Snowflake Challenge #4
Jan. 10th, 2026 08:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brightly_litChallenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page
Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!
I spend a fair bit of time on Reddit. When I first found Reddit, as I think many of us do at first, I thought, Wow, look at all these well-informed people with interesting opinions who are so nice and funny! Then one day you get downvoted for the stupidest imaginable thing, or regarding a question you happen to be knowledgable about you see some actually well-informed person being downvoted to oblivion while some inaccurate but popular comment is at the top, or you realize you've seen the same exact post phrased the same exact way every other day for a month, and suddenly you see through the facade.
Reddit's whole upvote/downvote system was based on the charmingly idealistic notion that it would cause the cream to rise to the top. What it actually does, of course, is cause not the most accurate, informative, or helpful posts and comments, but the most popular posts and comments, to rise to the top--i.e. something that reflects the most popular notions of the time, something that reinforces what readers already believe or want to believe, something that makes them feel good, etc. It causes a certain type of user--that is, some idiot who talks out their ass entertainingly with great authority--to be hailed as brilliant, while people who may lack pizazz but otherwise have much to offer tend to get ignored.
Also, Reddit has a big bot problem. It's easy for more paranoid users to become convinced that most of the commenters with whom they're interacting are not actually people. (I personally think the number of comments not made by a human is less than 15%, but it is hard to tell.) However many of the comments are not composed by a human, undoubtedly lots of the most popular posts are composed by AI, but even before AI, a great many of the front-page posts that purport to be the truth were always fabrications, which does suck, but at least the fake stuff can be entertaining. And even if the original post is fake, many of the comments on it are sincere and informative/touching/hilarious.
However many bots and trolls may plague the place, there are lots of real people there, too. One really cool thing about Reddit is that there's a subreddit for EVERYTHING. Smaller subreddits, especially where there is advice being sought and dispensed, can be invaluable. Much--maybe even most--of the best gardening/homesteading/food-preservation/plant-identification information I've gotten has come from Reddit--real people with real experience who actually know what they're talking about. (For some reason this kind of information is very hard to come by in articles; so many gardening articles seem to have been written by someone who has never grown a plant--and from what I know about how magazines hire writers, that's very likely to be the case.)
When it comes to fandom, Reddit is pretty good. It lacks the friend-group aspect of lj or dw. You probably won't make any friends there, and general-interest posts tend to repeat questions like "What's your favorite x" or "What's the worst episode of y you've ever seen"; the conversation never progresses and gets deeper. One of the best and worst aspects of Reddit is how anonymous it is. Most of the time, a question asked of one user is answered by another, and most people probably never notice. But so far in my experience, in fandom spaces there, people have been pretty nice.
As long as I take it with a massive grain of salt, never assuming anything I see there is true, Reddit can be a lot of fun, and an interesting window into humanity and its evolving opinions.
Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!
I spend a fair bit of time on Reddit. When I first found Reddit, as I think many of us do at first, I thought, Wow, look at all these well-informed people with interesting opinions who are so nice and funny! Then one day you get downvoted for the stupidest imaginable thing, or regarding a question you happen to be knowledgable about you see some actually well-informed person being downvoted to oblivion while some inaccurate but popular comment is at the top, or you realize you've seen the same exact post phrased the same exact way every other day for a month, and suddenly you see through the facade.
Reddit's whole upvote/downvote system was based on the charmingly idealistic notion that it would cause the cream to rise to the top. What it actually does, of course, is cause not the most accurate, informative, or helpful posts and comments, but the most popular posts and comments, to rise to the top--i.e. something that reflects the most popular notions of the time, something that reinforces what readers already believe or want to believe, something that makes them feel good, etc. It causes a certain type of user--that is, some idiot who talks out their ass entertainingly with great authority--to be hailed as brilliant, while people who may lack pizazz but otherwise have much to offer tend to get ignored.
Also, Reddit has a big bot problem. It's easy for more paranoid users to become convinced that most of the commenters with whom they're interacting are not actually people. (I personally think the number of comments not made by a human is less than 15%, but it is hard to tell.) However many of the comments are not composed by a human, undoubtedly lots of the most popular posts are composed by AI, but even before AI, a great many of the front-page posts that purport to be the truth were always fabrications, which does suck, but at least the fake stuff can be entertaining. And even if the original post is fake, many of the comments on it are sincere and informative/touching/hilarious.
However many bots and trolls may plague the place, there are lots of real people there, too. One really cool thing about Reddit is that there's a subreddit for EVERYTHING. Smaller subreddits, especially where there is advice being sought and dispensed, can be invaluable. Much--maybe even most--of the best gardening/homesteading/food-preservation/plant-identification information I've gotten has come from Reddit--real people with real experience who actually know what they're talking about. (For some reason this kind of information is very hard to come by in articles; so many gardening articles seem to have been written by someone who has never grown a plant--and from what I know about how magazines hire writers, that's very likely to be the case.)
When it comes to fandom, Reddit is pretty good. It lacks the friend-group aspect of lj or dw. You probably won't make any friends there, and general-interest posts tend to repeat questions like "What's your favorite x" or "What's the worst episode of y you've ever seen"; the conversation never progresses and gets deeper. One of the best and worst aspects of Reddit is how anonymous it is. Most of the time, a question asked of one user is answered by another, and most people probably never notice. But so far in my experience, in fandom spaces there, people have been pretty nice.
As long as I take it with a massive grain of salt, never assuming anything I see there is true, Reddit can be a lot of fun, and an interesting window into humanity and its evolving opinions.
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Date: 2026-01-11 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-12 04:21 am (UTC)