I’ve generally found that avoiding the biggest crowds seems to also avoid some (though not all) of the worst behavior. More specialized subreddits, communities, and magazines tend to be more chill, and also more focused on their topics.

It’s arguably so easy to “farm karma” that I accidentally did it for a while. Just kept posting silly puns to reply to stuff people post on the Florida Man subreddit.

Reddit karma ain’t worth much at all.

On one hand downvotes are an expression of negativity, but on the other hand downvotes are an outlet for negativity.

Meanwhile, I’m scratching my head trying to figure out why a bunch of the top comments here got like one downvote each, lol.

Honestly I don’t think an algorithm needs to work very hard to “be mean” like that. Sure, you can purposely put people with clashing views in each other sight on a place where people go to hang out and have fun. But you don’t even need to go do that on purpose. To some extent, people naturally produce more “engagement” with stuff that’s controversial/argumentative.

Imagine if I were to walk past you and say some completely innocent comment. Now imagine I were to walk past you and insult your favorite movie/show/song/game/whatever. You’d be far more likely to respond in the latter case.

So, as people respond, more activity is generated, and that makes the post “hotter”. Simply boost what’s hot, and you have a veritable litany of controversy.

(or his mother)

lol, suspiciously specific denial

Yeah, I wasn’t really using Reddit much before Reddit had its meltdown and the threadiverse exploded onto the scene. I’ve had a lot of fun here. Frankly I think I understand how the threadiverse works more than I understand how Reddit works.

I’ve had a similar experience with Mastodon. Wasn’t a big Twitter user, but now I’m more active on Mastodon than I ever was on Twitter. On each of multiple Mastodon accounts.

Good gosh I’ve always hated how I often can’t reuse packaging material and/or containers for something else. I would want to but (1) I get too many of them, (2) they’re sometimes too dirty (for various reasons) to be able to reuse easily, and (3) even if I could come up with ways to reuse them I’d also have to convince people I live with.

We need to reduce the amount of stuff from further upstream, rather than just having consumers try to do all the three R’s by themselves.