zlacker

That can happen but the relative frequencies matter a lot. What I’ve seen at least an order of magnitude more frequently is that someone comes in with some tedious repeat of e.g. recent Fox News talking points, perhaps even literally copy-pasted, and then whines about downvoting because clearly the problem is that other people weren’t taking seriously their regurgitation of something which has debunked many times already. This is especially common in places like science or economics subreddits where a hefty fraction of these aren’t controversial takes but simply run afoul of measurable reality.

I’ve also seen a ton of cases where people expressed disagreement or contrarian positions but did so in a respectful and fact-aware manner and had positive interactions because they were respectful of the community.

>>acdha+(OP)
But you have tedious repeated things upvoted to the moon as long as it is the right kind of wrong, so that is often all you see in popular subreddits when sorting by popular.

>>acdha+(OP)
I've found that when posting a popular opinion, you can have absolute minimum effort fluff like "racism is bad" and get plenty of upvotes, but for controversial opinions you need to tread extremely lightly. You need disclaimers and careful wording and references etc. to avoid being downvoted. In many cases that's not even enough.

Positive interactions are certainly possible and do happen, but the site is heavily heavily tilted towards groupthink. Fighting it is an uphill battle.

>>Jensso+N2
Definitely - I’m not saying it’s perfect, just that it’s not as simple as portrayed in the comment I replied to. It’s just part of human nature that challenging the status quo is harder than stroking it: nobody changes the world by saying “<local sports team> is the best” but it’s easy to warm a crowd up that way, too.

>>Asrael+z3
It’s definitely easier to go along with the status quo, but where in life is that not true? Things like academic debates have a lot of rules and structure trying to reduce that but even there it’s understood that certain positions are harder to argue than others.

>>Asrael+z3
> In many cases that's not even enough.

Users rarely deviate from the established upvote/downvote patterns. In fact, I'd go as far as saying many users don't even read the comments before voting.

When two users are having a heated argument, it's common for a third person to respond to the 'right' person with an innocuous comment and be heavily downvoted for it.

>>acdha+(OP)
It's funny you call out the exception as tedious as opposed to the groupthink that's mindlessly enforced and repeated ad nauseam on most Subreddits.

>>gorwel+0G
A subreddit is a community - if you don’t like the norms, go to a different one. It’s like going to someone’s party and loudly asking why they all like such lousy music – nothing positive is going to come from it. In many cases, it’s not even entertainingly weird - more like “you should try something good. You probably haven’t heard of my favorite band before but look them up. Nickleback.”

Note also how I mentioned people repeating low-effort arguments. The tedium comes from the stream of people who come, repeat someone else’s idea, aren’t prepared or willing to engage intellectually, and whine about censorship when nobody finds that compelling. Anyone who spends much time in a particular forum can recognize that and see that there’ll be very little value from engaging. We see that a lot here where people complain that HN is biased against cryptocurrency because the response to “have you accepted our lord and savior bitcoin into your heart?” was not well received by people who remember the exact same claims being made a decade ago.

>>acdha+YN
> The tedium comes from the stream of people who come, repeat someone else’s idea, aren’t prepared or willing to engage intellectually

This is 99% of Reddit though.