[financltravsty]

I visited Reddit yesterday for the first time in a long time. I saw an interesting meme and wanted to write a long form piece of content in the comments. After I was done: I received two low-effort replies that revealed to me I have less-than-great communication skills or the readers put zero focus in active reading skills; and one reply with an axe to grind that focused on attacking me and making all sorts of assumptions on who I was as a person, while assuring me I was the person who couldn’t take someone challenging his ideas, and that I was the problem.

Reddit is a cesspit.

[pierat]

Given Reddit's history with fake accounts, I'm not sure that many posts aren't just fever-dreamed LLMs on corporately created bulk accounts.

Reddit has burned a lot of credibility with the power user and creator types. I know plenty who've moved to Mastodon, Blue Sky, Threads, etc. And by doing so, leaves bottom feeders there. And how else do you get engagement? You fake it, naturally.

[ryloric]

What are you on about? What relevance does any of this have?

I like the parent comment because it made me laugh, so I was expressing my wish that it would be nice to able to appreciate them for it in some way. I used reddit's gilding feature as a shortcut to convey that wish because most people know of it and it's an easy to understand shortcut.

Because reddit is a cesspit, any feature that was associated with reddit at any point of time is not worth using to convey information? How about text quoting and reply buttons, should we stop using them too? What an absurd way to look at things.

[financltravsty]

Clearly, I am horrible at communication or Redditors are horrible at reading something at face value.

I shared a recent anecdote about Reddit, because I was reminded of it from your comment. There was no point, I was just sharing what I felt the same way you did when you wrote about wishing HN to have a gild feature.

But if we want to go down the combative discourse route: you're hyperbolizing. Reddit became the mess it was due to a mixture of many things. One of those was its site design/UI; notably public display of post and comment scores that leads to a "dog-pile" effect, rather than natural voting patterns. Being able to gild just intensifies the effects, and leads to posts being interacted with not because the content of their message is informative or interesting, but because it has countless flashing symbols violating your focus, screaming "look at me! look at me!"