And what’s worse, the contents of subreddits are incredibly homogeneous; there is no place for dissent. A subreddit named ”music” or ”films” or ”games” (just conceptually, ok?) fancies itself as the reference for that specific thing, when it’s actually just a reflection of whatever political stance the mods have (usually simply reduction to average). Outside people will see that and think ”oh nice a centralized discussion for concept X” and that just makes things even worse.
And the public upvote / downvote system make it even worse. Soon, you're reduced to a small subset of opinion because any slightly dissenting opinion will be downvoted to hell and hidden at the very bottom of the page.
Not necessarily an issue for small communities focused on a non-controversial topic (mostly anything about jokes/memes, or very niche technical stuff), but bigger communities focusing on slightly political topics become hell. The "europe" subreddit is incredibly toxic for this reason. Not because of individual redditors, but because of the group effect.
HN doesn't suffer from this problem both because of the niche aspect and because downvotes are restricted.
Yes. The mob mentality is an issue on reddit and has made me refrain from giving my honest opinion on a lot of topics because of the fear of being downvoted to hell. I think an upvote or like only system like Facebook or twitter would be much better.
