I’ll share mine first.
I had a psych patient one night pile shitty toilet paper next to his toilet overnight. Normally my psych nurse brain would consider this a symptom of disorganized psychosis, EXCEPT!
I remembered an aita post about a conflict between a western OP and his middle eastern roomate trying to figure out why their roommate put their shitty toilet paper in the trash. Turns out many middle eastern toilets can’t handle toilet paper.
Oh and inpatient psychiatry doesn’t provide freestanding hard plastic trashcans (turns out they make great clubs). We gave him one of our freestanding paper bag trashcans and problem solved.
TL;DR; Reddit expanded my cultural knowledge enough to differentiate disorganized psychotic behaviors from a genuine cultural difference. Thanks reddit!
Anyone have any similar examples of positive exchanges of knowledge or culture using reddit?
I used to make shit post comments where I would vehemently demand something as fact, and even cite sources. At the time, I thought people were upvoting them because they saw it was satire and shared my humor. Later, I had someone ping my account as a citation to their own argument, and when I chimed in and told them it was a shit post, they blocked me and deleted the comment with the ping.
I realized that I was just spreading misinformation and the fact that it was satire flew right over people’s heads. I didn’t think it was anywhere near subtle.
If you say something confidently enough, and add in some fake but legit sounding sources, people will just believe you.
Yikes! Good on you for correcting it! Satire is definitely easier understood in a visual medium as opposed to text based. Can’t say I’m surprised that people actually did that though.
That day you learned how 4chan keeps manipulating people again and again!
I think this is something I learned from Reddit too, although from the lurker side vs your example. It seems like it’s one of the scary and cool things about the Internet, that your words can be seen by anyone and interpreted in many ways you didn’t intend. Even if something seems perfectly clear to you, someone else might not see it.
I think I also learned that I am also vulnerable to misinformation, just as much as the people that I’ve scoffed at for falling victim to it. It’s made me more cautious in how I relay information to other people - if I am speculating or don’t have complete information about something, I make sure to mention that. I think the people in my life have come to trust me more when I tell them something because of this.
I once posted a comment that was misinterpreted by a bunch of neo-Nazis as an expression of a sympathetic view. I was showered with compliments and expressions of friendship and invited through private messages to join a range of exclusive Nazi forums. They were extremely welcoming and warm, and it felt good except for the whole thing about them all being Nazis. So Reddit taught me something about how the far right recruits by making people feel appreciated and special. And I also learned to check my comments for ambiguity.