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Comment by mhink | Hacker News Reader

I mean, for what it's worth there's an aspect of this on Reddit, in the sense that you can choose which subreddits to join (and can maintain multiple accounts to keep your experiences separate).

Although I'm sure it's not perfect, it's not terrible either. Especially if you follow the perennial Reddit advice and unsubscribe from the massive default subs.

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I kind of disagree about this: maybe it's different if you're more mature but reddit was my first social media platform, I used it a lot in middle school, and in my experience rage bait was a huge problem. Rage bait subreddits become more and more extreme over time, losing the ability to distinguish the people they hate from parodies of the people they hate and effectively building up an effigy/totem of "the other side" to concentrate that hate onto. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I eventually realized I had to quit reddit because the extent to which I engaged in rage bait made me a worse person.

Yeah I agree, had the same experience. I found I literally couldn’t get away from the rage bait either. They keep putting things in your feed even if your aren’t subscribed.

Reddit is also just an awful hive mind.

oof it's probably worse now than it was for me lol, when I used it I don't think they even had an algorithmic feed, just a subscribed and /r/all.

and yeah the hivemind stuff is pretty bad. I'm reminded of a talk that ViHart of all people did where they argued that in a McLuhanist "the medium is the message" way, reddit's focus on up and down votes and karma creates an extremely judgy and kind of adversarial experience that eventually breeds hiveminds. I'd also argue that reddit's focus on small communities managed individually by specific moderators creates an undercurrent of site drama that reliably rears its ugly head every few months or so, but I guess that's neither here nor there.

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