just pick your subreddits more carefully, and your experience of reddit will be extremely different. Mine bears absolutely no resemblance to what you describe, likely because I never go near the "top level" reddits, and stay only with the subreddits that matter to me.
The worst is going on any city's subreddit. You will think it is a terrible place with the worst drivers, crime, terrible schools, no jobs, and loneliness. And if you try to contradict that with some positivity you will get attacked.
Country specific subs aren't better either. They slowly changed from comfy places to talk about laid back topics to a full on brigaded cesspool where only the most polarizing opinion thrive.
As someone who’s on Reddit a lot, I completely agree
I was chronically on reddit daily from when Digg collapsed until they pulled the API. I was long overdue to leave by that point anyway.
Now in the last couple years, both my sisters have discovered reddit, and hanging out with them is like the god damn /r/all comments sections all over again. So insidious.
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My original home on the internet is metafilter, where I've been a member since 2001. For an extremely long time, it was the internet's best kept community, imo. Unfortunately, it also seems to be falling into pure doomerism, especially as the user base has declined over the last few years. The overall population is definitely on the older side at this: I was one of the younger users 25 years ago, and probably still am.
Which is to say, the feelings of doom are quite widespread. There's a good argument to be made that it underlies the rise of trumpism: people in the sticks feeling abandonment, resentment, and doom, and expressing it at the ballot box.
There were a lot more reasons for a positive outlook for the world 25 years ago. It significantly predates Trumpism. Some people see 9/11 as the turning point.
Why would young people with dismal economic perspectives and a poisoned political system possibly be miserable? That doesn't take too much to understand.
They’re miserable because they think this way. They think this way because they spend time with others spreading cynicism. Dismal economic perspectives and a poisoned political system is a point of view and a talking point and in reality not true for most people. If you know even a little bit about history you likely won’t have this perspective. Get off social media and look around at real life and you’ll see all sorts of great things!
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Also climate change, which the world seems unwilling to take necessary action to mitigate. Are climatologists feeling good about the future?
Young people protested Gaza, climate change, racism, massive wealth disparity and they just don't see the results. Governments, economic systems and societies just keep the status quo.
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Its not the doomerism that bothers me. Its the hivemind mentality and brain dead comments and zero critical thinking, and the absurd negativity and judgment of everyone and everything, and the politicalization of all the main subs (top post on pics is pretty much guranteed to be something Trump) Even as someone thats far left I cant stand Reddits mentality.
15 years ago there were nice discussions happening on reddit, now all the comments are one liner stupid jokes from people who never even bothered to read the article and people calling you a bootlicker if you don't agree with every nonsense against Trump/Musk/some billionaire.
Yeah you can pretty easily spot the chronically addicted redditor by their copy/paste standard rejoinders, memes, and cliches.
Also, more and more of them are bots which are trained to regurgitate themes that get a lot of engagement.
Reddit literally is what you make of it. Unlike HN.
Only if you create an account and start subscribing. If you just visit and browse you end up at all/popular which, when I still visited it was very predictable content any given day.
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Controversial content is discussed more than positive one, that's a well known phenomenon from gossiping with friends to discussing politics online to whatever.
I always bring the same example: if one of your best friends has troubles with it's partner you'll hear for hours. But when things go smooth they have nothing to say and you have little to add.
This is well known, and why forums that wanted to maintain their quality would consistently lock such threads going back at least 20+ years when I started using forums. Reddit, Facebook, et al, do the opposite. Its why they feel so bad to use over time - they are engineered to tap into this and to promote it. HN thrives because they very consciously do the opposite.
I'm sure many of us would take it much further, but I hope we can appreciate its not an easy task.
I'm tired of this point being repeated. This is not universally true. I'm in communities where the more active discussions are not ragebait.
I'd say HN's problem is rooted in that many folks participate in malicious contrarianism.
>I'm in communities where the more active discussions
And they are heavily moderated against negative discussion/ragebait.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533/
>specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.
This is a human problem and it happens everywhere.
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There's a lot of scientific evidence that negative and controversial content has multiple psychological effects of high emotional arousal, triggers the confrontation effect and toxicity breeds retention.
We're more likely to keep arguing here when disagreeing than to agree and add much.
And again, this isn't limited to internet but irl too.
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There's a saying : No News is Good news.
Unfortunately "No News" doesn't make for a very good website.
That’s a factor, but the Reddit hive mind can take even non-controversial posts and turn them into a toxic, cynical cesspool of comments.
When I was still visiting Reddit my subreddit list was short and focused on a few hobbies and tech topics. Even those subreddits had become overtaken with cynical doomerism and toxic responses to everything. For a while I could still get some value out of select comments, but eventually everyone who wanted real discussion gave up and left. Now even when interesting or helpful topics get posted it’s like the commenters are sharks circling and waiting for any opportunity to bring doom and gloom to any subject.
It depends on the platform. Most of the platforms reward content engagement, no matter if the content is positive or negative.
Engagement means money. Even if this is bait content then you get rewarded (on TikTok, X, YouTube, you directly get cash).
Even here controversy is indirectly rewarded here because it creates engagement, and there is practically no downsides if you upset anyone;
You get points for every answer that someone does to your comment, and the downvotes you get on your own comments don't offset the gained points.
These points have real utility to make money indirectly: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.
[...]
and it helps to bootstrap your project or grab new customers for free (at most 1 day of writing the bot script).
Let's say, you want to launch a new Juicero, and nobody knows about it yet, it's great to be able to push it on the homepage of HN, otherwise nobody is going to notice.
> These points have utility: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.
<1: Troll
<10: Throwaway
<60: Troll
<300: Probably a throwaway. Quality varies widely.
>500, <1000: Normal people
>1000, account less than 6 months old: Redditor, all content will be political or occasionally about Linux, most comments will be inflammatory.
<1000, >10,000, account less than 5 years old: Mostly normal users. Quality isn’t generally great.
<10,000, >30,000, account 10+ years old: Usually the best quality posts; karma and age suggest consistent contributions overtime without any of the personality disorders that go with being terminally online.
>100,000, account <5 years old: Redditor, all content will be political or occasionally about Linux, most comments will be inflammatory. Lots of flagged submissions about US politics.
>100,000, 10+ years old: Domain knowledge expert. Usually an older user with enough of a reputation that a subset of users know the user’s real identity. Will occasionally post absolutely unhinged comments.
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I believe the only threshold that might warrant karma-farming on HN is 100 points? Is that when you can actually downvote? After that karma was certainly not on my radar.
I'm trying to establish, if you'll believe me, that I'm not whoring.
And yet, I confess to generally towing the cynical line in my comments. But that's my nature. "Atta boy", piling on, bandwagoning—antithetical to my nature. In fact I'm always suspicious when a thing appears to have no downside.
I can say too at times, I'll take a stand in opposition to what I actually believe in order to call myself out—or, you know, cast doubt. I suspect ego comes in to play too—it's kind of a challenge to take the unpopular opinion and champion it.
In short, I think if I generally agree with the sentiment in the thread, I don't comment.
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> and there is practically no downsides if you upset anyone
Seems like the downsides are about the same as in other forums. It depends on if your account is anonymous or not.
> You get points for every answer that someone does to your comment, and the downvotes you get on your own comments don't offset the gained points.
I don’t think that’s right. You don’t get points for replies, you get points for upvotes. And downvotes you get also affect your overall karma, though you don’t seemingly have an upper bound on upvotes but I have read there is a lower bound of -4. An upvote on a submission seems to also be worth less than an upvote on a comment, though I’m not sure of the ratio (half? one third?).
> These points have real utility to make money indirectly: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.
I don’t think that’s right either. Once you can downvote and flag (500 karma?), more points don’t give you anything extra. Personally I rarely check someone’s points, only when viewing comment history or trying to identify spammers and other obvious bad actors.
> This is why I am collecting points on all my fake accounts, because once I have collected enough karma points, I can upvote my startup speech on Hackernews using these shadow accounts.
HN has voting ring detection. Though I can’t speak for how effective it is.
I don't think YC startups need to sneak to promote their startups - they can just ask the moderators to give them a boost.
Meanwhile if you say anything bad about capitalism the comment is removed.
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I personally only really noticed that I did not like the "after dark" style reddits. But I would generally try to ignore anything political, and focus on like craft/hobby content, media (but not tabloid style), and things not a commentary.
Reddit (or socially generated sites) are really a mixed bag.
I think what became interesting and I nailed down with others was any hobby forum became toxic and lost its utility in direct correlation with its popularity.
For the most part I pinned it down to casual engagement from non hobbyists introduced noise and anti information at scale.
For example in r/cars a site that talks about vehicles the vast majority of commenters do not own, comments become about the “simualacra” of having an exotic (comparing specs debating reviews etc). Where as Ferrari chat forum is about the utilitarian ins and outs of actually owning one (financing, maintence, dealer issues etc).
This seems to apply to all hobby forums when grow in popularity to the point where engagement rewards contributions from non hobbiests over real ones.
My final takeaway was that the nature of the internet being a simulation inherently rewards non real content over real. (Fake news is inherent to the internet) And karmic systems specifically reconstruct and enforce that simualacra.
An adjacent problem is when enthusiasts in hobby subreddits become a bit too enthusiastic about the hobby which sometimes develops into an unhealthy obsession that the community (un)wittingly becomes a part of.
I recently bought a pair of boots from a reputable brand. So I of course checked out the subreddit for the brand and while many posts are good and the community is receptive to questions but posts by weirdos with like a dozen+ pairs of $300+ boots dominate the discussion.
Can these people actually afford like $5000 worth of boots and all the accessories they come with it? Maybe. Maybe we’re all participating in their shopping addiction when they post pictures of their stairs covered in boots.
Either way there’s something unsettlingly unnatural about their posts, and I don’t mean in an astroturfing sort of way.
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I feel like this goes back to the "trick" of getting your questions about Linux answered. Basically, if you just asked your question "How do I do X on Linux?", you'd get no response. But if you said "Windows is so much better than Linux because I can't even do X on Linux", you'd get 5 different ways to accomplish your task before the end of the day.
Nothing gets people engaged more than making them angry.
I feel ironically obliged to mention Cunningham's Law
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
A 45/65 balance feels like it's at the optimal balance for interesting. Users are expected to continually upvote more and more boring posts if the user pool grows with noise. If the system stabilizes to 50/50, the content would trend toward mediocre but harmless.. Ergo, HN really is a cut above social media.
This totally matches my experience and is good way of describing OP's negative subreddit filtering.
R/weightlifting used to be total cesspool of rumors and gossip about athletes and coaches, but at some point the sub course corrected and got more heavily moderated. The result is a completely uninteresting feed of technique videos that are actually just kids showing off their latest PR.
However, the sub also aggressively reenforces that mediocrity. I posted what I thought was an interesting video of Lebron James doing a weightlifting drill, (with much lighter weight than a competitive lifter) and commenters jumped all the way up my ass about it being off topic, but also how Lebron has terrible weightlifting technique. No compelling discussion about weightlifting for elite athletes in other sports was had...
Unrelated but I still use rif daily. You can patch the apk using Revanced to use your own API key rather than the original developer's key. With the rise of AI, I've block a bunch of subreddits that have become infected with obvious engagement bait posts all with similar structures, writing styles, and tropes.
"Am I the asshole for leaving my spouse because they pushed me down the stairs and murdered my dog? He's also a member of an ultra-nationalist terror organization and doesn't put his cart away at the grocery store.
My friends and family have chimed in with mixed sentiments on social media. Some are praising me and others are telling me I'm wrong."
The account will of course be brand new and all of the top comments will be accounts that solely respond to similar bait posts on similar subreddits. It reminds me of subreddit simulator, it's bots talking to bots. My personal conspiracy theory is that reddit encourages this AI bait slop because it drives engagement and gets people to see more ads. The stories are like the soap operas I sometimes watched with my mom growing up.
What! You can still use rif like that? That's interesting. I completely stopped browsing Reddit on my phone after it went away (though maybe that's for the best...)
I'm not the person you replied to, but yes, I've been using RiF since the API changes ...with a small 4-month l break last year when I was automatically flagged as bot API traffic and instantly permabanned with no warning. Reddit's built-in appeals went unanswered and ignored. Luckily I live in the EU, I appealed under DSA and they unbanned me after actual human review right before the 1-month deadline.
Could have I created a new account instead? Maybe. Did I want to check if DSA actually works in practice and can get me back my u/Tenemo nickname that I use everywhere, not just on Reddit? I sure did! Turns out Reddit cannot legally ban me from their platform without a valid reason, no matter what is in the ToS. Pretty cool!
Back to using RiF with a fresh API key after that and haven't had any issues since.
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I switched to RedReader, which Reddit decided to still allow.
Same, and what made me finally quit reddit for good was realizing that on a given r/all page I was blocking 98+% of the content, to the point where it made me question why I am even bothering.
I went through a similar process recently mostly by hand and found the same result. After blocking negative vibes, my only "subs" were intentionally "wholesome" subs like animals/feel good news etc.
>also revealed how boring it is without the kind of algorithmic reaction seeking content.
I also found this but realized this is a good thing(!) if your goal is to reduce Reddit usage.
That being said, a little negativity might be warranted in order to be a part of the discussion. Otherwise you're just opting out completely.
I also found it a very good thing. After the API use ban, and losing my blocklist, I couldn't go back to browsing normal reddit anymore and was finally able to quit after 10+ years. And, it has made me very resistant to joining or doomscrolling any other social media too. I think the hn model is decent because it doesn't optimize for engagement but for intellectual curiosity, whether it's positive or negative, which leads to mostly earnest and interesting discussion.
Blocking subreddits is still possible with just the webpage btw. Go into the sub, click the 3 dots up top, choose "mute subreddit".
I do the same as you. If any post is harming my mental health, I just must the entire sub. But then weirder and weirder stuff just keeps surfacing. Some of it is funny though; like it keeps showing me alien subreddits now, which I find funny because I'm pretty sure 65% of the comments are just satire.
Most ideas are bad, so maybe negativity should be common?
To meta-steelman: if one steelmans a bad take, then the negativity becomes even more valuable.
It's probably not a good approach to life though. Most bad ideas aren't really worth arguing about, better to focus on the good ideas, or at least the finding common ground with the good intentions behind bad ideas.
I'm as guilty of negativity as anybody, maybe even more than most, but at least we can recognize this as a vice which may feel good in the short term but do us harm in the long run.
>It's probably not a good approach to life though.
It is 100% how adults approach life.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533/
>Most bad ideas aren't really worth arguing about,
At the same time you have to stop bad ideas in their tracks otherwise they spread like bacteria on an unclean counter, and the internet typically does a bad job of stopping them unless moderation is heavy handed. This leads to a never ending circle of discussion of bad ideas.
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I generally agree. Offline (ask my family) I'm Pollyanna.
It's hard to let bad ideas go unchallenged though. Places like Reddit? Sure, brigades, bots—it's tilting at windmills to try to add balance there. But HN is a community I still care for. I still respect the comments (and commenters) here.
(No, commentator is not a word—despite what Apple's dictionary is telling me.)
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Bad ideas in politics should be argued about, particularly if they are gaining traction and have backing, because then there's a decent chance they will become policy. People who tune out of politics because of polarization and toxicity are letting the bad ideas win.
Bad ideas in fields of expertise need to be discussed to the extent of keeping the field free of bad ideas as much as possible. Biologists will sometimes point out why intelligent design is not a good scientific theory for example.
I disagree. Life is a tightrope of limited duration and small missteps can be disastrous. Take risks, but tilt the odds in your favor by making the optimism as pruned by correct negativity as possible. Do not waste time optimistically on something that has little chance of success, or that has already demonstrably failed. Above all, do not get trapped wishfully believing in things that are wrong.
> but at least we can recognize this as a vice which may feel good in the short term but do us harm in the long run.
harm??? so only happy thoughts from now on?
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That’s a fair point, but I think we can distinguish between critical thinking and negativity.
We can rigorously test an idea or decide it’s not for us while still maintaining a supportive environment.
Often, the most helpful feedback isn't ‘this is bad,’ but rather ‘here is a different perspective to consider.’
I like your attitude.
Most things are inedible, yet we treat food poisoning as unacceptable event. Places serving expired food get shut down. Yet preparing speech and sights we feed others is a lost art. When I read how people wrote 100 years ago I feel like a brute
I'm very confused by this analogy.
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I think this is a common view, but it assumes that most of one's negative hot takes are good. And frankly, I've seen HNers being confidently wrong more times than I can count.
The critique of negativity assumes the positive takes are good. Why the asymmetry? It feels hypocritical.
Had the same experience with rif/res, and on X. If you go into algorithm-heavy sites with the intention of actively curating your personalized algorithm into your areas of interest, the sites can work quite well. One click blocking of subreddits and topics/posters sends strong feedback to the algorithm to readjust. I really don't know how people can use sites in any other way. For YouTube, I have filters and blockers set up such that I don't even get recommended any videos, and don't see any videos to click on unless I type in a search query or receive a notification from a channel to which I am intentionally subscribed. Facebook was/is broken beyond all repair, though. I recall that you could not remove posts from random groups and people from your feed, even if you were not friends with them or members of those groups.
Sometimes, I will see a screenshot of someone using reddit or YouTube "unfiltered" and it's night and day, full of slop and ragebait everywhere. No thanks!
My only difference of opinion with you is that I don't find positive content boring. I find positive things exciting and engaging! Negative content just makes me want to tune out, for the most part, unless it's some cathartic or amusing scenario like the recent thread here about SO imploding lol.
I didn't mean to imply that I find all positive content boring — just the kind of positive content that would rise to /r/all in reddit at that time, which was mostly quickly digestable content (like animal pictures). And it was also boring in the sense that it was much "slower" to change within a day than the unfiltered /r/all, so I would largely see the same content for a lot longer.
YouTube is also similiar. I need to be quite careful what to click so "my algorithm" stays interesting and wholesome. If I click on any remotely baity and negative video, the recommendations algo picks it up almost immediately and devolves into garbage.
nit: 35%
I did something similar and ended up opening only /r/AskHistorian posts...
Unironically, how are history-related questions not negative? I’d imagine people would ask questions about some dark events.
I was blocking subreddits recently and was contemplating if /r/historyporn because of the amount of photos of dead bodies and politically-charged discussions that sometimes unfold
If you block /r/history, you would prove the aphorism, "One thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history"
So a nice bubble? :) ( I actually mean that positive )
If you had a no tolerance policy then over time you ban every single sub. 99.99% positive would still mean they could get banned, under this algorithm.
You're also comparing Apples to Oranges by comparing zero tolerance records for subs vs average across all posts of hn.