I wonder if that has anything to do with the popularity of subs that are about disliking things or groups of people. That kind of shit drives engagement but turns communities toxic really fast.
I use(d) RIF, which let me filter subs out of my feed and the experience has been a lot less horrid, except for when those subs leak their toxic waste into other discussions, which happens way to often.
Reddit’s far left can be pretty toxic too. As an old liberal myself, I don’t believe that there are any good kinds of hate or discrimination, but if you argue against that kind of crap, the absolute worst people come out to defend it. A good chunk of my negative interactions have been with those people.
That being said, the Eternal September is real. I don’t know anyone in real life who actually thinks like that. The trouble is, if you have ten million users, a tenth of a percent of them could be assholes and that’s still 10,000 obnoxious assholes.
Before y’all miss the point, were the male and female characters designed the way the were for everyone’s enjoyment or for a single demographic’s?
A single demographic, clearly.
My wife listens to books on tape basically all the time, and some of those books are pretty horny and treat the character designs of their men in words the same way that One Piece treats the character designs of women in pictures. As such, it seems to me that those particular books are also targeted at a single demographic; and while I don’t think this has actually been studied by anyone that I’m aware of, it seems at least anecdotally that there’s more current written fiction geared exclusively towards straight women than there is geared exclusively towards straight men.
My point here isn’t “waddabout books, those are bad too”; it’s to point out that the existence of media that’s geared toward the enjoyment of some demographic or another is perfectly okay. One Piece doesn’t need to be aimed equally toward every demographic. Anyone who wants to like it is allowed to like it. If someone doesn’t like it because of the character designs, that’s fine too; the authors of the series aren’t obligated to alter their character designs to appeal to everyone. They can make it however they want.
This goes doubly for the random art that people post on reddit that r/mendrawingwomen frequently links to. Artists aren’t obligated to appeal to everyone equally. First and foremost, they’re trying to make something that appeals to them. And if people are positioned in a way that some people find attractive and other people find awkward-looking, if that’s the intent of the art, then that’s fine.
Now, you bring up kids, and I want to say that I think the idea of educating people about the difference between fantasy and reality is important, and that’s how we need to be dealing with misconceptions coming from things like porn. r/mendrawingwomen is not the kind of subreddit that’s ideal for doing the kind of non-judgmental education that needs to be done, though.
It’s meant to be anonymous on Reddit, but it doesn’t seem to be meant to be anonymous here. Accountable downvoting seems to me like it’s something that’ll keep the conversation a lot less toxic, and discourage people from just quietly downvoting other people who are participating in the discussion but disagree with them.
Non-anonymous downvoting is a bad mechanic, particularly since downvotes are tied to a comment’s prominence in the discussion. If you’re too embarrassed to be seen downvoting something, maybe you’re doing something wrong. I don’t have any problem being seen downvoting bigotry or trolling, but if I downvote somebody for disagreeing with me and having a good point, maybe I ought to feel a bit ashamed of that.
You probably agree with their reasoning and general premise.
Now go back and suggest that there isn’t a “good” or “bad” way to draw women, and that being horny doesn’t make you a bad artist or a bad person, and see how that plays out. I bet you’ll get banned, or at the very least downvoted into oblivion. Every dumping sub has some amount of debate about who they’re dumping on, but that doesn’t stop them from being a dumping sub.
Also, I’ve seen stuff get posted there just for beginner anatomy mistakes. Constantly looking for content to post and dump on (even if it’s a poor fit) is the nature of that kind of sub, because rageboxes reward that behavior.
Edit: Also, most importantly, those kinds of subreddits leak. The most toxic people in the subreddit (even if the majority are absolutely wonderful people) are the ones who are nasty outside of the sub.
I don’t know that one very well. But my primary distinction is really be whether it’s people making fun of themselves, or people making fun of other people, even within the same hobby. I’m sure there are some subs with “circlejerk” in the name that aren’t like that.
I could do without communities whose primary purpose it is to dump on other groups of people. That means the manosphere and far right subs, but it also means thinks like the various circlejerks and mendrawingwomen. Those kinds of places just serve as echo chambers for rage, and if communities like that start getting popular I’ll start a server myself and filter them out for people who don’t want to be exposed to it.
This sounds like something the fediverse should be able to solve easily. For people who don’t want to be anywhere near porn, you can start a fediverse site and just not aggregate porn, and then like-minded people can go there, and nobody has to be cut off from everybody else just because of differences of opinion about porn.
Hidden up/down totals
Hidden up/downvote names (I understand the concern about the info being scraped by advertisers, but it should stay visible at least to the person who left the comment and the magazine moderators)
Generally high amounts of toxicity
I’ve seen reports here from this morning where people are saying that they’re even restoring comments deleted with Redact.
From a technical standpoint, adding a database table that is a comment revision history is trivial and barely requires any alternation of existing code. Even reddit could do it.
I’ve always suspected that they did it a long time ago in response to redact.
Unfortunately, they can undo that in seconds.
Honestly, part of what makes sites shitty is isn’t just the pursuit of profit over all else, but also the Eternal September. On the internet, quantity follows quality – that is, a high quality discussion board with a small to medium population will come into being, then everyone else will start moving toward it, and as more people show up, it gets more and more toxic, until the quality drops. I’m hoping that the fediverse will to some extent be able to alleviate that by allowing people to split off to some extent without having to leave completely.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with continuing to use reddit if you want to (I am, for now), but just be aware that part of the reason they want to block free API access is likely so they can sell all of the content they’ve collected for use in training large language models. If you post there, you’re contributing.
Reddit is going to go into a slow decline. It’s not going to burn down.
What this is actually doing is allowing other general discussion sites to reach critical mass so that people who are sick of reddit but couldn’t find anywhere else to go (such as myself) have a choice.
Reddit is like the Wal Mart of internet discussion forums. Some people shop at Wal Mart because they want to, and some people shop there because they drove all the other stores out of business and they’re the only place left.
What will ultimately hurt reddit is the existence of viable alternatives.
I know people are of differing opinions on this and a lot of people are sad to see reddit go out like this, but I’ve personally wanted to dump reddit for like a decade now, but there just wasn’t anywhere to go. Even if it recovers completely, people who are disillusioned will have options now.
This isn’t going to completely destroy reddit. Things will eventually go back to mostly how they were, but the difference is that some other places will have attracted a critical mass of people so as to provide an actual alternative. What’s probably going to happen is that reddit will begin a long, slow decline over the course of years. It’ll probably be around in some form or another for quite a long time, much in the same way that Slashdot, Fark, and Digg are still sputtering along.
Honestly, I’m not feeling grief so much as I just have this muscle memory where I keep checking RIF on my phone and now it’s just a bunch of random crap because there’s barely any content left for people to upvote. I imagine this will resolve itself once RIF stops working.
One UI change that could address this somewhat would be that if multiple communities post the same link, the discussions are grouped together in an expandable box on the main page. That wouldn’t require any voodoo magic to merge the threads, and it would make room on the main page for things other than news about reddit.