[marvin]

You are vastly overgeneralizing. Have you ever digged into the heavily moderated subreddits? The front page is not particularly representative of the positive parts of anonymity that spenvo is talking about. I am a very active reddit user and respectfully, you have no clue what you are talking about.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that reddit as a whole is representative of the younger (<30) parts of American society, not just a particular demographic or political group. Reddit has > 50 million users and is a very heterogenuous community. It is not just some hangout exclusive to nerds any longer. So you will see every political opinion and every positive and negative personal characteristic. As usual, the front page will show the lowest common denominator. There is by definition no way this could be any different, which you can see even if you look at the comments under any national newspaper article.

[SnydenBitchy]

I don’t want to derail this topic any further, but I’m quite familiar with reddit, and I would disagree that “reddit as a whole” is very heterogeneous or representative of the vast diversity of younger Americans. At a minimum, reddit’s mainstream is dominated by people belonging to a certain archetype—under 30, perhaps, but certainly also white and male and textbook brogressive[0]—resulting in thoroughly predictable patterns of discussion and voting.

The problem with smaller subreddits is that even with heavy moderation, they tend to be dominated by the mainstream of the site. For example (at least as of a couple years ago, when I largely quit participating) every new feminist- or woman-friendly subreddit would immediately be invaded by “men’s rights” activists to the point of rendering it useless for discussion. The only subreddit I’m aware of today where this hasn’t happened is /r/shitredditsays, but I suspect you’d agree that SRS’s utility for meaningful discussion is… limited.

Apologies for going offtopic.

[0] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brogressive

[marvin]

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I'm aware of the subreddit drama you are referencing, but it didn't make a big splash in the communities I frequent - apart from mentioned SRS derailing a couple of legitimate discussions that in no way deserved to be characterized as misognystic.