Everyone says Reddit is a cesspool but whenever I come on here all I see is normal people and most often very cheeky funny and extra kind people. I don’t understand the hate. Where does it get this reputation?

44 comments

  1. Apparently I can’t ask it to ask Reddit so I ask men since it is the second biggest community I could find

  3. It’s the mods. The ones in this sub are pretty great, but in many subs the mods turn it into an echo chamber. It’s great if you agree, but if you don’t, poof you can’t interact there anymore.

  5. Some communities are better than others. I’ve left a bunch over time as they were full of people just amplifying their bubbles, not reading or caring about posters and commenters, and were often just more concerned with making themselves feel good than actually helping others.

  6. Ask a question on this sub regarding any of the following topics:

    – Men being victims of modern society
    – Men struggling with dating
    – What sort of beliefs do you have that aren’t popular
    – Women are so evil/picky/terrible/etc
    – Something about men being worthless
    – Should I kill myself because I’m not able to find a partner
    – Why do women not like it when I do <XYZ immature sexist behavior>

    And watch what sort of responses you get. And which ones get upvoted.

    There’s your answer.

    Reddit isn’t one single thing. But Reddit is relatively anonymous for social media platforms, and it tends to attract people who are outcast, have chips on their shoulders, and have beliefs which they are afraid to share elsewhere. We’re about one step removed from 4Chan, and many of the demographic overlap.

  9. This sub is the exception. People on here are very pragmatic and solution oriented, rather than blaming external factors outside of their control

  11. It isn’t. People who say they hate Reddit actually are saying they hate the fact that their social selectivity is limited by the nature of the internet. In real life, we insulate ourselves from people we don’t like with physical or psychological distance. On Reddit, you can see an opinion you deeply despise get raised to the top by cultural inclinations of the website. The statistically average Redditor is a young white male U.S. National that lives in higher tax brackets and has a fifty/fifty chance of escaping social dysfunction in real life via the internet.

  15. Everyone is an expert or a critic and never fucking did it. Some people start commenting on stuff they think they know about and don’t even care when they find out otherwise too stubborn to change opinions. It’s a lot of dog shit people out there and unintelligent people causing problems and the internet lets them have opinions but not everyone should have opinions. :/

  17. Reddit is largely what you make it. You want to only sub to your favorite sports teams subs and get all the news from them? Go for it, and reddit will function as a sports website for you. Want to sub to a bunch of meme pages? Guess who has a website that is 90% memes. If you go and sub to 100 porn subs, you will have a porn website at your fingers.

    There are definitely subs that are worse than others, even in the niche communities. NBA subreddit is largely sports focused, NBAcirclejerk subreddit is currently filled with pedophile jokes.

    I will say there are some subs that become echo chambers that I can see why it would be considered a cesspool, politics is very left skewed and a right leaning opinion is down voted and hidden, creating the impression that they are far less popular than they are, alternatively in the conservative subreddit, any criticism of right leaning policy is down voted (or outright banned) creating their own echo chamber where they are the only opinion that exists. Imo it is a toxic mentality that you only want to surround yourself with people with the same opinion as you.

  18. You’re most likely seeing the upvoted and curated comments that you enjoy seeing, which would look positive to your eyes. To see it as a cesspit, you need to step outside the subs you’re used to being welcome in, or check downvoted comments, and interact with someone there.

  19. It’s a cesspool because there are a lot of people who are truly miserable and the only outlet they have is Reddit(e.g. a guy keeps posting how women are trash cause they select for height). Add to that, a lot of people lack basic critical thinking skills and it shows in their response to any topic.

    Example: make a general statement about anything (e.g. men on average are taller than women) and you will get a barrage of comments saying “I’ve never seen that” or “none of my friends are that”. It’s as if their small frame of reference constitutes the entire universe. I mean I have never personally been to outerspace but I don’t doubt that outerspace exists.

    That’s the kind of mindset that is prevalent on Reddit that makes it a cesspool.

  20. It depends entirely on where you go for what kind of people you find there. What sort of topic you want to discuss.

    You wear a sandwich board broadcasting the wrong message in the wrong neighborhood, and you’re not getting saved by a good samaritan store owner.

  23. Loads of people don’t understand negativity bias or are incapable of recognizing that they’ve fallen for it.

    They see a few weird comments or posts they disagree with and suddenly decide the whole site is that way.

    Even worse, I’ve seen people paint whole subreddit opinions based on highly downvoted comments. It’s even more ironic when their comment calling it out is highly upvoted.

    In reality, redditors are mostly normal people with milquetoast opinions. But hardly anyone comments those neutral takes (why comment if you have no feelings on the subject?) and a few bad comments make everything look worse than it is.

  25. Ask any question that involves the concept of being able to take a side on any perspective or opinion and you’ll see what they mean

  26. Must be only on the normie subreddits. I love this app but everyday it makes me want to throw my phone against the wall from the stupidity I see

  27. its the subs. you can kinda fall into a rabbit hole and reddit will keep suggesting things to you and then you go onto a popular sub and your views are wayyy out of the norm.

    kinda like tiktok or youtube. If you watch a bunch of chicks shaking their booties, you get more chicks shaking their booties. if you watch a bunch of stand up comedy, you get a bunch of stand up comedy.

    &#x200B;

    then you go onto a big sub like /askreddit and someone is like “hey should we try to save the earth and stop global warming”

    and thats when you get the guys coming out of their rabbit holes saying its a hoax and the earth is flat. etc. etc.

  29. It’s easy to live in your own silo here. You don’t have to care about other opinions and other’s bad opinions fuel yours.

  30. I don’t know what to say if you think the sort of conversation on reddit is normal or kind. Maybe get some better friends, I dunno.

  31. Reddit is manipulated and dumbed down. The manipulation is both commercial (bots, fake frontpaging, some suspicious hyping of certain artists, movies etc) and ideological (burying posts that are critical of the Biden administration etc; leftism controls the defaults and will ban you for being centrist/rightwing. That applies to most defaults).

    Bot manipulation has been well-documented:

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-is-being-manipulated-by-big-financial-services-companies/

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-is-being-manipulated-by-big-financial-services-companies/?sh=2d0fe2554c92

    The dumbing down comes from all of these censorship/manipulation attempts. Some subs still keep an honest flow of discussion, but reddit in general is compromised because it is riddled with dishonest, biased, self-destructive fanatics at the moderation and admin sectors, including the delusional, pathetic “power users”.

  33. If you have been blessed by the algorithm and isn’t terminally online, you see nothing close to a cesspool

  35. It used to be worse overall (see the response to the Boston Marathon bombing, some really insane old subs, and the infamous “ask a rapist” AskReddit thread) and a lot of people had that sort of lunacy set in their mind as “default Reddit.”

  36. Dunno. I made an appeal to a local area sub-Reddit to help get something from a hotel where I left it to a mail store to have it sent to me and at least two people stepped up to help. The guy who helped didn’t ask for any money and only asked, I were inclined, to donate to a local food bank.

  40. Uh Oh, we are supposed to be fighting amongst ourselves, not aligning. We making the powers-at-be sweat right now.

  41. Well, reddit is an extremely progressive platform, and with that progressiveness comes with a greater acceptance of well, almost anything.

    So a lot of the people who are rejected by normies, or simply have rare interest that normies can’t relate to, end up congregating on this platform and it results in some pretty interesting subreddits and conversations, to put it nicely.

    And while Reddit can be fun and there is cool people on here, in all of fairness there is some extremely weeeeeeeeird shit on this platform, and it’s not uncommon

    So a lot of regular, well adjusted people end up viewing Reddit as a cesspool

    As a side note r/askmen is uniquely well-moderated, you should go explore other subs a bit and you’ll start to understand the reputation

  43. There’s several reasons for this and I’ll quickly outline 3 of the top ones in descending order of importance.
    1) Reddit used to be different. When you look back about 10 years the culture around Reddit was different and it was a fair bit more edgy than it’s current form. You would frequently see people being way worse to each other than you would now on the regular forms and it used to be less moderated so some of those communities would become more promenant. This was the groups that presented most outwardly to the rest of the world and subsequently where Reddit got it’s reputation. I’m personally glad this has faded out because it’s wasn’t enjoyable for a lot of people and it was what initially made me leave.

    2) Some specialized communities do a lot of over explaining and occasionally are overly harsh in a way you don’t see on other platforms. If you’ve joined a hobby community that’s a bit too intense, you’ll notice that sometimes someone will post something like “I just bought [XYZ] and am incredibly excited to use it”. And then you’ll get someone underneath saying “No one who’s serious about [insert thing that’s supposed to be fun] uses those anymore. Leave and rejoin when you have [PQR]”. I’ve been seeing it less in recently but that it still occasionally shows up. Since Reddit also used be primarily encourage long form responses, this could have a fun little post followed by a 6 paragraph long tear down of why you’re having fun wrong.

    3) There’s a tangent of redditors that seem to dislike the users site and say it’s a cesspool. I notice it around more conservative groups along with the words “hive mind” but this is definitely a thing.

    I also really enjoy Reddit, it’s especially nice for my more niche hobby’s where I can exhaust the attention span of the people around me fast when I talk about it. I’m glad to hear you’re finding it nice as well!

  44. Reddit is largely what you make of it. I don’t see much dog shit because I don’t go looking for it. If I didn’t do anything to curate my own experience and just looked at front page stuff I would probably have a worse experience but that would be on me.

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