
A little gender experiment confirms that Reddit is full of douchebags - ColinWright
http://manboobz.com/2012/04/22/a-little-gender-experiment-confirms-that-reddit-is-full-of-douchebags/
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debacle
I'm an avid redditor, and while there certainly are douchebags on reddit, I
would surmise that the ratio is roughly similar to the number douchebags on
the Internet as a whole, or in the real world.

I'm going to use a term here that I rarely use, but I think fits this sort of
conversation: butthurt. You all probably know what I'm talking about when I
say that, and if you don't you can probably figure it out.

Anyway, it seems like there's a certain population of reddit[1] that very
easily gets butthurt about a great many things. There are entire reddits
devoted to butthurt, and the reality is that the subreddit system doesn't
really cater to contrary opinions - if you disagree, you get downvoted. If you
disagree often enough and get downvoted often enough, you just unsubscribe
from the subreddit because there is literally 0% chance that your argument
will be recognized as anything but trolling.

This creates an incentive for communities to be relatively one dimensional,
which leads to groupthink.

In this particular instance, we have biased parties on both sides of the
equation saying that there is/isn't a problem, but the entirety of the
evidence is anecdotal, and one side is being exceeding inflammatory (even for
the Internet).

Are there misogynists on reddit? I'm certain of it. Are there feminazis on
reddit? Certainly. Do either of these populations make up even nearly an
appreciable percentage of the site's population? Almost definitely not.

[1] I don't want to be one of those 'I have a four digit UID' guys, but it
seems as though, as time goes on, the general maturity, intelligence, and
acceptiveness of reddit goes down. I believe this is simply a testament to its
popularity, but certainly not a positive one.

~~~
garethsprice
"Are there misogynists on reddit? I'm certain of it. Are there feminazis on
reddit? Certainly. Do either of these populations make up even nearly an
appreciable percentage of the site's population? Almost definitely not."

It's not the percentage that counts - after all, what is an acceptable
percentage of commenters who will tell you you should be raped?

I don't know if there is a solution to this issue. Increasing verification and
moderation leads to stilted, boring, stagnated communities (Facebook).
Anonymous conversation with a large enough population will unavoidably attract
anti-social individuals (4chan, Reddit, YouTube, Fox News, er, well, basically
everywhere else that's popular).

Are online communities just doomed to a short cycle and inevitable decline as
they get more popular? (see: Eternal September). This is certainly the case
with every community I've been a part of since I first got online about 20
years ago.

~~~
debacle
Of course the percentage matters. To say anything less would be to not
understand what a society is and how the Internet works.

You're making broad generalizations about the reddit community by calling them
antisocial.

------
tzs
The experiment seems flawed. Based on her description, it seems she knew
whether she was going to be posting from her female-sounding account or her
male-sounding account when she would write a comment.

She should have written the comment first, then used a random number generator
to decide which account to post from. In fact, that step should have been
automated so that she would not know, even after it was posted, which account
it was posted from.

To check the responses, another script should have been used that would pull
up her comments and the responses, but filter out her account name, so that
when she judged how the comment had been received, she would not know if she
was judging a comment from the male account or the female account.

