My gut feeling is that most of the comments on Reddit are written by teenagers. In the real world there are plenty of context clues that I use to determine if someone is worth listening to or not. On the internet, you have to assume in good faith that a given comment was written by someone who has enough life experience to be taken seriously.
I mean, it depends on the sub, but if you expand your definition of "teenager" to include "36 years old, but still emotionally a teenager", then I think you are right.
In my experience, any subreddits with general appeal suffer from the same problem. Just find your niche/hobby subs and stick to them. Stay away from r/pics, news, etc...
You can still have tiny kings in small subs - mods with <10k members who let that "power" go to their heads - but it is more rare.
Unfortunately that doesn’t work anymore either, unless you only go browse those subreddits. It’s fully gone the Facebook way, where 90% of your home feed is then “Suggested” or “Promoted” posts from elsewhere.
Sounds like an issue with your client. old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com never did that to me, and I don't recall any client from F-Droid doing that either.
It's weird to hang out with old friends who have not changed at all since high school. It's kind of amazing how they managed to not change after so much time!
I think this "reddit is full of teenagers" statement is a trope for two reaspons.
First, my partner is a highschool math teacher and in his casual surveys and discussions, most students don't use reddit: tiktok still dominates. The ones that do, mostly boys, just watch fight and war videos. Girls apparently are into makeup videos. News to me.
Second, I'm in my 50's and there's no way teenagers are interested in political discussions. Maybe they are, but the people I get in flame wars with speak and act like angry adults: their rages and complaints would require too much effort for a teenager to fabricate.
I think the truth is Reddit is mostly adults but for some reason lots of adults want to believe it is just teenagers, possibly because we act like children online sometimes?
Genuinely curious: political discussions on Reddit are notably sterile and quickly devolve into shouting matches. Why even spend your energy or time arguing with shills/trolls/bots/someone whose opinion won’t change as a result of the discussion/argument?
Because they aren't always sterile, thats yet ANOTHER trope about reddit: I've learned quite a bit when a historian enters the chat. And, TBH, sometimes I like a good ol' internet fight when someone spouts some dumb shit (esp. MAGA nonsense). It's in my blood. Being a good troll is NOT easy, it is a skill that requires practice.
>there's no way teenagers are interested in political discussions. Maybe they are, but the people I get in flame wars with speak and act like angry adults
pretty much describes how I used reddit as a teenager.
There are the default front-page subreddits, that attract "the masses."
Then there's everything else, and each of those subreddits has its own moderation team and culture. They range from trash to gold. Generalizing about these is almost always off-base.
Nothing showed this better than that anti-work mod. In that case the stereotype of a teenage loser posting from their mom's basement was laughably true. Reddit got a lot more understandable when you realize that most of the posts are coming from people like that.
Please, HN is intellectual paradise compared to reddit. I once tried to get into a debate on reddit about whether China was the next rising superpower or not. I pointed out China's demographic issues, how the developed world has largely turned against them in sentiment, how they're dependent on the outside world for food and energy, etc.
The response I got? "Lol people have been saying China's going to collapse for decades and it hasn't happened yet lol" Oh and I got downvoted while that response got up-voted. I basically became a full time lurker in reddit after that experience. Complete waste of 15 minutes typing out an actual argument.
Contrast that to HN where even when people have a misinformed argument they at least make an effort to engage, and I've actually been put in my place a few times with new information/well reasoned arguments that weren't just pulled out of someone's ass.
When that subreddit exploded in size, it also included a lot of people who weren't actually "anti-work", but using it as an outlet to complain about and discuss employee abuse and extremely low wages to the point of quitting.
And the mod also clarified she works 20+ hours/week in addition to being a full-time student, which is hardly a loser-teenager stereotype being peddled here. She clearly had no media training and the folks at Fox took advantage of that, though.
What she decides to call herself his her own choice.
We could go down the sex vs gender debate, but I think it's much simpler than that: I don't care - I think there is much more to a person than what their birth sex and their chosen gender is to make it something I want to take issue with.
Since it doesn't impact you - at all - why do you even care?
Let people use the pronouns they want and identify with whatever gender they feel more comfortable with and give them the courtesy to address them in a way that makes them feel welcome.
Nah that's ridiculous. I am probably somewhere around the average level of accomplishment here and there's a decent chance that you've interacted with my code at some point. I'm also married, have traveled the world, have a kid, and a home of my own. My life experience is way way way ahead of the mod I'm talking about.
And in the grand scheme of HN that's really not that much. We have people who have actual legitimate accomplishments like creating widely used software or founding businesses.
Its either bots or teenagers. I have noticed that Reddit is at its worst during the Summer. The rest of the time it can get pretty bad, but during the summer is when I hear the most extremist, poorly thought out opinions possible.
It doesn't help that 40-50% are very impressionable, which is a bad combination when you put them all in a virtual room together like Reddit or Twitter.
You are factually incorrect, in fact the subreddit told her not to do the interview. This has been well documented. It's not very helpful to post your unsubstantiated beliefs when it is very easy to look up the facts.
Perhaps a nitpick or a misunderstanding, but subreddits don't choose mods. Mods choose mods. The initial mod is just the mod that started it.
If I remember correctly the popular sentiment on r/antiwork re: the mod's appearance on Fox was more along the lines of oh god why but I'm not certain.
> I don't know how that author identified the most prolific reviewer at the time but I found one reviewer with 20.8k reviews since 2011. That's just under 3,000 reviews per year, which comes out to around 8 per day. This man has written an average of 8 reviews on Amazon per day, all of the ones I see about books, every day for seven years. I thought it might be some bot account writing fake reviews in exchange for money, but if it is then it's a really good bot because Grady Harp is a real person whose job matches that account's description. And my skimming of some reviews looked like they were all relevant to the book, and he has the "verified purchase" tag on all of them, which also means he's probably actually reading them.
sounds a lot more like the guy has hired a staff of reviewers that he pays to post under his name (and he obviously could be receiving money from publishers or hired publicity companies to do so) , rather than he is an insane person reading 3000 books a year. Not so much "insane" as "has yet another shady internet business".
Slightly off topic, but is it shady? There highly respected magazines dedicated to reviewing books. This is just shifting it into a different medium. I suppose pretending they are all a person is on the shady side, but if that's the only option Amazon gives, I can understand why it's like that. If the reviews are adding value (and according to the OP they seem to be), is it much shadier than the Paris Review or the New York Review of Books?
it's shady because they are pretending to be a specific person writing something, which they are not. I would not be surprised if the picture shown has nothing to do with who actually writes those reviews.
> If the reviews are adding value (and according to the OP they seem to be), is it much shadier than the Paris Review or the New York Review of Books?
yes because the source producing the review is bogus in this case. Reading book reviews from your (assumed to be a non-famous literary critic!) brother in law vs. a famous book reviewer are two different kinds of value add.
Now straying far off the topic, how about when this goes the other way around? When authors attach their names to books they do not write (e.g. James Patterson with <name in much smaller type>) or who might not even be alive (V.C. Andrews or Robert Ludlum)?
This actually reminds me of "Richard Bachman" which was Steven King using a pen name and fake picture which I think was striving for the opposite effect.
> When authors attach their names to books they do not write (e.g. James Patterson with <name in much smaller type>) or who might not even be alive (V.C. Andrews or Robert Ludlum)?
I would say that is lame, but the actual writer's name is still there. it's not untraceable like a random profile on the internet. When we see these celebrity books that are written by someone else, I dont think there's any confusion among those who actually care to know, that "book X was written by a ghost writer". if celebrity X is claiming, "I wrote that book myself!" when they didn't, they are lying, and yes that is bad.
Haha, I've read reviews from a similar account/person. I was always amazed at how prolific (s)he was, you would find their review for books spanning many different technical topics.
The same can be said about the entertainment business since pretty much forever. Writers can be quite eccentric people, yet manage to tell compelling stories about characters we relate to. Movie makers, actors, and script writers, all might lead extraordinary lives, yet try to tell stories about ordinary people. Stand-up comedians are another example, where you might have some low-life, whore-mongering, low-functioning alcoholic doing bits of observational comedy about office life and his awful wife.
One development that is new is the one where reviews and encyclopedia entries are written by people seemingly detached from reality. That's a sobering thought for anyone looking for factual answers.
While this is true, the stakes are higher which I think acts as a balancing mechanism.
The traditional entertainments always have a profit-motive. They cannot publish anything too insane as they worry it might unduly effect profits. So there’s at least some gatekeeping and some critical apparatus that is not quite peer review but that at least provides some critical filter and dampening mechanism, even the most morally deplorable entertainers often tried to keep the unsavory aspects of their lives off the stage because they understood the potential dangers of alienating audiences once the truth of their morales came to the surface.
The internet has a far different structure and the motives for creators differ. A profit motive still exists, but other factors are more prevalent. In fact, I’d argue that the internet has allowed views previously considered more fringe to make their way into the more rigid systems of traditional television etc. since the success of radical views on the internet has convinced the traditional media that such radical views are not in fact a harm to profit motive but may actually increase profits (you can see this most clearly in the increasing radicalism of the views expressed by political television pundits, who by the way, often go so far as to reference views espoused online)
This has the potential to provide a lot of meta-insights about society if it coalesces into a distinct branch of social studies.
Power laws are everywhere. Why isn't there a field dedicated to studying these social/psychological archetypes? Like: what kinds of people are most likely to write the comments we read, what kinds of people are more likely to become politicians, what kinds of people are more likely to seek "Trust & Safety jobs" at social media companies, or become journalists, etc. Groups cluster, and no "influential" group (defining influencial liberally) is representative or free of bias. There's a lot of insights to be gained in this kind of "meta-thinking" about society. This would be far more insightful than basic observations about gender or race ratios, and would highlight far deeper divisions within society, which could help address them.
While he didn’t use the concept of power law, Michel Foucault’s work was largely about this subject.
Unfortunately, subsequent academics have viewed Foucault’s work as a complete theoretic and used it as an instrument to apply to other areas rather than continue and extend the study of power itself.
This is interesting to hear, and I can imagine in the future one would not do well with work from home type jobs, while the other would. (Assuming the personalities hold)
I want to cross-link a comment from a related thread that's also on the front page right now, because I think it's really important:
> my current theory is that the biggest "threat" on the internet is people believing what they read represents the actual views of average citizens. It's not.
These are individual "users" not necessarily equating to individual "people"...
The other more plausible and sinister explanation is that they are simply front's for organisations through which many people contribute to carefully manipulate online perception through legitimate looking user accounts. This would explain the high volume and yet high quality - compared to spam bot reviews which are low effort reposts or simple automatic rephrasing of a pool of content. Instead it would be manually crafted output, by many individuals, spinning a consistent and genuine sounding individual "character".
It is really interesting how all of this works. Kind of scares me since HN is the platform I actually post on since there's usually good discussion and feedback on stuff like software architecture. Am I one of these people, but in a more question oriented way?
I've searched HN for info on specific things before, only to see that in the comments of one of the posts, there's the little orange asterisk showing me that this is my comment. I'm even feeding into this cycle right now...
As long as I don't spend too much time on HN outside of work mornings, I'll consider myself fine.
Seems the edit/footnote at the end of the article is particularly relevant in this context:
>>Edit: I guess my tone-projection is off. A lot of people seem to be put-off by my usage of the word "insane." I intended that as tongue-in-cheek and did not mean to imply that any of them literally have diagnosable mental illnesses. I have a lot of respect for all of the individuals I listed and they seem like nice people, I was just trying to make a point about how unusual their behavior is.
How is this different from classical philosophy? Look into the personal lives of... well... most major philosophers and political thinkers. Humanity is led by its lunatics.
I think the question is should "regular people" accept what they're told by "lunatics" as if they were "regular", or should some filter or skepticism be applied?
HN is literally a site for the kind of people that would be interested in such topics, and a lot of what otherwise makes first page on other sites is banned to keep things interesting. Why are you surprised that ultra-niche topics like these, of all things, are trending?
Sure, because there is no middle-ground between the update of a unicode character that has only ever been used once in a single text, and the Kardashians, that's well known.
>"Edit: I guess my tone-projection is off. A lot of people seem to be put-off by my usage of the word "insane." I intended that as tongue-in-cheek and did not mean to imply that any of them literally have diagnosable mental illnesses. I have a lot of respect for all of the individuals I listed and they seem like nice people, I was just trying to make a point about how unusual their behavior is."
