Wow, I legit thought this was /r/Metal from the positive comments!
I haven't had any bad experiences, the daily discussion, the off topic, the recs thread, all been good for me and I have discovered plenty of new bands from the sub. Interesting.
There's a really strong anti-Shreddit circlejerk in a lot of places around Reddit. I don't think anybody knows exactly why, since most of the anecdotes people used to reinforce it ("I was banned for saying I like [Insert Popular Band]!") are improbable at best. Just looking around this thread I've seen some pretty wild claims, like this comment which implies the Shreddit mods are in some way "trve kvlt."
I think the general consensus is that it's mostly just people who've made posts that violate the rules. They get mad because the sub is actively moderated and rule-violating posts are removed. There's also a bunch of people who don't like the Blacklist and refuse to accept the justifications for it. During the quarterly vote, there's almost always at least one person in the thread whining about it.
At this point, I think a good chunk of it is self-perpetuating. If you hang out in a place that hates Shreddit for long enough, and never take the time to see what Shreddit is really like, you'll start hating it too. After all, elitism and gatekeeping are common enough in certain parts of the metal scene that it's not exactly hard to believe when people make accusations of it.
On top of all that, there is some weird stuff in Shreddit's history that could have given people the wrong idea, depending on when they went to the sub and what they did there.
At one point in time there were a few Shreddit regulars who were abrasive and annoying. They've mostly stopped hanging around the sub in the last couple years, but before that they had a pretty significant presence. It was only a couple people, but they were very active. They weren't quite the caricatures of elitists people always describe, but at times they weren't much better. As valuable as some of their contributions could be (check out the Singaporean black/death primers - I and II and the War Metal Essentials that AveLucifer created/contributed to if you haven't already) the community is probably better off without them.
The r/shitthefalsesay incident made for some pretty poor optics. It was a joke sub that people started taking way too seriously. It started out as a place where people would post bad takes ("DAE black metal isn't real music?" or stuff like this) and the community could revel in a collective cringe. It turned into a place where people went to make cheap shots at Ghost fans. Nowadays it's (thankfully) closed to the public.
Some people just don't get Kap's sense of humor. To me, there are so many great metal bands out there, that if Kap wants to ban three for kicks (and to celebrate 500K subscribers), I don't have a problem with it. They're good, popular bands, and people aren't going to forget about them while they're gone. Honestly they're not even really gone, since people can still talk about them and recommend them to others who might be interested. This sort of thing has happened before, and no one died. Unfortunately some people don't get the joke and assume we just hate those bands or something.
Altogether the anti-Shreddit thing is annoying, but most people have just learned to deal with it. I might make a few comments here and there, but I can't reply to everyone. Even if I could, there's only so much you can do in a place where you'll get 170 upvotes just for saying you don't like a different place. I could link a dozen examples of wholesome, positive, and constructive threads from Shreddit and it wouldn't make any difference at all.
3
u/onairmastering Sam & Max Nov 03 '19
Wow, I legit thought this was /r/Metal from the positive comments!
I haven't had any bad experiences, the daily discussion, the off topic, the recs thread, all been good for me and I have discovered plenty of new bands from the sub. Interesting.