Guenther_Amanita , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I wouldn’t agree with “better content” per se.

There’s just as much “spam” (links to articles, low effort posts, etc.) as everywhere else. At the same time, the content is waaaay better.

Karma

The fact that you don’t have to keep your karma in mind here let’s you speak more freely.

If I would say “Pineapple on pizza is disgusting”, I would have been downvoted to oblivion on Reddit. Here, they just ignore it, OR, don’t downvote and tell me why I might be wrong.

Back to Reddit: That, in fact, would give me two options:

1. Delete this said comment, which would discourage discussions and make every community hive-minded, or,
2. Stay strong to my opinion, and loose the ability to post to many subs anymore, because I now have -5000 Karma.

I always chose 1… Here, I don’t care. And this mindset has lead to many great, mind opening discussions.

Even on subs like r/Changemyview or r/Unpopularopinion this culture didn’t exist. No opinion was unpopular, merely “weird” (like “I like my socks wet” and stuff). Every “unpopular” opinion was popular on Reddit. And elsewhere, everything was a fight.

On this site, disagreeing is only for useful discussions I had/ read too. It’s almost like an “anti-echochamber”, and I love it! I love my opinions being challenged.

One more result of that is that the upvote/ downvote function went from “I agree/ I find that funny” or “This is against the subs opinion” to “This comment is worth reading for others and adds value. OP put work into it”. WHICH IT SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE BEEN! This button isn’t for disagreeing, it’s for FILTERING out trash!

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Algorithm

Also, there’s no algorithm. On many other social media, post that make you laugh (-> mostly dumb stuff or reposts) or promote strong emotions (mostly aggression and tribalism) got promoted.

Here, it’s somehow totally random. There’s so much “boring” stuff on my trending page. But, I’ve discovered many cool niche subs here I wouldn’t have otherwise. I didn’t know so many people were into collecting space rocks and model trains for example 😁

E.g., my own gourmet-mushroom-growing-community got super many views and comments from people who’ve never heart of that before. That was unbelievable!

On the other hand, there’s sooo much useless information, some opt-in filtering/ algorithm wouldn’t be bad tbh. But many say that about account karma too, which is a way smaller feature, and that has repercussions too (see above). Something like an algorithm would be HUGE, but also maybe hugely bad for this site?

Idk, tell me! Be controversial! 😁