Comment by legacynl
6 hours ago
> Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison.
Yeah especially on r/AmITheAsshole. Those comments never advocate for communication, forgiveness and mending things with family.
6 hours ago
> Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison.
Yeah especially on r/AmITheAsshole. Those comments never advocate for communication, forgiveness and mending things with family.
Additionally, I'm sure many posts and replies on r/AmITheAsshole are LLM-generated in the first place.
Yes, it is a toxic sub, where the notion that there can be greater happiness on the other side of forgiveness than cutting ties is all but absent.
To be fair, it’s easier to concisely explain cutting someone off than justifying forgiveness. And the latter will land with some people versus others, while the former will only be rejected by people who have themselves concluded a theory of forgiveness. As a result, the simpler pitch gets upvoted. Even if the majority would have been swayed by a collection of arguments the other way.
It’s a good theory. My theory is, for whatever reason, jaded, narcissistic, miserable people congregate in r/AITA and try to drag other people into their misery because that’s easier than accepting responsibility and doing something to change.
2 replies →
Well, because that's never the correct choice. There's a big big filter on people actually posting there. Any easy problems with obvious solutions never make it to there.
Think about it, how fucked does your relationship have to be to post on Reddit for advice?
Someone has a chart somewhere that shows responses in that subreddit getting more and more anti-conciliatory over time. I think it’s online misanthropy (measured by Reddit responses) increasing over time rather than it being objectively never the correct choice.
Also the rules and norms of the subreddit has changed over time, which has led to spin-off subreddits that serve those purposes.
This wrongly assumes people are good at judging what easy problems are.
Not to mention nowadays an untold amount of posts to subreddits that invite commentary are made up stories from accounts trying to get engagement.
I believe this. There is a graph somewhere of the relationship subs tending towards breaking up over time.
I don't think this is necessarily that the advice is getting worse. My friends are pretty mature and stable people and I've found that they've had way more issues staying in relationships longer than they should've compared to breaking up earlier. Especially for relationships earlier in people's lives (where many people I know has a story about being in a relationship for way longer than they should've and seems often to be the ages of people asking for advice) erring towards breaking up seems prudent.
Not that these relationships subreddits are good (often it's obviously children trying to give advice they don't have the experience for) but I don't think that telling people to break up more is less accurate advice.
It's often that a lot of "NTA" answers are downright antisocial.
"No one owns you anything, you don't own anyone anything" mentality, without a crumb of social awareness.