r/TheoryOfReddit

I know Reddit has always had a combative tone. I'm not trying to claim there was ever some golden age where everyone was charitable and thoughtful.

But lately I've noticed what feels like an increase in the baseline level of hostility across the site, not just in one subreddit. More threads seem to turn into dunking, bad-faith readings, pile-ons, moralizing, a snarky reply at every opportunity.

I'm curious whether other long-time users have noticed the same thing. Whether there's any evidence for a platform-wide shift in norms, or if this is mostly nostalgia / selection bias / subreddit choice.

For people who have used Reddit for years: does the overall tone feel noticeably more hostile lately, even compared to Reddit's usual level of snark and argument? If so, when did you start noticing it, and what do you think changed?

So I get obsessed with old media, specifically TV shows from the 90s. I recently watched Friends, and while I'm aware that it isn't very good, I still love it wholly and completely.

The r/howyoudoin subreddit still has 200k weekly visitors, 4k weekly contributions, and around 450k members. This is a show that ended almost 25 years ago.

How long do these TV show subreddits tend to last? Mad About You ran for 7 years in the 90s and was extremely popular as well, but the only subreddit they have is extremely dead.

The Seinfeld subreddit is also very active, but its pretty much all jokes and random quotes, no real discussion or meaningful/interesting posts.

So whats usually the fate of these subreddits? What do you think is gonna happen to the Friends one, given that it was such a big show?

I’ve had this Reddit account for about 8 years. I originally made it as a teenager to promote an event in a games subreddit, then barely touched it for years. During that time, I always had a fairly negative impression of Reddit from what Id seen online, but I decided to actually give it a proper try after watching videos about the platform.

For the last month, Ive been using Reddit regularly. I started by answering questions and trying to help people in relationship advice communities. Later I joined some political discussions, where I ended up getting into heated arguments and received hostility including comments directed at me because Im European.

Most recently I posted in a Japan travel subreddit because my girlfriend lives in Tokyo. Ive been visiting her every 3-4 months for about a year, and we have already done many of the usual tourist activities. I simply wanted suggestions for things that would also be fun for a local.
Instead, a surprising number of replies assumed I was trying to “impress” my girlfriend or that there was something wrong with our relationship. Others mocked me for not knowing specific Japanese cultural terms and one person even insulted my girlfriend. Defending oneself and clarifying just led to getting downvoted. It felt like the discussion stopped being about travel recommendations and became about making assumptions about me and my life instead.

Is this a normal Reddit experience? Ive found plenty of genuinely helpful people, but Ive also noticed that some threads seem to snowball into personal attacks or arguments that have little to do with the topic.

I feel like I encountered the lowest lives on the internet on here.

**Article TL;DR**

* AI is changing what makes the internet valuable.
* Authentic human conversations are becoming more valuable than polished web content.
* Communities like Reddit are evolving from discussion forums into critical AI training infrastructure, even if a lot of behavior is moderated.
* The next battle for AI may be over access to genuine human experience, rather than just behavioral patterns at scale.
* Human context at the individual level is becoming a valuable source of AI training data.

**Post**

I like that Reddit has become a valuable archive of genuine human interaction. But the fact that this value is now being commoditised and, in effect, used to sell things back to us doesn't really sit right with me.

I know our online behavior has been tracked for almost as long as the internet has been been around, but this feels more intrusive somehow.

I'm curious how everyone else feels about it. Is Reddit actually the best source of this kind of data compared with platforms like Discord, TikTok or, heaven forbid, X?

Or is this simply the next evolution of the internet economy and is years of genuine human conversations and context needed to build frontier AI products.?

*This post was written entirely by a human. To all you AI slop spammers out there, you all have a nice day :)*

I have been wondering… I joined Reddit because I have a medical condition and wanted to learn and help people on a couple of topics where I have been dealing with eg insomnia…

But I also wanted to learn other things /opinions ect… so I explored some other forums here on Reddit.. and what I have noticed is this

You have the functional users, they are looking for answers and solutions and insights for their problems/qiestions and on those forums people are very grateful for the help, very friendly but they don’t care about upvotes and high reward culture (karma), but these forums give a lot of satisfaction and that’s the reward…

Then you have the “for fun users” open forums discussion forums. Eg askreddit ect… There people say what they think, good or bad sometimes rude. They don’t care about other people, only themselve. it’s all about the upvotes in most forums… their is no gratitude no real satisfaction besides getting the most upvotes…

What is your preference? For me it is obvious?

And/or the original sub(s) being jerked have become indistinguishable from the jerk subs.

Its almost like the irony/sincerity spectrum has collapsed in a quantum wavefront which demolished both.

Concrete manifestations of the phenomenon include:

1. CJ posts which are both sauced and obviously insincere—meaning any vaguely sober Redditor should be able to suss “something ain’t right here”—whose commenters respond earnestly or in good faith, as though it were the main sub

2. Posts on the main subs for which there are CJs which are fundamentally indistinguishable from the CJ satires.

3. Jerkers who notice the above two phenomena and who then gleefully start posting their jerks on the main subs, since no one visiting the CJ gets it.

There’s got to be some kind of critical theory term for satire collapse, right?

This is confusion on the deBordian level: what’s even real any more?

I had a thought in the shower, thinking of how many of us there must be who started downvoting things they aren't interested in because they themselves got unceremoniously downvoted on Reddit. The way actual Karma works is that many people start to act the way they are treated, and so downvoting can easily become a habit that multiplies. So I thought perhaps if each of us was docked one Karma point for every downvote we gave out, it would be a sort of instant karma system where if you were becoming a serial down-voter, you would find out pretty quickly instead of breeding an entire ecosystem.

But this kind of topic wasn't allowed on showerthoughts, so I thought perhaps it is an unpopular opinion, but it also wasn't allowed on unpopularopinion, so I thought, hold on, where can I have a casual conversation about this? 🙂

Would instantkarma reduction for downvoting be an idea? Or perhaps a "downvote count" under our profile page Karma count? Or is it really important for us to anonymously engage with things we don't fancy...?

Update: this topic was also prohibited in casualconversations. lol

I’ve been thinking about a pattern I’ve noticed over the years, and I wonder if there’s a social psychology explanation for it?

The moment you become the OP you become the person standing at the front of the classroom giving a presentation. Regardless of The topic.

In a classroom, everyone else is sitting comfortably. They get to ask questions, joke, point out mistakes, challenge assumptions, or even nitpick. The presenter is expected to answer politely, clarify misunderstandings, and generally “take it.” If the presenter responds in any other way, the audience often turns against them, even if the presenter is objectively correct.

A random commenter can be sarcastic or dismissive and often get upvotes.If OP responds with the exact same level of sarcasm, people suddenly perceive them as defensive, arrogant or unable to take criticism.

It feels like there’s an unwritten social contract:“You asked for our attention. Now you accept our harsh judgment. And you deserve anything we give you”

Is this a unique Reddit behaviour? If not, what does this tell us about humanity?

One obvious exception is Donald Trump. He often seems to ignore this unwritten rule entirely. Instead of patiently absorbing criticism, he attacks back just as aggressively, sometimes more so. Yet many of his supporters interpret that not as insecurity, but as strength. How?

Is the anonymity somehow at play here?

Some key quotes:

>Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-time mods and Redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will start requiring everyone to log in.

> We can’t promise it will be around forever, but [Reddit CEO Steve Huffman] himself has said we’ll keep supporting it while folks are still using it. That said, it doesn’t have the same modern security tech stack reddit.com has, so we need to tighten security on old reddit to keep it viable.

I'm not some old user of reddit I'm new here but i have heard a lot about reddit like there is no restriction we can post anything. Reddit is somehow connected to the dark web everything is anonymous etc. But it's nothing like in fact it's more restrictive than any other platform don't mind I'm not complaining about reddit as a whole because obviously the purpose of reddit is clear and it's doing it's best but the restrictions on every subreddit like fr whatever i post somehow gets removed by moderator even some posts gets a good amount of views still they get removed by moderator and many subreddits doesn't even approves the post and it's not like I'm posting some wrong stuff you can just scroll through my profile it's mostly about tech and advices related to that and still most of my posts gets banned after few hours or even worse never gets approved idk what should i think. Am i doing something wrong? Or am i missing something? I get it every subreddit has rules but aren't those rules much more restrictive than it needed to be?

Something I've noticed about some K-pop subreddits is that people often confuse criticism with hate.

You can say something as simple as "I found this moment a bit cringe" or "I didn't like this performance," and suddenly people act as if you personally attacked the idol. Instead of discussing your point, they downvote you into oblivion and jump to defend someone who doesn't even know they exist.

It honestly makes these spaces feel less like discussion forums and more like echo chambers. If every opinion has to be positive, then what's even the point of having discussions?

Disagree with me if you want, that's completely fine. But there's a huge difference between disagreeing with someone's opinion and treating any criticism as hate. K-pop fans constantly say they want "honest discussions," yet the moment someone shares a respectful negative opinion, they're labeled a hater.

Downvotes have become less about whether someone contributes to the conversation and more about whether people like what they're reading. That's not how discussions grow.

These are my main critiques of Reddit and I think they are not the typical “moderators are mean” critique – which I agree with, but am not promoting here.

My critiques are mainly that Reddit replaced forum culture (the bulletin board) but in some ways downgraded it.

1: I am a very intentional user.  I come up with a thought, then I decide where I am going to post it.  Sometimes the choice is obvious – but sometimes subreddits that seem they should fit based on subdomain name introduce strict rules that get my hopes up and then force me to consider another option.  In old forum culture this was not really a big issue.  There were categories, but they were not so rule heavy.

2: As an intentional user, I do not want to doom scroll.  On the other hand there are simply too many posts to read chronologically.  To avoid being pulled into a bandwagon “hot” feed – I am forced to work around this by taking advantage of Reddit’s AI contracts and using LLM to query a personalized list of topics for me.  Reddit’s own AI does not do this well and its search is rather primitive.  I suspect this is intentional – Reddit wants you to doomscroll.  The workaround involves external AIs.

3: I appreciate that Reddit rejects shadow bans used in other major social sites.  However, I feel Reddit is too reactive to hit pieces from mainstream media and closes down rule abiding subreddits reactively.  In my opinion, this is why MGTOW is not here anymore and why StupidPol is under threat.  Two events made this worse a) the IPO and preparation for it b) the insurgent political campaigns of Trump and Sanders (big tech clamped down).  When Huffman became CEO people thought it was a step in the right direction – until he unveiled that he no longer supported the decentralized “free speech” approach.

4: I feel Reddit borrows from blog culture as opposed to forum culture in that the post is the main event and replies are mainly feedback for the poster.  In contrast, classic forum culture treats replies as relatively equal to the opening post.  This means posts have a short window for actual activity.  While they remain useful for passive viewing as an information library – they are confined to that, active commenting completely drops off.

5: I feel the upvote and downvote system is something I live with but something I would rather eliminate.

6: I feel Reddit trades persistent personalities for scale.  I hardly even notice usernames.

If any mods see this please let me know if this is too heavy for this sub. I will take it down if so.

Trigger warning for self harm and suicide.

Does anyone else think a large amount of people posting themselves to be roasted in r/roastme are engaging in self harm behaviours because of their poor mental health?

Don't get me wrong, a lot of posts aren't concerning and the OP is roasting people back and just generally having what seems like a good time. I don't really understand it but I respect that some people genuinely love 'the art of roasting'.

But some descriptions attached to these posts are really concerning. Some of these posts are made by people who are depressed, have had horrible life events happen to them recently, and/or have body image issues. When I see these posts I can't help but think they are just engaging in self harm behaviours and the internet is joining in.

I have believed this is the case with many of these posters for a long time. But it got a bit deeper for me after r/roastme was recommended to me again today.

At points in my life I've been very suicidal. I think a lot of people who have dealt with being suicidal will understand that sometimes you want to end everything but can't go through with it, so you wish you could feel so horrible that you can go through with ending your life. Sometimes it's not just wishing and people engage in self harming behaviours so they can go through with their plans. Things like burning bridges, going on benders, etc.

This type of thinking is very common amongst people with severe mental health struggles and is what really concerns me. I worry that some of these people are at this point in their struggles and want to engage in self harm behaviours through posting to r/roastme so they can take another step to getting to a point emotionally in which they are able to go through with ending their lives.

I did some google searching and looked through Reddit and have found people who have had similar concerns surrounding people with mental health struggles using r/roastme to engage in self harm.

But I have never seen someone talk about how suicidal ideation fits into these self harming behaviours.

I would like some people to weigh in on the topic and see what your opinions are. Part of me is thinking, is it really this deep? It feels like it is.

I’ve noticed in one of the local subs I am in an influx of brand new accounts posting spam or regurgitating local news for karma. Usually the first or second comment on their post will be someone calling out OP for being a bot with a fresh account (less than a week).

Larger subs it is less of a big deal because there are account age or even karma requirements for posting comments.

Obviously older accounts gain credibility from constant posting over years. The chance of them being used for botting is dramatically smaller than a brand new accounts.

My question is, has this given veteran accounts more relevance or weight over discussions in small to medium subs?

I define ”Veteran” as any account older than 8 years, ideally with at least 5000 karma to show activity.

Please share your thoughts .

Almost every time I get some smarmy reply, some dismissive asshole, some holier-than-thou Saint Redditor who thinks they're a god-given gift of "truth bombs" because their IQ test said 101 and they're now "above average"... it's a hidden profile user.

My thoughts on why asshole Redditors love hidden profiles:

• It hides that nearly every interaction they've entered into on this site is toxic, thus baiting some users into giving them the benefit of the doubt and engaging with them when they otherwise wouldn't have if they could see the comment history

• Users who need to be right all the time are protected from being called out for their wrong past predictions/comments by anyone in their communities other than mods

• They're into degenerate shit and love to argue, and got tired of (rightfully) getting shut down every time with "lol you post in furry diaper fetish subs"

Why are users with open and honest histories forced to interact with people using a feature almost universally adored by assholes and bad actors? If they want to hide, let me hide all their content, everywhere on Reddit. I shouldn't ever have to read posts or comments from hidden profile users, and they shouldn't be able to engage with any of my stuff.

Artists (nowadays called "creators") used to have "muses", i.e. one person in their lives that inspired them to go on with their work.

Nowadays, few people seem to have muses but they attract a lot of critics in the early stages of developing their ideas (COUGH reddit COUGH) - does this mean that today's creator's have a harder time because they are discouraged from pursuing their ideas earlier than in days past? 

Also: Are creators inadvertantly making it harder for themselves by posting too early to reddit? I've seen it happen too many times: People rushing to a subreddit, pitching an idea that is barely fleshed out asking for validation before actually engaging with it and producing not even an early draft. This just asks for being torn down because people will generally not judge your idea's potential but only the effort you have already put in.

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One thing that all humans share is an instinct to punishment. This punishment can come in the form of extreme violence, such as burning someone at the stake for being a witch, and it can take the form of something much more benign- like gate keeping and elitism. All are forms of punishment.

In order to punish, there requires in the most healthy of humans a set of conditions to be present that wipes their hands of blame for their innate instinct to punish. Neurology informs us that the human mind is made up of several different operating systems working in concert. When the instinct to punish aligns with a credible social narrative for the WHY someone has felt it safe to openly punish and cheer its application , they will be capable of incredible cruelty. This is the god of the Old Testament at work. Applied in the modern context it’s “Eye for an AI.”

No matter what science tells us about the mind, these advances in understanding our nature will not change us fundamentally as a species. Why, some of the best among us have ancestors who showed up to every public execution and cheered as the heads were lopped off. It was okay- the executed were not covered by any amount of considerations relied upon by humanity at its finest to award compassion or pity. They got what they deserved and your ancestor? They baked a mean loaf of bread with only the tiniest amounts of plaster of Paris to fill it out. Solid blokes.

For the sake of this piece, I’ve decided to take the time to not use AI whatsoever. Ive also decided to put this admission later in the piece because I want to prove that people, by and large, will not read this far because they lack the ability to do so. But if you’ve made it this far please look at the opening sequence. Does it still look like AI now that I’ve informed you it isn’t? Can you detect the human touch as well as you can AI? Would you even know humanity if it was talking directly to you?

Further to the point of chosing to not use AI- in order to even understand what that means, and in practical terms in a user case such as mine, one must have a creative process of their very own to compare with those of others. If you don’t even so much as possess a robust process, then you won’t really grasp if subterfuge is occuring through the use of the modern LLM tools. Not that that will matter much to you, most likely, because you’re not there to engage with ideas requiring deep thought. Your instinct is to sniff out and find an excuse to punish and commonly that is why you’re reading. maybe you're a serial AI punisher, going from thread to thread, never affected by any idea, but only getting dopamine by announcing you’ve detected the use of AI. Go witch hunter, go! Youre doing gods work!

As an artist, I have not led with statistics, but rather, abstract associations and language meant to evoke scenes and settings in the readers mind to achieve my goal of writing this piece.

That said, you must understand something- AI cannot do that in the way I now communicate. And you wouldn’t desire it otherwise. A large language model can make writing more accessible because it homogenizes syntax and vernacular. Already, from the way I have written this, there are certain calling cards of my unique and specific region of origin, experiences, and socioeconomic background. This could make it harder to follow if you’re not from my specific area of the English speaking world. But AI can’t make up story beats that are feverish and intentional. it can’t make up turns of phrase that connect seemingly unconnected concepts. It cant write you a story anyone will want to read. But it can take story beats and employ your own rhetorical devices into a more accessible form that best mirrors the entirety of what you already are fed daily by the corporate magazines and news stories have shifted your baseline understanding of what good writing is.

the concept and Intention must remain human to realize the power of the tools. To conceive of something, as Ive conceived this imperitive to rebut the new incarnation of the town square beheading, can only be derived from thought.

And here, in forums such as Reddit,we find, time and again, the most mundane and uncommunicative minds among us barely being able to tolerate authoring a comment longer than “you used ai”. that’s all the effort they had to use to get their dopamine to drip feed them.

Think of that for a moment. What faculties or wonders of the human mind are you championing to object to someone’s use of AI when you yourself are so over bored and over stimulated that you spend the least amount of cognitive energy to punish someone else? Just because someone’s cognition may not be impressive enough to brute force and manual labor out a piece for you to skim as you’re on your toilet doom scrolling, doesn’t mean that you yourself possess a remarkable human mind. And before you even know the WHAT you want to pose as your reasonable objection in reaction to this accusation , you’d likely have to crowdsource a valid point to make originating from someone more thoughtful than yourself so that you still achieve your dopamine.

It is 2026 and You’re likely already fooled, or will be in time, by AI generated videos. Stop feasting on that cheap dopamine and figure out what you have to say to the human race for yourself. Whatever it takes to get your message across is acceptable as long as it adds to our greater collective of understanding.

now I’d like to point out the pure lunacy of the modern and lazy position-

Every published work you have ever read was submitted to an editor who took the breadth of IDEAS presented to them and cut and arranged them. But the authors name is on the book isn’t it? spellcheck, Microsoft word, grammerly etc etc all alter your writing and have done so for decades. And yes, if you didn’t, the grammar Nazis came for you didn’t they? expending very little energy to punish you for mistaking “your” and “you’re”.

again chasing that dopamine high.

History informs us that the witch hunter provided no service to society- made no good that fed, that nourished the body or soul. The executioner was no more than a human axe with nothing to contribute. just a dumb brute raising his violence over head and bellowing “you used AI”.

And if you’ve made it this far I must congratulate you on your endurance! You’ve displayed some real cognitive stamina to actually interact with human mind as it speaks to you in its own earned vernacular and idiosyncrasies. If this is what people most craved, then it’s what would still be for sale in magazines like VICE. But metrics have already informed us what audiences like, and it ain’t THIS. The human voice is not what people want. And it’s not what sales. The first thing that would need to happen for this piece to reach a large readership is all friction to be removed to make it accessible as possible. I would need an editor on retainer… or perhaps a LLM.

Because for gods sake, wouldn’t want to exhaust anyone!

oh, and did you note the mocking tone I employed? That’s my instinct to punish at work.

*written on an iPhone over the course of an hour