I think that when talking about social media/forums/social communication services, it's useful to separate them into the service itself and the users. In the case of Reddit, the service makes up the website/app itself and the system through which people can talk. And the users are the "Redditors", casual scrollers and moderators who through the application communicate with each other. (Quick note before I start, I'm going to be referring the people who are actual paid Reddit employees that moderate as "admins" and normal non-paid subreddit moderators as just "moderators.)
The Service:
Reddit at its core is a community based-platform. It's very different from services like Twitter or Instagram. When you go into one of those, your mindset is: "I wonder what X person or X artist posted today" but when you go on Reddit your mindset is: "I wonder what's being posted in X subreddit or what X community is doing". It's much more akin to forums in which the major focus is not on individuals but rather the community itself. But Reddit has certain cracks in it's structure that doesn't let it properly develop a healthy community.
The upvote-downvote system is fine, most of the time it helps boost good answers and lower bad ones. But sometimes it's used for toxic reasons. I'd prefer if moderators could have some minor control over the upvoting-downvoting of posts but that within itself brings issues if the moderators aren't competent or are biased. In the end, it's a double-edged sword in a way but I feel like it's mostly with good reasons in mind on Reddit.
But what I really have mixed-negative opinions on is karma. Karma has two goals in mind:
1. Prevent Spamming/Trolling
2. Work as a "Reflection of how much your contributions mean to your community" (Quote from Reddit Support)
Being such a huge platform, Reddit is no stranger to trolls and spammers and thus a lot of subreddits implement a minimum karma one has to have in order to post. I have no problem with this. Lot's of communities use it, even MotK implements it to some extent with you having to post a certain amount of times in order to unlock things. But there's two differences between something like that and Karma. The first one is that Karma is dependent on how much people agree with you not how much you've contributed numerically, and just like upvotes, this can be used to gatekeep people out of communities. The second difference is that after you reach the required threshold in other sites, it becomes irrelevant but in Reddit, it doesn't stop, it transforms from a tool made to prevent spamming/trolling into just the second goal, agreeability points. Its value becomes subjective and is left entirely up to the interpretation of the viewer on wherever it matters or not. And since karma is one of the few characteristics a Redditor has to compare themselves to others, karma has now become the number one way to prove your "superiority" over other users (even so more than the follow feature). And thus karma farms are born (I'll talk about their effects in the users section). I've seen some people argue that karma is also a measure on how trustworthy someone is because lots of karma = lots of upvotes = trustworthy answers/content, but the problem with this is that just because someone gets a lot of karma from upvotes on a subreddit about a certain topic that they know about, it doesn't necessarily mean that they'll respond with the same quality on a subreddit of an entirely different thing. At that point you'd have to do a full backlog of all their posts in order to find out if they actually know about the topic at hand. I personally would remove the karma system, implement a normal "your reddit account age needs to be X old" or "you must post X amount of posts" for preventing spamming/trolling, and then add a sort of role system where a moderator can give a well-known user that has an extensive background on the subreddit's topic a role that only works in that one subreddit in order to identify them as someone who knows (of course this idea is sadly also prone to bias and moderator shenanigans).
Admins just like their less powerful counterparts can also mess up their jobs and be incompetent. The only times I've heard of them directly communicating with the reddit community is with the moderators of big subreddits and even then that communication is scarce. But I have to give them credit, there have been times where they were surprisingly quick at responding to reports from users (or maybe it's just the reddit auto-moderator). And since most admins work remotely, there have been a lot of times where Reddit has not payed them properly for their jobs so I can't really blame them.
Then there's the stuff with the API. The topic has already been covered before in another topic but I wanted to reiterate it here as a reminder that the focus of Reddit right now is not to grow a healthy community, but rather to earn money. A lot of subreddits have had to change drastically in order to adapt to these changes and moderation has become much much more difficult. There's been rumours going around that all these drastic changes in Reddit are being made in order to increase its profit and sell itself off to some big tech company which just doesn't bode well for the company.
The Users:
As was mentioned before, the users of Reddit can sometimes be very.... varied in attitude. There's still users who genuinely use the site for good reasons, give competent responses and just want to help people, but of course there's the bad and the ugly. Karma farms have filled a lot of subreddits with reposts and low quality posts that aim to cash in on popular trends and thus simply searching a subreddit by newest will fill your screen with nothing good. Debates on Reddit also drag out uncomfortably and the website's formatting doesn't help at all. There's subreddits that I enjoy browsing through every once in a while but on occasions I see a subreddit who's content makes me want to pour bleach over my eyes.
And of course we have moderators. The most notorious people on Reddit. I've had run-ins with practically every type of mod that there can be on Reddit. The best mods are those who are able to moderate a community with very little interference. People are very quick to pull out the "1984!" card so one has to maneuver things without having users feel like they're being pushed around. Nevertheless they of course take appropriate action when something blatantly violates the rules or someone ignores multiple warnings. There's also the moderators of big subreddits who have to scroll through hundreds of posts daily and remove anything that the auto-moderator doesn't who I have respect for.(which has now become an even more troublesome task with the API changes). Then there are the bad moderators which come in two forms: the bad in personality moderators and the ignorant ones. Bad in personality moderators are not exclusive to Reddit but a lot of them roam that site (Maybe it's the nerdy reputation of Reddit that attracts them so much?). Unlike good moderators, these ones are very quick to whip out warnings, don't accept constructive criticism and like to bend the rules a lot for their benefits (I swear to god I've seen some of the most ridiculous justifications for bans on some subreddits). Ignorant moderators are equally as bad, if you're not going to moderate then you can't really consider yourself a moderator can you? Bad moderators always get called out and are criticized more than good moderators are praised. At this point I don't know how the bad moderator problem could be fixed, there would have to be a lot of changes in mod hiring processes or even an intervention from Reddit higher-ups. But wherever they would do that is left up to interpretation.
There's also just a lot of toxicity in certain areas. I've genuinely had people I know get doxxed and harassed on Reddit simply because they don't agree with someone (And it's not even anything like politics, this happens over silly stuff such as theories on the lore of certain games). As I said before, I only browse a select amount of subreddits but I've had many interactions with people from bigger subreddits and moderators. Reddit also always shows up the top of my google results page whenever I ask a question
So. Is Reddit bad?
- A lot of parts of it are bad. However if you dedicate yourself to only using certain subreddits that you know are well moderated and have a nice community behind them, then you'll have a great time. Ignorance is Bliss as they say. But the structure of the site itself is making it harder each and every day for these subreddits to thrive so maybe one day there could be absolutely nothing redeemable on Reddit. At least I trust Reddit more than Quora though so that's a win for them.
