The article was interesting but your title is a little misleading, OP. They were not singling out Reddit. Merely using it as an example in their study on why social media threads tend to skew towards negativity over time. It was about human psychology more than any specific social media platform.

Their study was based on analysis of 2.05 billion comments from 2,150 Reddit communities.

If they want to generalize their findings to all social media platforms, that’s on them.

Would a remark like this one count as positive or negative?

So does it short circuit the fuckery if you make the inevitable Hitler reference right away in a top level comment?

Also fuck reddit.

Godwin’s law has been around since long before Reddit.

Just about any forum thread that goes on for pages ends up in an argument. I think this can be avoided with strict rules and users who reinforce the culture.

As far as reddit goes I find the larger the number of subscribers to a subreddit the worse it gets. However depending on the topic of the subreddit even a niche small subreddit can be toxic in some way. This tracks here as well.

I would like to see more discussion about an artificial technical or skill barrier needed to participate on a website or service. This might sound elitist but keeping “normies” out goes a long way to helping keep the discussion quality high. Even having something as simple as an “ugly” more text based interface helps.

I used to think everyone should have access to the internet back in the day. After that happened I changed my mind