everybody on ilx complains about reddit

This thread title is both an observation and an invitation!

The way you guys complain about reddit and its users, it seems like it must make it's way into your lives quite a bit. But I only hear about it through ilx! Except for the Obama thing, I think I heard about that in a newspaper or something. So how do you guys know so much about redditors and their loathsome opinions?

Are you all reddit users too and when you go over there, do you complain about ilxor?
Do people share contemptible reddit links on your facebook/twitter?
When you're out at the club, do people ask you if you saw that thing on reddit?

My apologies. I meant for that formatting to be in bold.

my manager talks about it all the time

i have some irl friends who are active on reddit.

at first i only knew of reddit because my wife started forwarding me a bunch of the image memes from whichever board of theirs focuses only on pictures. i started clicking around the site and ended up on one of those creepy boards dedicated to men and how terrible women are and have p much written the site off since. i mean, i'm sure there are some just fine places on reddit, but i got a really uncomfortable vibe from it.

only thing i know about reddit is there's this crazy keyboard techno-busker in town who's constantly trying to get his Facebook "fans" to sign up to it so they can vote for him in a poll, except he keeps writing the wrong instructions on exactly what to do and he's been at it for days and days....

i started clicking around the site and ended up on one of those creepy boards dedicated to men and how terrible women are and have p much written the site off since.

Yes, I hear about this one the most, probably.

i only ever hear about it here too

challenged a friend on that and he offered the semi-convincing argument that you can control your subscriptions or whatever and make the site into whatever you want it to be. but i still steer clear.

that being the men's rights board.

Reddit is basically the future of language. We'll have trollface, Jackie Chan face, Freddie Mercury face, "me gusta", rageface, and that's it. No words just memes

are u on reddit frogbs?

god no

Reddit is basically the future of language. We'll have trollface, Jackie Chan face, Freddie Mercury face, "me gusta", rageface, and that's it. No words just memes

don't most of these things come out of 4chan?

I don't know, but both times I've been on reddit it was full of this stuff. either way I think my point stands. this is just how young people communicate.

I have a bunch of FB friends who share reddit crap all the damn time

the niche subreddits are fine because they're usually small and of likeminded people

I think the people who think about reddit the most are the ones most disgusted by it

the hivemind of reddit is depressingly stupid and naive. people making inside jokes and puns on middle east riot threads. imo the site is full of sheltered philistines who know very little about a lot

"I have nothing to say, but I want to say it anyway"

its popular on the internet, so if you spend a lot of time on the internet you will probably run across it,

it's possible to spend a lot of time on the internet and not see much or anything reddit related

or it was until 'reddit' became shorthand for a load of stuff ppl hate + an easy laugh at the expense of dorks

it is possible yes

One of the most popular Reddits is IAmA ("I am a") where users prompt others to AMA ("Ask me anything"). Recently, many celebrities have taken to this section, including President Barack Obama, Jimmy Kimmel, Ron Paul, Stephen Colbert, Bear Grylls, Deadmau5, Zach Braff, Neil Strauss, Tim Ferriss and others.[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]

Men’s Rights thing is probably overstated. It’s the 171st most popular subreddit and most people only know about it because of Gawker clowning them for it. Not totally fair because anyone can create a subreddit about anything and with a user base of millions, shitty niche areas will arise. That said, “Redditors” are mostly awful 20 something white male alpha nerd atheist gamer types who think they’ve got the world figured out and they’re insufferable and have terrible taste in everything.

I do know that Deathdrone wrote about Reddit a lot so that's the persona I associate "redditor" with

It’s the 171st most popular subreddit and most people only know about it because of Gawker clowning them for it.

This is key info here. Thank you.

171st most popular of 3,692 subreddits

171 was the peak US chart position for the first velvet underground album

only 500 people read the men's rights forum but every one of them etc etc

I feel like this thread is going to good for exposed the extent of the reddit/ilx cross-over.

"for exposting"

a local acquaintance just got divorced and is sliding into men's rights shit on his Facebook and it's like...dude...you gotta just back away from the men's rights community

I thought I was into men's rights back when Norwood Fisher was trying to get child custody. I don't know if I heard anything about it until it got brought up in the context of reddit/extreme misogyny.

In fairness, if we had a men's rights board, I would be totally okay with Gawker clowning us for it.

xp: just realized that was "father's rights" and so a different thing I guess.

It's a gateway drug iirc.

Every time I look at an AmA, the comments are so loathsome that I give up pretty much immediately.

But sometimes the train wreck is just too compelling

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ypb8j/third_world_child_ama_with_translator_via/

there's a disconnect between what some notable people (some of whom probably should know better) who end up doing IAMAs think reddit's readership is like and how it actually is, that you get a lot of cool people who aren't joss whedon getting only a few responses to the point where you can ask, say, James Fallows a question and it will probably get answered. It's kind of nice!

i'm pretty glad ILX exists or else i'd probably be on reddit or still reading somethingawful forums or whatever

Ground zero for GWB image rehabilitation:
http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/101a82/good_guy_gw_greets_troops_at_the_airport/

i'm pretty glad ILX exists or else i'd probably be on reddit or still reading somethingawful forums or whatever

― ciderpress, Tuesday, September 18, 2012 6:47 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a pretty good site for clearing out the riff raff:
http://topiama.com/

I don't think I 'get' reddit... I've only ever seen a couple of the ask me anything threads and they just kind of seemed like the comments section of the av club or whatever.

I quite like metafilter though. Is it considered equally hateful? Am I accidentally joining fathers4justice by reading it?!

avclub comments are the worst, seriously

"GET CANCERAIDS LOL"

Metafilter is much better than reddit imo, but they both have their uses. With reddit, the key is to register and then only subscribe to the subreddits that have actual interesting content.

iow what call all destroyer already said

rettit is horrible nerds

they should just call the site horriblenerds

metafilter is objectionable too, but it's right at the opposite end of the spectrum from reddit's misogyny4u, over at the the po-faced navel-observation end. We're somewhere in the happy middle, I guess?

But ye I spend time on both: Metafilter gives better link than reddit, but for tech stuff I can bear the horrible nerds on the programming reddit more than the "bro, bro, watch me pivot" clan on Hacker News

(The traffic that reddit sends is astounding, btw. We more than doubled our daily average when a link got on reddit, and it wasn't even on the front page, it was buried somewhere with 5 upvotes)

lmao

https://i.imgur.com/XgAoN4h.png

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-soldier-indicted-attempting-pass-national-defense-information-peoples-republic-china

how to not get caught selling state secrets site:reddit.com

i just visited reddit for the first time since... idk, july?

why did i waste so much time there?

Reddit reportedly signed a multi-million content licensing deal with an AI company
https://www.engadget.com/reddit-reportedly-signed-a-multi-million-content-licensing-deal-with-an-ai-company-124516009.html?guccounter=1

As the moderator of my town's subreddit, I suppose I should have some sort of doomed-to-fail opinion about data privacy. If it wasn't opvious already, only "AI" buzzword compliant b.s. is getting funding - all of it spent to monetize the shit out of everyone and everything.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/f94j0y/oc_how_much_of_reddit_is_pornographic/

can't imagine how this could go wrong

Reddit's IPO plans are the stupidest thing I've heard in a while

(specifically this plan: https://apnews.com/article/google-reddit-ai-partnership-a7f131c7cb4225307134ef21d3c6a708) which IMO just means most people who care will stop using reddit

A post not about content, but on navigation.

When, on a desktop computer, I'm navigating a long thread with loads of deep subthreads, there is a depth level and/or subthread post count where clicking on the "more replies" bit opens a new page instead of expanding the subthread in the same page. My question is: is there a way of getting back to the same place in the main thread where I was when I was sent to the next page? The "See full discussion" link takes me back to the top of the main thread, the "Single comment thread" appears to just take me up one level, which may be somewhat more useful but is a bit disorienting.

It feels I'm missing something completely obvious here, but this one throws me all the time.

You could just make a habit of right clicking “more replies” and opening the link in a new tab instead of just clicking through and you’ll never lose your place on the main tab.

Well yeah, I did think of that, but the first links I tried didn't have any "Open in new tab" options in their context menu. Now I see, however, that those were of the expand-on-this-page type, and that the ones that actually do open a new page have the link-type context menu.

A bit annoying to have to check for the option for each one (or bother to learn at which level this happens), but I'll take it. Thanks!

I wonder if shift + clicking would open same page ones normally and new page ones in a tab?

So it does! (Well, ctrl + click in Chrome; shift + click opens an entire new window.) Excellent idea, thanks!

isn't that the same idea I mentioned? geez!

reddit bombs out with errors for me almost constantly and fails to load things, but I think it's because I run EFF's privacy badger and 2 ad blocker extensions. It's quite annoying

@Evan my suggestion, doesn’t rely on trying to write click and being disappointed when you can’t. Geez!

- that comma & write=right. Dictation and sass is a bad combination.

https://i.imgur.com/Yk5jL1o.png

That guy is going to be so happy when he learns about Jean Rollin.

Boost finally died on me a day or so ago--I mod a few subreddits, so I had been able to use it for a year or so after regular users had to stop.

the baseball subreddit is more liberal than the liberal subreddits

Baseball fans tend to be pretty chill. I see that here as well as on Reddit

I like the baseball sub, but not the mlb one

I'm addicted to the fucking Am I Overreacting sub, mainly because I absolutely can't believe that actual humans txt each other the way people apparently do. Set aside the barely literate ones (which is a large number of them), but does every fucking couple call each other 'babe' over and over again back and forth when they txt? "babe, blah blah blah" "ok babe, blah blah" "babe, blah blah" what the ever living fuck.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/reddit-ai-persuasion-experiment-ethics/682676/

^ researchers used /r/changemymind to train AI bots and managed to actually change minds before being caught

https://i.imgur.com/UUkc4nb.jpeg

https://www.reddit.com/r/Megadeth/comments/1m3oc9y/fuck_you/

lol

On r/popculturechat people are talking shit about kelly clarkson’s very recently deceased ex husband and his bereaved girlfriend because they assume, without more than circumstantial evidence, that he cheated. A post with thousands of upvotes says flatly that he was “not a good person.”

I’ve noticed a similar type of purity policing on this site before, not only in regard to infidelity. In the relationship subs there is always a clear hero/victim and villain. In my life and relationships, it has never been like that, even in cases where there was cheating. I mean in my view.

Am I wrong in noticing a general trend toward black and white thinking? Mixed with a gross sort of prurient concern with the private lives of others? Not just on reddif.

Sometimes there are heroes and villains of course. Just not every time. And good people do bad things out of weakness not malice.

only engagement matters on social media sites, and its users have begun to internalize that

Am I wrong in noticing a general trend toward black and white thinking?

― treeship 2, Wednesday, August 13, 2025 12:59 PM (forty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

only engagement matters on social media sites, and its users have begun to internalize that

― fluffy tufts university (f. hazel), Wednesday, August 13, 2025 1:36 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes exactly, black and white stances used to farm engagement. For that reason assume most of it is creative writing. And Reddit users haven't just begun doing it, it's been happening for a long time. It's all bait! Only niche corners of social media have any value because they're generally free from these tactics / behaviors.

yeah that ain't a reddit thing it's an entire history of the internet thing. like irl people are people, they can be nice, they can be funny, they can have struggles and guilt and unique home situations unlike anything you've ever experienced, they can have shitty views on things but also never really talk about them so you suspect they just don't think much about it, and so on and so on, whereas online, especially these reddit posts which are just like "who's the bad guy?", well all I know about this person is these 2 sentences

It just seems very morbid because this dude just died and left behind two young children. And all these comments are just like “fuck this guy” based on speculation. And they aren’t even saying they suspect he did something horrendous — they are just baselessly speculating on the reason he marriage failed. Clarkson did not say anything like this.

social media discourse is just some variant of erotic fan fiction in comment form where the characters may or may not be real people

it was so weird when all the Making a Murderer stuff was going on and there was a busy subreddit dedicated to it, often the internet sleuths would discover certain people in Manitowoc who on several occasions were people I actually knew, all I could think is my god these people have no clue whatsoever

Erotic fan fiction comparison is pretty otm. Social media is just fucking garbage full of caricatures and bait best not to get swept up in it.

Erotic fan fiction comparison is pretty otm. Social media is just fucking garbage full of caricatures and bait best not to get swept up in it.

Dammit

fandom in general seems deeply poisoned by b&w thinking. not surprising obvs. and probably not new either, though networking fans into feedback loops is relatively

The fracture started as Team Edward vs. Team Jacob iirc

The dress that was blue or not blue solidified the schism, and we cannot go back

the sports subreddits (even college football and basketball, the soccer subreddit might be the least good - seems like there's still a ton of casual Islamophobia from European fans) are more progressive than music subreddits when something political comes up (Gaza, a coach or player's politics coming up)

/r/baseball sits to the left of the DSA national committee

one of the most annoying things about this website is the preponderance of pages called things like JustGuysBeingBrosTogether and the communities that frequent them, seemingly composed of men who have never had any friends or ever left their homes, who think that things like "bonding over a shared interest" or "making a silly face in public" are "Guy Things"

I have regrettably stepped back into reddit this month after nearly a decade away, and am already ready to leave again. One problem is the attitude that sharing other people's work is fine, sharing your own work makes you a spammer, just this feeling that everyone is there to consume and not to create. But that's just the thing I remembered.

The other thing, which I had forgotten about, is the scolding / debate club tone of the place, you cannot do the mildest of shitposting without getting hoards of redditors descending upon you with demands for lists of sources, and since everyone is a stranger they assume that you're a completely sincere idiot, it's exhausting. I recently read that a lot of the training data for AI was reddit, and that completely makes sense, that same humourless bland tone, also explains why I find it infuriating to read.

Also the content is boring, the same things posted over and over again no matter how much you try to get them out of your feed. I keep getting r/mealdealrates coming up because I keep downvoting people's shitty mealdeals, which I guess is engagement to them.

one of the most annoying things about this website is the preponderance of pages called things like JustGuysBeingBrosTogether and the communities that frequent them, seemingly composed of men who have never had any friends or ever left their homes, who think that things like "bonding over a shared interest" or "making a silly face in public" are "Guy Things"

That’s kind of charming, it could be much worse.

I would simply not seek out /r/guysbeingdudestogether if I was annoyed by that content.

i just go to reddit.com and look at whatever comes up so i'm kind of at the mercy of whatever is most popular, for better or worse

Every platform requires curating your feed - even ILX. Unless a platform is actively hostile to that (Facebook, mostly), letting the algorithm serve you a pile of turds is a user error.

If I go to reddit.com it’s almost entirely sports highlights and posts from music/instrument subreddits. The worst things I see are the centrist libs of indieheads and European soccer fans.

idk i feel like having a reddit account is kind of an L. i just go there for the same reason i would stare at the magazine selection in a grocery store. because there's nothing better to do and it's strangely horrifying yet appealing

internet conspiracy: since about 2015/ellen pao fallout, reddit has had paid writers.