[redthrowaway]

So you take the replies to replies from a single thread, and conclude that the site itself is useless? I suppose I should discount Stack Exchange, as there undoubtedly questions for which all of the answers are unhelpful or incorrect.

Your comment reeks of the typical reddit hate on HN, without anything to back it up.

[ceol]

I wouldn't say the entire site is useless, but the good communities are few and far between due to the reddit's culture abhorring any sort of moderation.

Would you like me to edit my reply to be more specific to /r/AskReddit? Certainly if you have a scientific question, /r/askscience is great, and /r/philosophy tends to be decent most of the time. But my point is that getting honest, relatively troll-free discussion on reddit, especially in the default subreddits, is uncommon.

[rm999]

While you acknowledge it's not the case, you're still making the mistake of thinking of reddit as a single community that is run in a homogeneous way. But subreddits have successfully and neatly separated the wheat from the chaff.

Dig a little and you can find some great niche communities that don't exist outside of more archaic forum-style sites (communities that sites like quora would love to capture).

[ceol]

I know well of the niche communities in reddit. I frequent most of them to hide myself from the default subs. However, the same problems still exist.

For instance, I enjoy the show Adventure Time, so I subscribed to the /r/adventuretime subreddit. It was fine for a while, but then a submission popped up on my front page. It was a photograph of a group of kids cosplaying as Adventure Time characters at a local convention, and a few of the kids either had a "poorly done" costume or were heavier than the characters they were cosplaying. The top comments in this thread were saying hurtful things about their weight and attractiveness. Not fluffed up "jokes"; these were crude and would warrant a punch in the face in any real life situation. When I made a comment about how it was rude for them to say such things, and that cosplaying is about the person cosplaying, not the people viewing, I was met with hostility and downvotes. I even messaged the moderators asking them to remove the comments since they offered nothing but vitriol, but the only moderator to respond said, "I'm not their mother. This is the internet."

You can try to escape it by going into smaller and smaller subreddits, but you'll never outrun it. This is what I mean by it being pervasive.* It's in everything on the site. You can argue "reddit isn't a single community" and all, but there are some characteristics that permeate through almost all sections (or maybe eventually show up due to how the site is designed.)

* edit: I realize after I posted that this was a different comment chain. The comment to which I'm referring is this one, last paragraph: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4378485

[krickle]

If people acting like jerks offends you that much, you are going to have a bad time on the internet. Although if you know of anywhere besides HN that is mostly reasonable, please PM me :)

nitpick: just as you are offended by rude comments, I am offended by advocating violence as a response to rudeness. I don't think you were serious, but I have to say there's nothing you can say or write that actually warrants a punch in the face.

[mattgreenrocks]

Defending poor behavior perpetuates it. Stop tolerating crappy behavior from users, and move to platforms where such childishness is met with disciplinary action.

Use your imagination. It's possible to have reasonable discussions on the Internet. It's just very rare, and everyone's too scared to a) not be the 'best site with all users' and b) have a reputation for 'censoring' content.

[rdl]

> Although if you know of anywhere besides HN that is mostly reasonable

Quora.

[Zarel]

If I may rewrite your comment a bit:

"I wouldn't say the entire internet is useless, but the good websites are few and far between due to the internet's culture abhorring any sort of regulation.

"Would you like me to edit my reply to be more specific to [Facebook, YouTube, pick a popular site]? Certainly if you have a scientific question, [insert science website] is great, and [other website you like] tends to be decent most of the time. But my point is that getting honest, relatively troll-free discussion on the internet, especially in the popular websites, is uncommon."

While you seem to acknowledge that Reddit is several communities, not one, many of the things you say still make it seem like you're lumping Reddit into one community and one culture.

[eli]

Agreed. Compare AskReddit to something like Ask Metafilter, which is fairly aggressively moderated.

[Karunamon]

The trick to reddit is to stay the hell away from the default subs.

The fact that something is frontpaged greatly decreases the signal to noise ratio, the moderators are IMHO asshats.

Do some searching to find topics that interest you, and then unsubscribe from every single front page subreddit. You'll have a much better experience as a result.

[niels_olson]

Actually, ceol spent most of the comment providing a specific, layered example.