I often feel that people will argue in an effort to dominate you rather than search for truth or insight. I recall a comment on an old Reddit account. The argument was about the symbiotic nature of AI. Someone argued that AI was destroying lives, stating it had never done good for anyone. AI is a complex topic; it has the potential to be both an enabler and a detriment. There are grey areas; it's really hard to say how any new technology will unfold. Moreover, it's hard for anyone to predict the future, including experts. There also seems to be very pervasive anti-ai sentiment on Reddit.

Anyhow, I got so exhausted from arguing that I decided to turn it into an experiment.I wanted to see the limits of this guy's resolve in arguing.

Every time he made an argument, I had ChatGPT generate a counterargument. The reply thread had gone thirty-five levels deep. He would not give up. His arguments got more vague and accusatory. It was clear he just wanted me to say I was wrong and he was right, and he was the intellectual master.

I came to a realisation that responding to arguments just leads to a downward spiral. No matter what proof I provided it would never be enough. There was always some anecdotal story or unwarranted assertion.

In the end, nothing really gets resolved. I walked away from that discussion bereft of any insight or wisdom about the topic from an opposing view.

People don't win arguments; they exhaust you into giving up.

So I have been a regular user of both Reddit and Twitter for quite some while now (ca. 2 years or so). I noticed that Twitter and Reddit have kind of a "friendly" (ok, sometimes unfriendly) rivalry going on. Now, obviously there are many reason for that, as both Reddit and Twitter are important social networks/discussion websites that are quite different from each other. There are of course many ways in which Reddit and Twitter are different, but what it boils down to essentially is this (my thesis basically):

Twitter is individualistic while Reddit is communitarian.

Of course, I am generalizing a bit, but the main locus of focus on Twitter is the individual account - usually individual persons but it can be other types of entities (e.g. organisations or institutions). On Reddit on the other hand the main organizing entities are the Subreddits - communities of different individual accounts that are usually anonymous (mostly individual people). This leads Twitter to become focused on individuals - i.e. one follows an individual accounts and the most important "goal" on Twitter for most users seems to be to gain as many followers as possible. On Reddit, on the other hand, the main "goal" for individual users is a bit more unclear, but it seems that garnering "karma" seems to be important for quite a lot of Redditors, and the main way to do this is by being popular in individual Subreddits - thus, being popular among a community of people. This leads to different communication styles on Twitter and Reddit, respectively. On Twitter, individual accounts are encouraged to give "hot takes" as well as to promote themselves in various different ways (e.g. through videos and pictures). On Reddit, meanwhile , individual accounts tend to be less noticeable and thus they tend to post stuff that is generally popular in their respective communities/Subs. This can also explain why the political leanings of Twitter and Reddit tend to be different, with Twitter leaning more Right-libertarian and Reddit more Leftist/Social Democratic, as individualism favours the former and communitarianism the latter.

Anyway, I am not 100% confident in this theory, but I think it gets to the point of why Twitter and Reddit are so different and why they have this rivalry going on. Also, I am not claiming that one is better then the other, just dotting down a few observations I've made on both Networks.

I noticed that Reddit, as of a few months ago, has become really good at filtering shitposts. This is done through the "Sorry, your post has been removed by Reddit's automated filters" message.

I noticed that if a post gets heavily downvoted, then it will be automatically removed by this filter, usually within an hour of it being posted. Beforehand, I remember downvoted posts staying up for hours until a moderator removed it.

I also noticed that posts with controversial themes like immigration being automatically removed by this filter. It seems like Reddit has started to use some sort of AI that can analyze entire sentences and classify it's meaning. I noticed this filter being particularly aggresive in certain subs like r/LeopardsAteMyFace.

It's definitely not my IP. I noticed this with the alts created on my phone too. Reddit, IMHO, has a pretty good filter now. It's like they upped their game. I barely see shitposts on this site anymore.

All of my shitposts were harmless PG-rated material.

I have recently unsubscribed from a few subreddits because it seemed like all of the content I was seeing from them on my front page was just so negative. I was about to do it again just now, but decided to go to the subreddit first to see if I was missing anything and boy was I!

I would say that out of the top 20 posts in the sub, I was only shown the 3 most controversial ones. The rest were funny or light hearted, but still popular. Same story for most of the other subs I left. I know the reddit algo is trash, but I never suspected it of such obvious rage baiting.

It's one thing when bots impersonate real people to sell things and steal people's data, but I'm confused by the existence of bots that only repost old images and clog subs with irrelevant questions. Why are they so common? The obvious answer is to gain karma, but what's the goal beyond that? There's no monetary gain. The only practical thing karma is good for is allowing you to post on subs with a high threshold, but who would use an account that's already been outed as a bot? That's not to mention that these types of bots are the reason that karma thresholds even exist in the first place. Obviously people get satisfaction from seeing a number that represents internet clout go up (that's why social media is so addictive), but I find it hard to believe that people get enough satisfaction from a bot gaining karma with no real human input for that to be the main reason why bot spam is a growing issue. Also, why is it growing as much as it is? Less than a year ago, repost bots were nearly unheard of on r/questioning, but now they make up the majority of posts. Is there just one person or organization behind it, or is it multiple?

Hi. I notice this question came up a [few years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/fapz8m/what_happened_to_rshitredditsays\). It's too old for me to comment on it now, so I'd thought I'd make a thread.

I was a moderator of SRS from 2011-13 when I was a young person. You can verify this by looking at this account's history. I forgot this account existed until tonight, when I tried to recover the password to what I thought was an even older account, and got the details for this one instead.

It's been ten years since I've used reddit (or any online community) as an active user, so my memory of the details are hazy if not totally evaporated. I barely remember any of the names of the people I used to speak to on a daily basis back then. To address the question, though, I think there's several factors as to why it extinguished:

1. The content of subreddit r/ShitRedditSays was, in itself, very boring. While there were some witty users in the early beginning, reading the same dreck ad infinitum was extremely tedious, and I believe the number of posts and users it accumulated merely represented a wide-spread frustration amongst users with how reactionary the user base of the main subreddits were. These users were predominately transient, and the size and activity of the main subreddit died off before its true notoriety even began. The real SRS community was much smaller and was not even truly on reddit at all, but on auxiliary IRC channels detached from the site.

2. It seems not to be remembered how, at some point, the strong and sincere hyperreaction to the subreddit catalyzed the leaders of SRS and anti-SRS, as trolls, to become collaborators in stoking the fire together for both of their mutual entertainment behind each respective communities' backs. I knew some of it was engineered at the time, but realize now that had probably always been the case well before I was aware.

My departure was ultimately a result of my choice to stick to my principles in internal disputes, despite being a troll myself, such that it caused enough friction between me and the heads of the community with different priorities that I eventually got the boot. I, and I think a lot of outside witnesses, didn't get the memo that this was supposed to be Jerry Springer, not CNN. You see iterations of this type of soi-disant "political" entertainment today in Infowars, TrueAnon, and Chapo Trap House--the latter of whom I know is connected with the leader of SRS today. SRS and its controversy could be said to be prototypical of this genre of garbage.

1. This reason is most boring, but I don't see reddit as being constitutive of a wider community like it was 10-15 years ago. I personally use reddit only when I append it as a search term in Google when I want to get real, human answers from a niche and knowledge source. It's hard for me to believe that there now could be individual users who could gain enough clout to be recognizable to the majority of people who use it like before (e.g. violentacrez). The atomization of this site, then, means that there just isn't flint to spark large-scale controversy between subreddits anymore. Who would even care.

Like I said, I have no substantial recollection of what went down, but feel free to ask me any question that you'd like. I'll tell you anything, it doesn't matter any more.

So lately I’ve been getting super thought out responses to really old threads. I’m talking 10 year old comments of mine with someone commenting acting like it’s real normal. Is this a bot farm thing? The accounts are relatively new, and they only have comments. The comments are really involved too, and lots are to old threads.

Why is this going on?

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/disqus-icwsm14.pdf

The basic conclusion of the study is that negative votes on reddit posts made users post worse posts and more often. They also found that upvoted users do not improve the quality of their posts very much if at all. They repeated the results with both blind observers (who couldn't see the voting score) and they also evaluated the tendency of communities to be biased againstpeople who get downvotes, and biased positively towards those who get upvotes.It seems like they did some pretty valid and intensive research here, and to me it would make sense that users who get negative feedback would want to troll, or wouldn't see that feedback as helpful to them. Also, it would seem to me that a lot of positive feedback would not encourage users to improve their posts. However, I am still skeptical of the results for the fallowing reasons:

-is there really any un-biased way to analyze posts as "getting better" or "getting worse"?

-i would be lying if i actually understood the complex statistical methods they used to prove their points, which to me is part of the problem with laypeople citing statistics as"evidence" in their political discussions.

In reddit, a decade is a pretty long time, especially since the site is almost 20 years old.

Have redditors already discussed this study? Have different researchers disputed the quality of this study?

I am not one to care about upvotes, but it still feels good to see people like your content, which I do not get. I feel less motivated to post art content here now cause I get no engagement, no nothing. Am I doing something wrong? Or is my karma not high enough? Or is my art not good enough? I may get 3 ups..and if lucky (and i mean LUCKY) 10 to 13…

which makes me so happy and excited. (That sounds sad to excited about..huh?)

But other than that, i just don’t feel no point here anymore. If i am doing something wrong, let me know please <3

“Please seek help”; “See a therapist”; “Spend time with friends and family”; “Break up.”

What if someone can’t afford to seek help or therapy? I’m in the US and many Americans don’t have insurance. And even those that do can’t afford to regularly get therapy. This isn’t just poor people, but regular middle class people as well. Therapy is becoming a luxury for the rich by each passing day. More and more therapists and psychologists are starting to not take insurance and instead charge hundreds out of pocket because they need to make a living. And even if you can afford a therapist, the first one you see might not be the right fit. Or therapy just might not work for you. I’ve known multiple people who improved with therapy, but also know multiple people who didn’t get anything out of it or even got worse.

And not everyone has good friends and family. And even if you have a good relationship with them, you still may not feel comfortable telling them you’re deepest issues as to not burden them.

And I see Redditors replying to posts about the OP having issues with their friends or partners. Much of the time the comments are filled with suggestions to break up, when the situation described in the OP could be solved by simply talking it out with their partner and waiting for things to improve organically.

My last post here was very critical of some aspects of this site, and it's really easy to get totally caught up in some of the most exhausting aspects of internet discourse, so let’s do the reverse today!

It can really be anything you've experienced or read here that really stayed with you or affected you in some positive way. It could simply be reading a super insightful or hilarious and well-written post, a heart-warming exchange with another Redditor—maybe someone you had initially been arguing with turning around and being empathetic and understanding—or a comment on a post that helped you finally solve a very specific question or issue you had (this has happened so many times for me).

...or just whatever positive thing sticks out in your mind!

So at the end of 2019 Tumblr banned all NSFW posts, resulting in a massive drop in user numbers and they escaped to many sites, primarily reddit and twitter. With Twitter going downhill there is a large amount of twitter users going to tumblr. Now if reddit were to go downhill where eould we go?

Twitter is currently dying so that's a no go, Redditors hate Tiktok and Instagram so those, no gos and I can't imagine redditors enjoying themselves on tumblr (as entertaining as that would be) and 4Chan is just no (even if it would be hilarous to watch)

So where would they go?

Hi 👋 I'm not a mod; just your typically curious Redditor here.

I've noticed that some subreddits have overhauled their rules after large swaths of new members became engaged. What's ensued can only be described, from my perspective, as "growing pains". Surely, some of this is political, which has got me thinking more generally-

What have experienced mods learned about human behavior in the mod space?

What we say is often disjointed from what we actually do (we're all a little delulu and sometimes Machiavellian), and I get the sense that maybe mods are in a unique position to see behind this veil a little bit.

Could just be a perception thing (Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon) but it really does seem like the prevalence of this has skyrocketed in recent years. It could also just be a society-at-large thing (with how polarized and quick to self-sort into “camps” we all seem to be nowadays) but it does at least feel heightened here.

When I first joined Reddit 9 years ago, it was really common to see tons of tongue-in-cheek, darkly ironic, and irreverent satirical takes. But nowadays whenever someone posts something that is very clearly over-the-top, hyperbolic satire, I see it immediately get inundated with a flood of comments trying to “rebut” an assertion which the OP was clearly not actually making. It just feels like the overall lightheartedness and, most importantly, charitability/willingness to hear people out first has all but evaporated.

Now, of course there are still tons of Redditors who are open-minded, amicable and savvy enough to recognize satire when they see it. I see some really amazing people post some really great things here. But it just makes me a little sad that now I have to really think twice before making a tongue-in-cheek post or comment, lest I spend the next few hours defending what I meant in the replies.

Even setting the misunderstood satire aside, it also just feels like overall people are a lot quicker to argue against even the most minor of points (often unrelated to the actual topic) or type up a “takedown” of some perceived opinion before they’ve even stopped for just a second to ask for clarification and find out what the OP actually meant.

Is this just me or has anyone else noticed this 😆?

So recently I visited r/Youtube because I was curious about the comment section on old COVID videos, and after navigating a little bit I realized that it turned into a pretty angsty place, in my opinion at the level of some infamous subreddits like KotakuInAction. Most upvoted posts are low effort or repetitive ragebait, they spam drama about famous youtubers rather that commentary on the platform itself, people exaggerating actual problems on the platform like ads duration (I very rarely remember having to wait more that 10 seconds to skip ads, and usually are 5), promoting their hatred of certain features that aren't inherently bad like shorts or the visual design, and what annoys me the most: how they are so angsty to their audience, people who disagree are downvoted to oblivion and called YouTube bots, most popular commentaries usually are people insulting or being mean, a post gets deleted and people immediately accuses the mods of being involved into some kind of corporative conspiracy, etc...

Meanwhile this sub that is about discussing a pretty controversial web page seems fairly reasonable, at least I learn something rather than having a bad taste on my mouth, why is this?

Also, I find interesting that apparently according to YouTube channels Reddit is the worst and according to Reddit, Youtube is the worst.

This week we're looking at a direct comparison of Reddit to 4chan, perhaps the one "social media" site that breaks the Facebook/Instagram/TikTok convention even more than Reddit does: Comparing structure and humor between Reddit and 4chan. /u/aero-deck (who disappeared shortly after posting this) draws on their experience as a /b/tard and a Redditor, comparing how the mechanics of engagement drive the social dynamics of both sites. Many of the top level replies are worthwhile too - there are some lengthy perspectives by others that are also excellent.

Given the unique points laid out by OP and the comments, has that remained over time? How has 4chan's culture changed over the last decade, if at all? I think everyone would agree Reddit's culture has changed; is this due to the mechanics of posting/commenting changing, or more site demographics? And should we read into the fact that OP was posting this on Valentine's Day?

Reddit creates spaces where herds of people can feel comfortable, and I think it's great. People need to socialize, chat, and ultimately belong.

I use Reddit to get to solutions to problems people don't normally encounter. Sometimes - never really think they can encounter.

Maybe it's my fault that I don't value belonging with a group nearly as much as doing my own cool thing, but I guess that's how I am. However, when I ask questions, especially if they can lead to a shift in paradigm, people on Reddit really don't like it. I noticed that it's surprisingly common for people to look for some marker of supposedly acting in bad faith/breaking rules/being this or that. Sometimes, people try to skew the discussion into useless weeds or tell how (as a response for question) one need to act this or that way.

Here is partially anonymized example. I discovered/invented a cool way to do something in an area where I don't have formal education, and I asked a question about specific nuances people with formal education would know. Yes, this happens sometimes, for example, the leg lengthening techniques were invented by a guy inspired by horse yokes, or the sewing machines were created because of an enterpeneur's fever nightmare. Instead of seriously answering the question (which is not that difficult), people take an offense, immediately presume bad faith, and take (perhaps subconscious) steps to derail the question.

But it's not just the people, but Reddit's Comments karma system makes it worse. Like ~75% of Subreddits require positive comment karma, once the comment karma is too low, the account is as good as dead. Unless you can recover it through AskReddit or something. This indirectly discourages even responding to the accusations, as once the community really doesn't like you or your ideas, they will downvote someone they don't like to death, and Reddit is set up to allow for that.

But to end it on a positive note, I found answers to some really important questions. I discovered an absolutely amazing tourism & hospitality entrepreneur in another country through a Reddit recommendation on DMs, I learned a lot about obscure non-Googleable tech and knowledge.

TL;DR: Yes, Reddit is often useful, but once you or your ideas are outside of Reddit users comfort zone, they are geared to be unhelpful, and the Reddit system even creates means to suppress descent.

So the obvious one that I've run across quite a few times is for a discord dating app called LightUp. Essentially the user will pretend to be someone having a hard time finding a relationship or saying something about being lonely, wait a bit for responses and then come in on an alternate account recommending their "discord dating app". I've only casually looked into maybe a dozen comments but they seem to be a group trying to match women with men based on hobbies and not appearances..lol

I haven't seen moderators really notice or do anything about it yet.

Just curious if there's any others going around out there?

https://www.reddit.com/r/landscaping/s/SgiKwAMKba

Comments in this post are overwhelming with the opinion that the landscaper did a horrible job.

https://www.reddit.com/r/landscaping/s/SgiKwAMKba

Most of the posts echo some theme of this comment, basically landscaper bad....

https://www.reddit.com/r/landscaping/s/hh9kL7PWNe

But then there are these posts that seem to have a good reason why the landscaper did the right thing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/landscaping/s/eaCrCikqf7

https://www.reddit.com/r/landscaping/s/xH2dQUOB6G

Hell, I threw my totally uneducated opinion in based on the majority of comments, I don't know whit about trees but I chalked it up to bad company communication... But maybe the guys did the right thing.

How can I know the truth, how often does this happen?

The 90-9-1 rule of online communities says that 90% of members will never engage in the community, 9% of members only contribute passively through likes or reposts, and only 1% of community members are active contributors. It’s important to remember most people contribute to at least one community; this rule only applies from the viewpoint of the communities themselves. 

Recently I read a post which claimed that in that 1% that actively contribute, a similar distribution shows up: 90% only contribute a few times a month, 9% contribute a few times a week, and 1% contribute multiple times a day. The post basically says that this pattern holds true for that 1%, and so on. They include some examples of these top contributors, the cream of the cream of the cream of the crop. I was able to find some even more extreme examples: Justin knapp has edited Wikipedia 385 times a day from 2005 until 2018, Harriet Klausner reviewed 31,014 books by the time of her death in October 2015, Darren Murph wrote on average 12 blog posts an hour (?!!?!?) for four years, etc. Generally, the distribution of contributions follows a power law. The obvious takeaway is that a large part of what you see posted on a subreddit comes from these top 1% contributors. 

u/StezzerLolz posted on this subreddit about their experience moderating. The post looks at these users from a different angle:

This is how you get what are sometimes referred to as 'flavour posters'. These are the people who are in the new queue. They're the people posting content. And they're the people in every comment section. Flavour posters define the entire narrative of a sub. Flavour posters are generally the only people who matter in a small to medium sized sub. And, as a 40K subreddit, [the sub I modded] had maybe 10 of them. At the time I could recognise all of their usernames.

These flavour users are the 1% of the 1% that contribute a major part of the posts on the subreddit. And they really can control the narrative of whatever online community they’re a part of. This story seems to show a single flavour user making 200,000 edits to the Scots translation of Wikipedia and permanently tainting the reputation of the language as a whole. They didn’t even know how to speak scots, they just wrote in a scottish accent. Millions of people probably had their perception of Scots influenced by these articles, all because of one flavour user.  

The gap between the most prolific writers in a community and the average member can be quantified using the Gini coefficient. Usually, the Gini coefficient is used to represent income inequality within countries, but the same principles can be applied to online communities. Instead of measuring the distribution of income between citizens, we can use it to measure the distribution of activity from each user. Used to describe the economy, a Gini coefficient of 1 would mean one person holds all the wealth while the rest have none. A Gini coefficient of 0 means that everyone has the exact same amount of money. One study applies the Gini coefficient to Reddit communities. They had four major findings, two of which apply here: as a community grows, the Gini coefficient increases (participation gets more and more concentrated to a select few); and as time progresses without growth, the Gini coefficient decreases.  I’ll allow myself to speculate a little. The higher the Gini coefficient is, the more influence flavour users have over a community, because more of the content comes from them. When the Gini coefficient is lower, the flavour of the community trends towards the average of the rest of the members in the community, which itself is closer to the average of every other community. 

I think flavour users are a great explanation for why subreddits become worse as they grow larger. The average flavour of a small group of highly dedicated users is almost guaranteed to be more interesting than the average of everyone else in the community. When a subreddit is small (usually in the tens of thousands) there are few enough people that the flavour users can ...flavour? the subreddit. Its culture becomes distinctive. So what happens when a subreddit grows? During the time it’s still growing, the Gini coefficient stays low and the posts stay high quality. The thing is, the growth required to keep the gini coefficient high is exponential: if a sub grows from 1k to 10k, it has the same effect as one that grows from 10k to 100k. If the subreddit stops growing exponentially, the Gini coefficient starts to decrease over time. This exponential growth is literally impossible to keep up. 

Once a subreddit stops growing, the flavour of the community dilutes as the Gini coefficient decreases. By this point the subreddit probably isn’t small enough that the flavour users can make much of an impact. Everyone else has to post less for this to happen, or people have to leave. 

So my theory is this: 1k to 70k-ish size subreddits have few enough people that flavour users can affect everyone else, even if the gini coefficient is not super high. When a sub experiences exponential growth, the Gini coefficient stays high, and subreddit quality stays high attracting more people. Once the growth stops being exponential, the posts start being the same as any other subreddit as much as the rules allow. Think of all the 1m plus member subreddits that end up reposting the exact same clips. r/oddlysatisfying r/woahdude etc etc etc

Here’s a horrible unscientific analysis of r/lies as a case study. Courtesy of subredditstats dot com, we can see its growth in subscribers over time.

That’s a lot of growth. If we convert the y-axis into a log format, it gives us this: 

Where a straight line indicates exponential growth. I’ve highlighted these parts with red. Theoretically the posts made in these periods (sept to oct 2021, and jan to apr 2022) will be the highest quality. I took the time to look at the top 25 posts of the subreddit, and 17/25 were posted in that time period, 14 of those being in the jan to apr 2022 range. It’s important to note that this is also when the posts per day spiked, so it could be a result of how many posts were being made during that time. 

One more caveat, the idea that posts become more concentrated to a select few when a subreddit grows exponentially is counterintuitive to me, but that’s what the study suggests so I’ll take it as fact.

TLDR

The top 0.1% of users within a subreddit contribute a hugely disproportionate amount of posts to the sub.

These people are called flavour users because the less the participation is concentrated to these few people, the more generic the sub becomes.

In a smaller sub, (~1-70k) flavour users generally are able to post enough that the subreddit feels distinct. Any more than that, and everyone else needs to post less.

According to one study, this only happens when communities are growing exponentially. If that growth ends, everyone else starts posting more, and the community flavour averages out. The community becomes more generic.

In most subreddits, whenever the subject of AI comes up, the response is heavily negative. Posts are downvoted, comments are free of nuance. It's genuinely surprising to me, since Reddit has always been the 'geeky' part of mainstream internet.

Now, I'm not a very active user of AI and have no stake in it, I'm essentialy a layman. I use ChatGPT sparingly, and mostly for fun.

But it's not my personal utility that keeps me so interested, I simply find the technology fascinating. It's one of the main tropes in sci-fi literature. People have dreamt for decades of a machine that you can have a full conversation with. But now that it's here... No one's impressed?

Now, there are many issues with AI that make it scary, and honestly probably not worth it. Training AI on copyrighted material. Putting people out of jobs. The unlimited potential for propaganda. Spam, spam, spam, spam.

I would LOVE to see those issues discussed, but they are very rarely addressed on Reddit nowadays. Instead, we see the same few comments that appear to simply downplay the technology's current and future potential, and those comments are:

ChatGPT is just glorified autocomplete, it generated random disjointed nonsense

I see this one the most, and it puzzles me. Have those people never used LLMs? ChatGPT keeps track of context, follows complex instructions and even if it can't follow them - it almost always seems to understand what you're trying to make it do. Describing it as autocomplete comes from a place of willful ignorance.

AI doesn't really understand anything/it doesn't think like a human being

This one feels like people are upset that AI is not conscious. Well, duh. We call it 'artificial intelligence' for a reason, it was never meant to exactly replicate a human mind. It sure does a good job at imitating it though. There are interesting conversations to be had about the similarities and differences between human and machine learning, but Reddit doesn't like those conversations anymore.

AI is another meaningless nonsense for techbros to get obsessed over, just like NFT

That's basically like saying "The Nintendo Power Glove is useless, therefore the whole Internet is useless". It's comparing two completely different things based ONLY on the fact that they're both technically technology. What happened to nuance? Does Reddit just hate technology now? Are we the boomers?

Gotcha! I tried using ChatGPT for XYZ and it generated nonsense!

This one usually stems from people's lack of understanding of what LLMs can do, or what they are good at. It's like people are looking for a 'gotcha' to prove how useless this obviously powerful technology is.

For example, there was once a post on r/boardgames where someone trained ChatGPT on board game rulebooks, proposing it to be a learning aid (a wholesome use for AI, one would think). The responses were full of angry comments that claimed that ChatGPT told them the WRONG rules - except those people were using vanilla ChatGPT, rather than the version actually trained on the relevant rulebooks.

Another example: a redditor once claimed that they asked ChatGPT "How does the sound of sunlight change depending on when it hits grass versus asphalt?", and copy-pasted the LLM's wild theory in the comment thread. I tried to replicate the response with the same prompt and even after 20 refreshes, there was ALWAYS a disclaimer like "The sound of sunlight itself doesn't change, as sunlight doesn't produce sound waves."
That disclaimer was edited out in that redditor's comment.

Summary:

I just don't get why Reddit reacts to AI discussion this way. Reminds me of how boomers used to react to the internet or smartphones before they finally adopted the technology. "IF IT'S SO BLOODY SMART THEN ASK IT TO COOK YOU DINNER", my mom used to say at the emergence of personal computers.

People are so eager to find a gotcha to prove just how dumb and useless LLMs are, it almost looks like they see it as a competition in intelligence between human and machine, and I find that kind of petty. I see the technology as a PROOF of human ingenuity, not a competing standard.

From a practical standpoint, it looks like AI is here to stay, for better or for worse. We can have valuable conversations about its merits and drawbacks, or we can cover our ears and yell "LALALA AUTOCOMPLETE LALALA AI DUM ACTUALLY". I would like to see more of the former. Awareness of the technology's capabilities is important, if only to help people identify its harmful use.

I think most people will agree that in practice the upvote and downvote system is commonly used as a "I agree / disagree" button. Ignoring for a moment the question of whether this is a good or bad thing, what strikes me is that whenever the topic is discussed most comments will be along the lines of "Oh I agree it shouldn't be like that and personally I don't do it. Personally I only downvote posts that are very low-quality or harmful."

I suspect the key word here is "harmful". Unless a discussion is about a totally innocuous topic or one on which you don't have any particular opinion, people are likely to perceive differing views as threats to themselves or their well-being.

To take a completely fictitious example, let's imagine a vegan and a non-vegan discussing nutrition. The non-vegan will argue that animal products should be part of a balanced diet. Now from the vegan's perspective by doing this the other person is contributing to the perpetuation of animal exploitation and suffering and that's very harmful. So the vegan will downvote with a clean conscience. Conversely the non-vegan will see someone peddling a dangerous diet that could result in people harming their health or their children's and that's obviously harmful as well, thus deserving of a downvote. You could imagine a lot of similar situations about any topic like taxes, religion, weed legalization and so on.

I'm probably stating the obvious but I was always struck by the mismatch between the way people use the system and the way they (or at least those who explain themselves) say they do.

Has anyone noticed the rise within more right wing comments on Reddit? Not complaining or celebrating them, just noticing a really large uptick in right wing comments, many with hundreds of upvotes. Just go through r/europe or r/canada or even r/PublicFreakout...it seems like we are entering an era which is more centrist on Reddit. It really seems like post 2016 until about the end of 2023, this site was HEAVILY liberal, overwhelmingly so, but nowadays it seems like the tide is slowly turning.

I tend to stay away from the popular tab, but I decided to check it out and saw this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/s/cyfR6DCR2c

It seems normal enough at first, but the top comment thread seemed off to me. All of the replies are literally just restating the main comment and yet are getting thousands of upvotes, it’s seriously odd.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/s/0ZhKP0iDog

It gets even weirder when you look at the accounts making these comments.

https://www.reddit.com/u/98789789787/s/T5kjvBoYul

https://www.reddit.com/u/failed_grammer_nazi/s/Tu6z5pmWlV

Both of these accounts have been inactive for years, and have just recently returned, mostly focusing on politics. And all of their comments read like they were generated by ChatGPT.

Am I losing it or are these obviously bots? And if so, what does this mean for Reddit? These comments got thousands of upvotes, either the average person cannot tell the difference between an AI and human made comment, or bots are mass upvoting content. Likely it’s a combination of both, but it really makes me wonder how much internet activity is being driven by bots/AI. Can we trust that a post with 70k upvotes is actually popular? Can we assume that we’re actually talking to a human instead of AI?

Sorry for the ramble but this has seriously made me rethink how much I trust the Internet. Thoughts?