You are confusing explicit and implicit punishment: the world "punishes" me for doing risky physical things in a way a video game doesn't; I can jump off a building and "die" in a video game, and potentially lose nothing. There are effectively no ramifications of any form on reddit for being an asshole or a bully or a troll: except in some isolated corner cases, for actual users (as opposed to people using reddit as a brand outlet, such as a developer of a popular video game) the value of a reddit account is effectively zero... people are unlikely to recognize it, if thy do people are unlikely to have read many of your comments, and you can always make a new one that is nearly impossible to ban. This effectively destroys the normal mechanisms we have as humans to keep people from being horrible, and reddit fails to replace with mechanisms that matter in the same way.

Yeah, says everyone except every reputable psychologist ever, and any parent who hasn't raised an out of control little monster of a child.

Negative reinforcement works better than any other form of reinforcement, except when paired with positive reinforcement for desired behaviors, just like innumerable studies and common goddamned sense tell you.

My first thought was that your comment was a little out there, but then I realized that I'm not that big on punishment with my own kids. I just let life punish them and stand by to assist them if they're in over their heads as well as to advise them on how to avoid future pitfalls.

Punishment that I would inflict would be fairly orthogonal to the real hazards that they'll face in life, so I haven't seen much point in it. I guess I'm more of a hippie than I thought. ;)

I was trying to keep things in the most general terms. A problem is certainly that you can hardly talk to the mob (I’ve tried that in some cases of cyberbullying, racism etc. on Reddit). You simply get downvoted and your comment gets buried.

It seems that there too few feedback loops in the Reddit community, possibly because it’s so easy to be ignorant online, and the popular ones are also of pretty low quality (SRS, subredditdrama, …). Those who can provide high quality feedback are too few and probably also don’t care enough.

According to vet and animal behaviorist Ian Dunbar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Dunbar), the best way to train dogs is not by punishing them when they do something "wrong", but to reward them when they do something right.

He also tried this method on his own children and it worked quite well for his family :D

However, it is more effective at discouraging behavior than negative reinforcement.

> Punishment is a pretty bad way to address misbehaviour.

As someone who's anticipating having kids in a few years, I'm genuinely curious as to what a better approach is.