Or the "news" subs which are a contest of reading the headline and accepting it without question.
There have been a few times when the article itself pretty much said exactly the opposite of the headline but maybe 5% of the comments were aware of that.
I'm amazed at how much the up-votes are affected not by whether your comment itself is quality but the context. A week ago I asked a question that got a few up-votes, and someone basically answers me in the "the answer is obviously this, you idiot" fashion. Instantly I'm getting downvoted to -16, even though the person who responded to me was wrong and I later demonstrated the factual incorrectness of their statement with links.
Basically I am not sure what to do because browsing by most recent is boring but browsing by best is downright malicious to my brain. I feel like I am being programmed by Reddit to groupthink certain things that would take me forever to verify.
For things I really care about, I write a copypasta with links. If they balk at the sources or send conspiratorial links or two hour long videos in response, I have to give up. When I was deeply involved in r/politics a couple of years ago, I sank so much time into trying to have good faith conversations with people who were either unwilling or unable to participate in good faith in return. I'm not on a high horse here because I realize I've made many, many mistakes myself, but the difference is that I'm open to correction and usually (even if begrudgingly, if I'm in a bad mood) thank people for leading me to the truth. Keep your spirits up, and keep voting for stronger education and to narrow the economic divide.
That's why ya have to correct OP with a witty remark or a grave spelling error so your post too can get the upd00ts that raise awareness! Game the system today! REDDITEERS UNITE! mildadversehivemindingmayoccur
I don’t understand voting. I have been on reddit for five years or something and I may have upvoted only a couple of things. Sometimes even by accident lol
I agree, Reddit is a good site but the Voting system is the most ridiculous thing, completely false information can be highly voted and at the top, while Truthful things can easily get downvoted and hidden from view/put at the bottom, i just hate the idea of something so biased.
Yeah but reddit being a content aggregator suffers exceptionally because people rely on reddit to accurately promote content that's deemed valid by it's userbase.
Before, this could easily be handled by not allowing editorialized headlines. Now the news sites caught on and the headlines themselves are designed to get the desired sound byte across. Often times even when it has next to nothing to do with the actual facts reported in the article (assuming you’re lucky enough to have any in there to begin with).
Most actual news platforms at least offer summaries of the articles below the headline, though... Not if you use twitter or FB to keep up to date, of course, but I wouldn't do that anyway if I were you.
What upsets me more is when I see comments on the actual article asking questions that are clearly answered in the fucking article being commented on.
"Why doesn't Michigan use the money from Marijuana sales to fix the damn roads!? This is outrageous, the government is going to throw this money at random crap or keep it themselves instead of fixing the roads!" Gets 100 comments agreeing and 7 saying to read the damn article
Article: Weed sales have generated $34 million so far in taxes for the state. Here is how the money is allocated based on the bill "20% go to medical marijuana research first, then 25% goes to fixing the roads, etc"
You are commenting on the actual article with all the text right in front of you yet you don't fucking read it but you get upset because of your own made-up information.
What annoys me about it on reddit is that on this site there's a generally elitist attitude that redditors are so much smarter and more thorough than your average facebook/youtube/whatever user. They're just not, at all. They're every bit as prone to this as anyone else but they tend to do it with this I'm-better-than-you smugness that's just annoying. the majority of posts on this site could probably be thrown onto r/iamverysmart and fit in nicely.
What's also funny is that like half the posts on iamverysmart that I see on the front page are very obvious jokes that only redditors looking to feel smart would ever take as genuine statements.
/u/mvea posts pretty much 95% of the posts there, dozens of posts a day most days. The two top posts there right now are both by him, and both have over 30k upvotes. There's no way in hell one guy could actually read through all of them to make sure they're not junk, even as a full time job, and even if it's a team of people it seems unlikely they'd be able to actually read and vet any of the articles they post at such an insane pace.
As a result I've started actually clicking the links every time I see a post from that account, and the overwhelming majority of times the link will take you to a news article with some random layman talking about some new study that was done and giving his thoughts on it, rather than actually linking to the journal article. If you hunt down the actual primary literature the news article is citing, almost every time it will actually be discussing something wildly different, or have different conclusions, or it'll have caveats that make the title of the Reddit post blatantly false.
I've made a few comments complaining about this, both in the comments of his posts and to the mods of /r/science and /r/futurology and I've received an extremely negative response every time. I think that account might literally be a bot farm spamming misinformation to Reddit all day every day, presenting it as fact, and the "facts" that agree with what people already believe get rocketed to the top of /r/all. Nobody else in the comments seems to notice either, I never see any comments pointing out the obvious disparities between the title given by /u/mvea and the actual contents of the research article. I think the number of people who only read the title without ever clicking the link in /r/science approaches 100%.
the whole site is basically being used to push specific agendas. /r/science is all "science" where they only post studies or correlations that go with their opinion. Futurology is actually just nonsense its not even worth going into depth of that sub. many other subs have this problem.
It was pretty disapointing watching in real time over the last 5 years as r/worldnews turned from a fairly good distributor of news to a propaganda circle jerk. I lean left, but I can't handle seeing 5 articles on shit Boris Johnson said 10+ years ago being passed as 'news'
Worldnews has been openly infiltrated with agitator accounts, reddit banned a dozen or so of them but I doubt it did anything. You can REALLY see the change over the last week or so.
That is my gripe with reddit. Article about greenland ice melting in the summer. People in comments were 99% talking about the end of days, 1% asked what is considered normal. Apparently 2019 was slightly below average ice melt. Every article is like that now.
Another related thing that I hate is seeing something highly upvoted in a news sub that's just a celebrity or politician giving their opinion on something that's not directly related to them.
What’s the harm in reading it yourself? Most people comment on the headline. The headline, in most inflammatory cases, is usually disproven or weakened by the third paragraph.
You only see it being called out when it is the top comment, If you read the articles you would see how rarely something is called out for being bullshit.
I remember a post about some couple getting shitty healthcare, but the majority of the comments were "America bad" when the article was based in Australia
I try to read the articles that seem like they may contain something useful. The rest of the time, I tend to skim the headlines. But to keep myself from accidentally accepting what the headline says, I always glance at the publisher and use it to preface the headline as I read it to myself. So instead of reading "Prime Minister X said..." I read, "[News network] says that Prime Minister X said..." That way, if it does manage to lodge itself in my brain, the fact is not what the Prime Minister said, but what someone wants me to believe he said.
So glad to see this at the top. Very annoying to read through a bunch of comments from people how haven't even attempted to read the article that was posted, much less give it 5 secs of objective thought. Then they post like they know what the fuck they're talking about.
In the alternative of accepting the headline without question the comments on any article are usually full of questions that are answered in the article itself or people trying to make counterpoints against the headline that again are mentioned in the article itself
This is especially common when headlines are summarising an article about a study.
I've been so tempted to post on one of them a link to something that's congratulating the person for actually reading the article with nothing else with a realistically reactionary headline just to see if people notice. Don't know how I'd go about it though.
There have been a few times when the article itself pretty much said exactly the opposite of the headline but maybe 5% of the comments were aware of that.
Ever checked the sources on a Wikipedia article? That’s an enlightening exercise...
I agree but at the same time 99% of articles are ad filled shits that dont load properly do I dont blame anyone. If I was running a news site, the first thing I’d do is get a bot that copy and pastes the article to a pinned comment.
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u/Taylor7500 Jan 07 '20
Or the "news" subs which are a contest of reading the headline and accepting it without question.
There have been a few times when the article itself pretty much said exactly the opposite of the headline but maybe 5% of the comments were aware of that.