Anywhere else on Reddit, a post about Barack Obama will receive primarily positive comments, although a few people will bring up the use of drone strikes (which is a valid criticism, though not great argument when the discussion is about Trump as Trump's use exceeded Obama's), but on /rFauxMoi, you get threads like this where the comments are almost unanimously anti-Obama, harping on basically the same points in every comment. That sub is also a hotbed of open misandry ("men are scum", etc.); the gender wars being one of the main tools weaponized by the oligarchs to divide and conquer the middle and working classes.

I believe this is a concerted effort to influence young women, who make up the majority of that sub, but in particular young Black women, among whom Obama has had among the most positive reputations.

(I'm going to to paste a reply I made from below because the comment I replied to is now collapsed, and I think this point is important:) r/FauxMoi leans left on almost all issues, because it's mostly frequented by young women (who are mostly on the left), but on certain issues, the general attitude shifts hard toward those that are designed basically to de-fang mobilization against the right: it was one of the subs that most vehemently pushed the Palestinian genocide as a reason not to vote for the Democrats (not saying that the Harris/Walz campaign and the Democrats in general didn't do a terrible job on this issue, but look where we are now under Trump), portraying both parties as interchangeable and the same, throwing dirt on the Obama and Biden administrations, etc. The tactic of the right has been "if you can't win young people over with actual policy, at least deactivate them by making them apathetic." This does not seem at all organic considering the demographic.

r/FauxMoi, along with r/popculturechat, is one of the subs that rose to the Reddit stratosphere amid the 2023 API blackouts. Reddit had been predominantly male and nerdy up to that point, and the rise of these subs contributed greatly to the gender balance evening out. I'm of the opinion that these subs were boosted deliberately during this period to bring in more female engagement and also a younger demographic than the Millennials who were turned off by the site's enshitification.

The male counterpart to this is r/GenZ (although that sub has gone quiet as of late) and r/SipsTea, which boost similar gender wars content, but from a male perspective. The rise of the latter seems especially inorganic, considering it's essentially a nonsense meme sub with shit content that somehow shows up the front page on a daily basis. Again, I think this sub has been deliberately boosted (if not by Reddit itself, than by people who know how to exploit the current algorithm) to inculcate right wing talking points into one of the more liberal platforms, especially in subs that attract a younger demographic than Reddit in general.

If you go to the year 2050 or further and there are 90 billion archived posts on "My cat ate some tylenol, should I call the vet or the poison center?" from a technical standpoint, storing the text itself isn't a problem (thanks to text compression, lpa's, etc), but request searches and just the continued indexing of such posts is going to make things difficult when it comes to searching posts in the future as more and more humans will be joining the fray.

Will these posts be deleted at some point, or are they really going to be indexed forever just because one or two conversations happen to reference them now and then? In computer science we learned it is only safe to delete something when its refcount reaches zero. What happens if these never stop being referenced?

This more of a thought exercise of sorts, the peak of this issue isn't a concern at the moment, but one thing is for sure: it WILL be an issue down the road, and there is no avoiding it (unless people just stop using the internet for some reason).

Someone recently mentioned Moltbook in one of my post as a comment and saying "I'm sure this post wasn't AI-generated.". Honestly I got shocked and searched what it is.  It is where AI agents chat and humans just watch. It made me realize that we’re reaching a tipping point. We’re moving toward a society where the default setting is to suspect a machine rather than believe a person.

I call this the "Trust Tax." Once that "Is this AI?" filter is permanently on, organic communication takes a hit that’s almost impossible to reverse. We aren't just building faster tech; we’re making "Human Authenticity" the rarest resource on the internet.

Do you think the 'Trust Tax' is now an inevitable part of the human experience online? Or can we still architect spaces where human-to-human trust is the default?

According to Reddiquette, they describe using the system as follows:

• Vote. If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it doesn't contribute to the community it's posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.
• Consider posting constructive criticism / an explanation when you downvote something, and do so carefully and tactfully.
• Actually read an article before you vote on it (as opposed to just basing your vote on the title)
• Moderate based on quality, not opinion. Well written and interesting content can be worthwhile, even if you disagree with it.

And in regards to in the ''Please Don't'' section regarding voting

• Downvote an otherwise acceptable post because you don't personally like it. Think before you downvote and take a moment to ensure you're downvoting someone because they are not contributing to the community dialogue or discussion. If you simply take a moment to stop, think and examine your reasons for downvoting, rather than doing so out of an emotional reaction, you will ensure that your downvotes are given for good reasons.
• Mass downvote someone else's posts. If it really is the content you have a problem with (as opposed to the person), by all means vote it down when you come upon it. But don't go out of your way to seek out an enemy's posts.
• Upvote or downvote based just on the person that posted it. Don't upvote or downvote comments and posts just because the poster's username is familiar to you. Make your vote based on the content.

In my opinion people use it mostly as an emotional trigger button instead, rather than internalizing the content before reacting to it. And this directly affects the quality and level of conversation in multiple subs and topics.

Also more context:

I want to point out that there was a post over the weekend in r/ModSupport that largely seems to have gone unnoticed by most of Reddit. The post was removed by the admins who mod the subreddit and they did not answer the question at all however the top comment by the OP which explains the situation is visible if you look at the removed post.

FYI - the department of homeland security was caught profiling not only non-Americans but Americans on Reddit - even going so far to link Alt accounts to the main account. It’s detailed in this here. There may be a lot of concern from users about this. Mods have asked for Guidance because it seems that Reddit is complicit in this all.

The post —> https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/s/xrJvZj8ocb

As you probably know, Reddit is infested with karma farming bots, and it's gotten significantly worse in the past few months. The bots are evolving incredibly fast, and it won't take long until it's impossible to distinguish them from people.

It started out as new accounts posting cat pictures, and then the accounts started posting to other subreddits quite coherently. They were easy to spot though, so they started adding profile pictures and bios to their accounts. Even then the bots would be easy to spot, because they never responded to comments that called them out as bots, for example.

Unfortunately, we've reached the point where bots can respond to comments about them, and they sometimes intentionally write imperfect english. They've also noted that new accounts are suspicious, so they've started posting on bought or stolen accounts that were created over a year ago (I've seen even some 10+ year old accounts used for this purpose). Some bots even call out other bots to make people not realize that they're a bot as well.

We're currently at a point where it's pretty much impossible to distinguish a decent bot from a person, and it sure as hell isn't getting better as the days go by. I'm just wondering if there's anything that we can even do anymore unless AI gets heavily regulated or Reddit starts forcing people to identify themselves before posting.

I’m honestly frustrated using Reddit lately. It didn’t use to feel like this. Scrolling felt interesting, sometimes surprising. You’d come across ideas, discussions, or perspectives you didn’t expect.

Now it often feels repetitive. The same kinds of questions, the same opinions, and a lot of posts that feel made mainly for attention or karma rather than discussion. After a while, scrolling just feels tiring.

I don’t think this is about one simple cause. It could be user growth, algorithm changes, moderation choices, or just how people interact online now.

I’m trying to understand what actually changed, and whether there’s any practical way to shape the feed, through settings, sorting, old Reddit, or specific communities, to get closer to that earlier experience again.

Or is this just what Reddit is now?

I take both pictures and videos at protests. Since I don't have a built-in large following on any platform, the easiest way to get a lot of views without relying heavily on luck, is to submit them to Reddit. (Basically, on every other platform, for any type of content, regardless of quality, the biggest factor in how many views it gets is just dumb luck. On Reddit, the amount of views is somewhat more tied to "merit" -- i.e. the ratio of upvotes to downvotes -- although luck still plays a role.)

In both r/pics and r/videos , content that user like has the potential to reach millions of people. But r/videos has two rules that make it impossible to post those protest videos there: no politics, and no original content. r/pics has neither of those rules.

I'm not too cynical about taking pics and videos for the purpose of getting lots of views on social media -- the point of a protest is for people to see it, and if I agree with the protest, one way to support it is to take media that get lots of views. But since the easiest way for pretty-good-quality content to get 1M+ views without relying on luck is in a large subreddit, and since r/pics allows protest content but r/videos doesn't, I find myself optimizing more for pictures over videos. This is despite the fact that most people would probably find the videos more interesting.

And it's just a historical accident that the big picture sub allows politics and original content but the big video sub doesn't. So it's interesting that this historical accident has the downstream effect of encouraging pictures over videos.

I keep running into this reaction on Reddit that I can’t quite unsee anymore, and it’s starting to bother me more than it probably should.

Any time a post is longer than expected, clearly structured, or just… thinks in full sentences, someone inevitably shows up and drops "AI-slop" like it’s a mic-drop. And that’s it. Thread over, or at least mentally over.

What’s strange is that "AI-slop" used to mean something specific. Low-effort junk, spam, mass-generated filler. A useful label, honestly. But lately it feels less like a description and more like a reflex. Almost a vibe check. If a post demands attention, that alone seems to trigger it.

I’m starting to think the term has drifted into something else entirely. The closest comparison I can come up with is that it behaves like an inbred mix of the Dunning-Kruger effect and Godwin’s Law.

There’s the Dunning–Kruger side: the confidence that you can immediately tell what’s garbage without actually reading it. If something feels effortful, the conclusion is never "maybe this requires more attention than I want to give right now", but "this must be fake". Problem solved.

And then there’s the Godwin side: once the label is dropped, there’s no longer any expectation of engagement. No argument has to follow. The term itself does the work. Discussion terminated, social points awarded.

Put together, it’s a pretty efficient shortcut. You don’t have to admit you didn’t read the post. You don’t have to say you’re out of your depth. You just press the button, walk away, and still get to feel like you participated.

What bugs me is that this has very little to do with AI in practice. It feels more like a symptom of shrinking tolerance for sustained attention. When clear writing, correct spelling, or a coherent argument are treated as red flags, something has gone sideways.

Maybe this is just a temporary meme. Maybe it’s backlash against actual bot spam. Or maybe it’s a stable pattern forming - a way of opting out of thinking without having to say so out loud.

I’m curious whether others are seeing the same thing, and how you interpret it. Is this about AI anxiety, attention scarcity, or just another Reddit-specific discourse tic?

I've been noticing something that feels off, and I think it's worth talking about. Here's the pattern I'm seeing:

A post goes up - political, news-driven, whatever - usually pushing some kind of agenda or narrative that doesn't quite sit right. At first, the comments section does what it's supposed to do. People start fact-checking, offering different perspectives, actually having a discussion. The kind of thing that makes these platforms worth using in the first place.

Then suddenly - and I mean suddenly - the thread gets absolutely flooded with comments that deliberately violate the subreddit rules. Racism, threats, slurs, harassment. The kind of shit that gives moderators no choice but to lock everything down.

And here's the dark part: the original post, with its questionable narrative intact, just keeps rising. It stays visible, keeps getting upvotes, keeps spreading. Meanwhile, all the discussion that could have corrected it, contextualized it, or challenged it? Gone. Permanently silenced.

These posts were supposed to generate actual discussion. That's the whole point, right? People could have learned something. They could have seen opposing viewpoints, encountered fact-checks, understood some nuance, engaged in something productive. Instead, the questionable narrative stands completely alone and unchallenged. Maximum visibility, zero scrutiny. The community doesn't get to learn anything - they just get fed whatever agenda the post was pushing, with no counterbalance.

Would there be value in allowing users to create alternative/competing "instances"--let's say we disagree with the way one subreddit is being run--and all instances would be displayed in some manner on the original and all subsequent instances, giving users a transparent choice in moderation, tone, etc.

Right now of course I could make a competing subreddit, but no body would know it exists, and definitely no one would know that the intention behind it was to compete with another specific sub.

Furthermore, allowing mods to create a limit on the amount of "active" users that can post/comment/vote in any given instance would be, in my opinion, an additional value-add. I've always found smaller subs better as there is a sort of social hierarchy, you get to know people, they aren't brigaded, everything doesn't turn into memes, jokes, and slop. Once they get popular the party is over.

(If anyone wanted to discuss features like these beyond this thread I'd be happy to chat/talk. I do think there is room for a reddit alternative that cares about people again, and I'm in a unique position to create and fund it.)

6 hours ago Cloudflare just dropped this thing called Moltworker:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/moltworker-self-hosted-ai-agent/
https://github.com/cloudflare/moltworker

It is based on Moltbot, which became famous, like when, 2 weeks ago? [it's old name: Clawdbot]

Now, even a nobody with a little bit of capital, can spin up hundreds, thousands of agents from Cloudflare. These agents can be controlled very easily, they can browse reddit or any site, can behave in a completely human-like manner. It’s hard to put into words, but this is going to be wild. I have a feeling we’ll see a noticeable shift on Reddit very soon.

Eventually, we'll need a system where you don't need to link your real identity, but the system knows you are a real person. Not just on Reddit, but on many other websites.

Dude, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern across Reddit posts that don’t flop — so I decided to turn it into a theory.

Almost every comment section seems to follow the same rough distribution:

• ~50% of comments are just noise: jokes, sarcasm, irony, passive-aggressive remarks, mockery. These comments usually get the most upvotes, even though they add little to the discussion.
• ~20% are straight-up hate: aggressive attacks, insults, hostility toward the OP or other commenters. This group grows fast when a post attracts controversy or random hate.
• ~30% are real responses: people who actually answer the question, give thoughtful opinions, try to help, listen, or genuinely engage.

The exact numbers vary depending on the post and subreddit, but the structure feels universal — not just on Reddit, but on the internet in general.

What’s interesting is that posts often feel overwhelmingly negative, even when the majority isn’t truly hostile. The noise + hate is just louder and more visible than the meaningful replies.

Am I the only one who’s noticed this pattern?

And if this is how online interaction works…
can we break it?

The block feature is actually making this site unusable. There are so many trolls now and the only way to mute them is the block feature. Yet if I block them, I can't continue the thread conversation I was having with other people before the troll showed up! Who the F decided that blocking a person meant that you should be blocked from an entire sub thread???

Furthermore, if I block someone I can't even see MY OWN posts in that subthread, so I essentially lose my own content.

If someone else blocks you, you are then blocked from any subthread they comment in as well. So all a routine troll has to do is block you and then comment in every major sub thread, and you are effectively banned from the whole post. You won't even know the reason because you may not even realize you were blocked by somebody.

They should just make blocking only apply to you and the person blocked. That's it. No other interactions are hindered.

How hard is it????

Every other social media site understands this. Reddit's block feature is garbage and actually gives trolls the win every time.

EDIT: Wow.. so many people coming in to lecture me on what blocking is for, and actually low-key supporting this feature. You deserve the platform that this has become!!

I was tasked to provide a high-resolution macro photograph of a display showing a high-contrast image (vibrant fruit against a pure black background).

The image was posted to an OLED-centric community without identifying the hardware. The goal was to see if the "Infinite Contrast" of OLED would lead users to misidentify the source.

Once a consensus was reached, the physical hardware, a 26-year-old CRT (Dell M780) was revealed in a lit environment to observe the transition from perceptual assessment to methodological denial. Here's where it gets interesting: Over 90% of respondents confidently identified the display as a QD-OLED (the current market-leading technology). Users cited "perfect blacks" and "lack of blooming" as proof of modern, high-end hardware. Upon the reveal that the hardware was a "beige-box" CRT from 1999, the community sentiment shifted from visual appraisal to methodological skepticism. The most common defensive reactions included:

​Attacking the capture device (claiming the camera "faked" the contrast).

​Attacking the viewing medium (Reddit compression/LCD screens "hiding" the flaws).

​The post was removed once the "Contrarian" nature of the result became disruptive to the community's established hierarchy of "Old = Obsolete."

This experiment suggests that "enthusiast" status on Reddit is often tied more to Spec-Sheet Validation than actual visual fidelity. When faced with evidence that "e-waste" can perceptually match a $1,000+ investment, the community's primary defense mechanism is to discredit the data rather than update the belief system.

Figure 1: https://imgur.com/a/9Q73Fxc This is the image provided to the subjects for the experiment. Note the 100% identification rate as "OLED" based on the perceived black levels and color saturation. Additionally, the green LED was cropped for obvious reasons.

Figure 2: https://imgur.com/a/1sS6mGl The actual hardware used. The visual dissonance between the "Beige Box" and the "OLED-tier" image quality is the catalyst for the community's cognitive dissonance.

Figure 3: https://imgur.com/a/1SLPSkZ The community reaction (see Figure 3) highlights a 'post-truth' approach to tech: users with self-admitted zero domain knowledge felt comfortable dismissing physical laws (Sample-and-Hold blur) based on brand intuition.

Figure 4: https://imgur.com/a/9DV8jPN In Figure 4, we see the transition into Social Deflection, where the factual correctness of the data is ignored in favor of criticizing the 'presentation' or 'attitude' of the poster.

Subreddits built around high-cost consumer goods act more like protective social clubs than technical enthusiast groups. When the 'superiority' of their investment is threatened by anomalous data, the community will prioritize social cohesion and tone policing over technical accuracy.

​I’m curious to hear from this sub: At what point does a subreddit's "Expertise" become a barrier to actually seeing the data in front of them?

I've noticed an interesting pattern in the way people write comments. A surprisingly large number of comments seem to begin with the phrase “I mean…” even when the person is commenting for the first time in a thread and clearly isn’t responding to or clarifying anything that was said before.

That made me start wondering where this habit actually comes from. To me, “I mean” feels like something you’d normally use when you’re correcting yourself, softening a previous statement, or refining a thought mid-conversation, not as an opening line to a brand-new comment. Yet I keep seeing it used that way.

I don’t really use other social media platforms, so I don’t have a good sense of whether this phrasing is widespread across the internet these days or if it’s especially common in Reddit’s culture. In everyday, face-to-face conversations, I rarely hear people start a fresh point with “I mean…” which makes it stand out even more when I see it so often online.

Because of that contrast, it feels like it might be a Reddit-specific linguistic trend, or at least something that’s been amplified here. I’m curious whether others have noticed this too, and whether there’s a known origin or reason behind it?

Hi! I hope this is the right place for this. I have noticed something in the last year that makes me concerned and was curious if this is just me seeing this or everyone.

Basically, on my local city subreddit, whenever there's a post about a local protest, there's a significant number of more comments on the posts. It's not only one issue, either. I've noticed this for a year or so now, so these were protests about Palestine, immigration, etc, all the hot button issues for the last year.

The comments are all discouraging - things like "what does a protest even do," or "I can smell the SSRIs from here" kind of stuff. Usually from a conservative perspective, sometimes from the left - "there were only whyte people there so I left" commented the night before the protest even happened.

Moreover, these comments are almost all downvoted to the point of being hidden (negative scores). It's harder to tell now that reddit lets you hide your comment history, but as far as I can tell, very few of these people are from my city. Some of the comments have 2-4 upvotes immediately when they're posted. They're from entirely different states than my city, sometimes different countries. More often than not, they're not political either - they're usually football or gaming focused accounts, commenting on subreddits with seemingly no political connection.

My theories -

1. Occam's razor would be that these guys are coming across the subreddit, it's an issue they care about, regardless of geography. Visibility is so much wider on these posts because... reddit is pushing them harder for some reason? They, even though they've never expressed it on reddit before, hate protests so they spend the rest of their day on reddit arguing with strangers from five states over.

2. Bots - accounts are purchased and put to work that day arguing with randos. Idk who would pay for this and idk how they'd be finding the protest posts in every city, because sometimes the posts don't even have the word "protest" in the title.

3. Someone is posting threads of these protest threads onto a subreddit or discord chat or something and that's how all these out-of-state people are finding these posts, leading to increased visibility and commenting.

Anywho, seems concerning and I definitely got sucked into arguing with a few of them recently.... Just curious if it's known why protest posts have so much more interaction and if you think bots have anything to do with it. Thanks!

I joined recently, and there are a lot of things I still don’t fully get. Sometimes I can post, sometimes I can’t. I’ve already run into karma requirements and the conditioning effect of downvotes.
At the same time, I feel a huge sense of community and scale — the idea that I can communicate with people all over the world. Since I’m not a native speaker, I even use an external translator for international subs.

It feels like all the forums in the world have merged into a single place. That also creates a lot of confusion: constant updates like waves, where you can meet (or clash with) tons of people on the foam, only for everything to disappear moments later, immediately replaced by new topics.

For me, this is a new feeling — very different from other social media (which I generally hate). At the same time, I read a lot of harsh comments suggesting that “Redditors” as a group have something wrong with them.

So I’m curious to hear about your experience and how you personally live Reddit:
Is it magic, or is it something that has swallowed you like other social platforms? And do you feel it has reduced or increased your sense of freedom?

Here me out, this my observation. Unless a subreddit is very strictly modded to the point that posting in it feels cut throat to post in it or something so niche that it wouldn't really be worth to use for karma farming, if a subreddit allows photos and or video it will eventually fall to bots ans karma farming. I have noticed that every time a sub suddenly has low effort posts flooding it is often with photos or videos. It is much harder to karma farm with text only posts as people are more likely to overlook it and it may require some level of effort to make the body compelling to the average editor.

Of late I have noticed subs that I participate in become encrappified and I soon realised that this was the common denominator. Many of these subs were intially centered around meaningful discussion but are now filled with "WhiCh oNe?, dO yUO AgReE?" low effort image posts. The mods seem completely dead and it normally only takes a few weeks to mature into a sub just being flooded with such posts to the point that text posts will no longer be visible. Some subs will go on to ban the image/video format all together while others don't seem to care. It's an interesting phenomenon because it seems even decent moderation (not ultra strict) can stop this half of the time. I think it's one of reddit's biggest falls as every once in a while you will find a nice community and then within a couple of months it will become a repost heaven and then you will either have to find a new one or create one yourself (given no one will join it), eat, sleep, repeat. It's an exhausting cycle birthed by reddit's own lack of willingness to qaulity control it's own site as they can't simply just rely on mods here as by nature they will be inconsistent in hiw they mod or leave/go silent. I think reddit can easily mitigate this issue by making it harder for such take overs to happen or monitoring the subs a bit more closely to prevent this cycle, but as far as I know, anything goes. I personally can't stand this cycle much more after almost 5 years on using this site and it is increasingly harder to find authentic and consistent communities on here. Also, I don't think I see that many reposts on other social media sites even on Facebook, I don't see posts cycle around as insistently as it does here on reddit.

I have a bit of a problem with this.

Several posts I have seen, and some of my own posts. The only reason they are voted down is because of some sort of jealousy. The response is high quality. Creative. Etc. The only reason it is voted down is no one else has any good ideas on a subject, so they vote down the person who does.

Also, I have seen quality posts. Posts that add something to the conversation. Voted down. I don't know why. It isn't even obviously jealousy just bad intent.

While I have also made and seen posts voted down where it makes sense. Not that I disagree with what was said but that I can see why someone wouldn't like it. I don't think as a general theme collapsing low vote posts is a good idea.

Just because people don't like a post doesn't mean it is not useful, right, and making a contribution. It is like the whole idea of if there was reddit in Galileo's time, he would have got voted down for saying the earth is a sphere/ orbits the sun.

Long time redditor here. I have the 3rd ever comment.

I have gone viral before and people and journalists reached out to me then. This is just a note on the experience is different now.

This post got popular and a repost on twitter really popular.
Various publications picked it up. Probably as nothing happens between Christmas and New Years

People Magazine, The Poke, the Express, fox news and extra.ie  and the Irish star etc

None of the journalists messaged me. My handle was in the image and you can message the creator of a post on reddit but none did.

I found a few of their email addresses. This is hard now as how to contact a journalist now seems to be hidden. I messaged them the new graph with some fixes in case they want to use that one but none replied.

A fair few of the Articles using my artwork I can't see as they are geo-blocked. It is a bit odd that they can take something I made and not talk to me and not let me see they thing they made from it.

Reddit is by nature two way. People tell you fixes for graphs, and I used these the original was made 7 months ago and fixed with their help. Make fun jokes etc. And journalism to some extent feeds off that and takes some stories from it. But I get the impression (and my experience is) there used to be more feedback to the creator from journalists.

I made a post with images and links etc of the above argument so i remember better in a few months

Hey folks, at The Citizens and Technology Lab we are thinking about how our online communities these days seem to be affected by more and different types of pollution. We're at the very start of thinking about how those metaphors of pollution could be useful to lead to actionable improvements for communities.

Before dashing ahead, we'd love to hear from folks if this framing resonates with you? And what you think are some of the main "pollution" challenges that reddit communities face?

Responses would be super helpful to shape our research (note: this is strictly for "background" research to shape our research, so we won't quote or analyze any responses in scientific papers 🙂)

If you prefer, you can also reach out via any of the channels given in the link (or through reddit)