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?
One of the more interesting things I took away from Reddit was that there is a fairly noticeable threshold of community size above which the quality of participation abruptly drops. I think there’s a conversation worth having about what barriers to entry are desirable or not.
Agreed, I was on Reddit for almost 12 years before I bailed, and although it was a “frog in a pot” kind of slow boil, the quality of content and interaction across the entire site was far worse at the end than at the beginning. But within individual subreddits the change would happen overnight after being linked in a popular comment. But the big thing for the site as a whole was that subreddits stopped being communities about specific topics and were just kind of catch-alls for any kind of post or memes. The whole thing eroded into a vaguely categorized iFunny clone and any sense of community just vanished.
People not adhering to the sub purpose was a constant source of frustration for me. But when the post is at 24k upvotes, downvotes or reports won’t do much.
I had the same experience with /r/winstupidprizes recently. There was some post were someone just did something dangerous but nothing bad happened at all. Not even a little bit. It was upvoted thousands of times, had a ton of comments, and only a few of them were calling out how it didn’t make any sense why it was getting upvoted at all.
I wonder how many were bots vs stupid people.
It might be interesting to see if we could create “honeypot” posts like this which are super stupid and outside of the point of the community, then just keep track of the accounts which upvoted them.
You’re in one of those places right now. This is reminiscent of the old askreddit before the major rules overhaul and aggressive moderation
Meirl is a great example of this. Ten years ago it was specifically for a certain kind of meme: So-called “selfies of the soul”. Then over time more and more people flooded in who barely got the joke and it became such a diluted meme sub that the top post on the front page was very often just a repost of something from r/funny