How Reddit Attracts (and Rewards) the Worst Type of Comments
The best response on Reddit is the very first thing that comes to mind.
It’s well-known that the first rule of the internet is never read the comments. Personally, I’ve never been a fan of it as a hard, fast rule, but that’s because I have a bit of a bias. I used to be a commenter! In fact, I got my earliest writing jobs because editors of sites I commented on noticed the un-asked-for essays I was writing for free. But it’s rare to find a community like that, where people wrote thoughtful things, had camaraderie with the site authors, and members of the community talked civilly with each other.
Instead, it usually looks more like Reddit.
Admitting you read Reddit — and especially Reddit comments — is already a self-own, but I have to press on. Because there’s something unique about the way Reddit’s comment system works that makes it distinctly annoying. The community it has cultivated over the years is, like everything else, filtered by the system its built on. And despite the common perception among some users of the site that Reddit is some kind meritocracy, the site — and especially its comments — are primed to reward commenters’ most terrible instincts.
The main issue comes in how Reddit decides what content to surface. While there are other factors that go into Reddit’s sorting algorithms, the primary feature is the upvote: each user can click an arrow that implicitly says “this should be more visible.” This applies to posts as well as comments. The more upvotes something gets, the higher it goes.
The effect this can have has been examined before, but the tl;dr version is that when viewing a thread early, even a single extra upvote on a comment can lead to a snowball effect where more people in a community upvote that comment. The idea kind of makes sense, right? You see a comment with a “2” next to it instead of a “1” and that signals to you that someone else already agreed with what was said. That subtly implies that this isn’t just one guy’s opinion. Now it’s a group. The wind vane of community opinion has started to show itself.
This seemingly minor thing was enough of an issue that years ago Reddit added a feature where subreddit mods…
