Okay. Here we go. This one's a longie
Content warning: child p*rnography, nonconsensual p*rn
In my last blog post, I made a point of showing my distaste for Reddit. Strange, as by most accounts, I'm the target audience if you were to profile one. I'm obsessed with media and the discussion surrounding it, I'm a 20-something autistic man, I probably could fit the term 'terminally online', I parade myself as a psuedo-intellectual, I'm passionate about my politics, I play games, and most importantly, I don't shut the fuck up. So why don't I like Reddit??
Well my ires from Reddit partially stem from the demographic around it, or at least the public perception of said demographic. But hating something because of a preconceived notion of its user-base is an idiotic approach. No, the real reason I have such a bone to pick is how the website's functionality, features, and to an extent philosophy create the culture around it in a very McLhuanist way.
Reddit, in its original form, was billed as a platform free of censorship, a place where free-thought could exist, immune from the same hurdles users face when trying to discuss touchy-topics or share media that would otherwise be banned. In one sentence, you see the appeal. There is, categorically speaking, a large user-base for such a platform that isn't consolidated into 'big tech. A digital library of Alexandria, with all the knowledge and culture of today, unfiltered, yet neatly sorted.
The first problem with that pitch though is; platforms are required by law to avoid hosting or promoting any illegal material, an already massive amount of moderation is needed to maintain that law, but when your platform is billed on being free of any restrictions whatsoever, you have a conflict of interest. Furthermore, just because something isn't illegal, doesn't make it wildly unpalatable. For years, one of the top subreddits and best of Reddit 2008 was r/jailbait, a forum that hosted sexualised images of minors. This all came to a head when one user posted images of an underage girl and claimed to have nude pictures too. The amount of requests for those images was described as a flood. It wasn't until 2011 that the subreddit was shut down. To this day, there is a sizable user-base who have lamented this as nothing more than Reddit 'selling out'. This is far from isolated, right-wing political extremism, videos of real people dying, nonconsensual pornography, doxxing, piracy, active misinformation, these are just some of the topics that have been banned in one way or another to the same response.
"Fucking sellouts".
As if a minor's right to privacy is second to the right to violate it.
This is not incomparable to platforms like Kick, a streaming service where anything goes (which also actively hosts the aforementioned material, but live). The truth is, if your platform is truly marketed as 'anything goes', you will attract the people whose 'anything' wouldn't 'go' elsewhere, and that's a dangerous crowd of people.
What Redditors fail to realize is, all glory aside, a social media platform that has financial and political interests as well as stakeholders. The power of free speech is inherently combative with the power of a dollar. This boiled into the 'Reddit Riots' when the company hiked the price of API tools to moderate. No matter how free a forum can be, Reddit's size and status needs to be maintained if for nothing else economics, and the users are fundamentally at the whims of whatever corporate changes are made.
Nonetheless, this mythology of Reddit as a digital free market of ideas and superior to other platforms permeates throughout the culture.
Putting unsavory content aside, which I concede as a minority, the culture at large is, ironically enough, one large parasocial circlejerk. I'll admit, I feel like Reddit tends to attract people who are more invested in deeper discussion in theory. With any social media however, there tends to be a system of hierarchy, and Reddit is not an exception by any notable means, but the way the hierarchy is presented and enforced is of note
The system of Reddit is largely dictated by 'upvotes' and 'downvotes' (see likes and dislikes on a YouTube Video). In most spaces, this can be used effectively to express personal taste and promote and demote content though an algorithm. This is functionally fine on what Reddit might call 'Normie' sites like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube etc. None of these sites are considered by its user-base a good representation of any topic, barring the most fringe theorists and tech-illiterate boomers. The average Facebook user isn't looking to Meta for keeping up to date with politics or seeing what the consensus is on season 3 of Community, they care about cat pics and maybe their friends' engagement photos. Reddit however, has gained an audience that sees a subreddit as an abridged version of academia, that the collective knowledge of hundreds of individuals focussing on one thing can outweigh someone with thousands of hours participating in one thing. Thus, the users become garage-qualified psuedo-intellectuals painfully unaware of the actual depth of any particular topic, and even less so self-aware.
Constraining further, the upvotes system is collated in an individual score of karma, the sum of all positive and negative votes you've received over the course of your account. Usually a large amount of karma makes you seen as a respected figure, and a negative amount can result in you being ostracized from a community, even systematically banned from them. Participants are then incentivized to say what is generally considered popular in whichever circle in order to reap the benefits of karma. Those in the circle will then reward them with upvotes. Newer community members will then see what is considered to be the standard opinion, believe the mythos that this consensus must be legitimate, and the cycle continues.
It's a bubble
The kickback from this manifests itself in the over-valuing karma as a form of personal merit, or worse a mark of intelligence. The illusion of internet points signifying intelligence is more a by-product of the bubble and its very in-group behavior. See: enjoy your downvote, kid.
For a side note, I've always found the use of IQ to be a very elitist tool when used unchecked. It's a score from a standardized test, something that the 'misunderstood intellectuals' lament as a barrier for them to express their 'inner genius'. One of my cousin's belongs to MENSA, a society open to those within the top 2 percentile on the IQ scale. She's invited me before, saying she'd think I could be within that range. Now, while I admit my deadly sin would probably be pride, I've never considered following up on that or checking my IQ for one reason. I couldn't give a single fuck. The circle-jerking and self-congratulatory nature of prioritizing IQ is a form of elitism that acts only to isolate you further. At its best, it's incredibly pretentious and annoying, halfway you start running into arguments that draw a lot of parallels to classism. At worst, you're dealing in eugenics and debates around the moral good of euthanizing those with an IQ below 90. Just go outside and actually learn social skills for fuck sake.
And before I see any of you try to say that group-think isn't real or that surely a community would escape, consider what people have done over all social media accounts to gain favor; likes, comments, subscription, hell even dislikes, all just forms of attention to farm. For many people, these communities may be the only place they feel like they can talk about their favorite game, their job, what they love, without it being deemed unacceptable.
A great example of this is the GameStop fiasco, where thousands of random users were getting garage-qualified in the stock market in an effort to outbid the biggest players, proudly bragging that they didn't fall for the 'biased' academia and experts, and instead were a legitimate grassroots movement, trading thousands of dollars based on the advice of whatever was the top post that day. A common rallying cry was that they were gamers, that the stock market wasn't prepared for the patience they were willing to display being gamers and all. As if they didn't consider that would be used against them. Skipping over a lot of history, finance-talk and cringe, to this day, the GameStop fiasco has consolidated into a highly resilient cult who're convinced their efforts will cause a mass-crash in the entire economy, cooking the kind of theories and cope comparable to QAnon. Utterly convinced the prophesied golden-age will come any day now, despite all evidence outside of the Reddit narrative pointing to the contrary: their plan failed.
A serious place of discussion can't also exist within a system that issues social rewards and risks, perceived or otherwise, to be unbiased.
And you can see *why* these people build narratives. Having insider information, feeling smart, more educated than 'normies' is a powerful feeling that Reddit enables, sucking them back in for another dose of 'intellectual discussion'. I feel like a large reason Reddit has a largely male-userbase is it allows them to feel the fantasy akin to sigma male mentality, the same catharsis you get from Walter White, Ryan Gosling, even Isekai anime . It helps men feel extraordinary in their otherwise un-extrordinary lives, a form of wish fulfillment that late capitalism promised them as children, only to drop the facade as they grew up.
But if you were particularly attentive to that example, you would notice another issue. If taken too far, the bubble itself causes people to feel like what it is they're talking about is something that is larger than the microcosm it inhabits. Their worldview and communication becomes informed by an almost altered reality.
In normal social interaction, there's a level of social norms. These are the rules you set for yourself, the understanding you can't simply start talking about an interest that is yours alone without context, that conversation will also deal with the interests of other people, that you can't quote an inside joke that the other does not know about it. You have to communicate in a shared language and framework to have any meaningful conversations. Reddit mostly works in the same conventions, but how they're applied is drastically different. As Reddit works as a bubble, there is a certain decorum that is unique to that space. Certain ways of talking, manners that are expected. And the mythos of Reddit being 'above' other platforms gives the illusion of validity and transferability to these expectations. When someone is an 'avid redditor', you can spot it. They start adopting that language into real life, start quoting memes, not understanding that the context is largely removed or withheld from others. When they don't get the response, laughs, agreement or even acceptance they want, they go back to the place that does, Reddit, usually lamenting how much real life sucks. This only furthers their social proclivities towards terminally online culture, making them even more isolated and patriotic. Any attempt at translation, only proves how isolated they are, reaffirming their beliefs.
And you can see how all this turns itself into a militant pride. The overintellectualistion of a website that hosts just as much porn as it does memes as it does political discussions about why Trump is bad. Why the 'Reddit University' term has come about, why people are building narratives upon narratives of how they are the modern philosophers, the so called 'intellectuals of the web'. And that's what I hate most about Reddit. Its pride. A system, shunting isolated individuals further into isolation, all while chanting that their isolation, is what makes them stronger. They aren't concerned with discussion, as much as they are opinion. And opinion, as much as who won the internet for today.
They're not building the library of Alexandria, they are building a tomb.
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"