Board 8 > Do any of you here also use Reddit?

(+) Yeah! (+)

SantaRPG posted...

reddit by a wide margin if we're considering average. Gamefaqs by a wide margin if we're considering worse collection of offenders

Really, so the worst of the worst you think are on this site mostly, why would that be though?

Reddit is better. The things I've seen here man.

B8 is good times though. And I still prefer the simpler layout of this place and I'm not a fan of the upvote system

XIII_Rocks posted...

Reddit

The things I've seen man.

B8 is good times though. And I still prefer the simpler layout of this place and I'm not a fan of the upvote system

So you are a mod and even you think this site is worse, a lot worse?

Reddit wins by sheer scale, especially considering it has subs dedicated to hatred or complaining about just about anything you can think of - children, spouses, in-laws, fat people, pets, you name it. It'd be a more interesting question if it was trying to compare it with GameFAQs at its peak.

My perspective is probably skewed because this is the only board on GFAQs I visit anymore, but Reddit is definitely a hard place to deal with sometimes. Just a huge collection of miserable people who are angry that everyone else isn't as miserable as they are.

Omniscientless posted...

Reddit wins by sheer scale, especially considering it has subs dedicated to hatred or complaining about just about anything you can think of - children, spouses, in-laws, fat people, pets, you name it. It'd be a more interesting question if it was trying to compare it with GameFAQs at its peak.

At it's peak, this site was much much worse?

i can't believe i'm saying this since i think reddit is insanely toxic, but gamefaqs is more toxic.

reddit's toxicity mostly comes from the groupthinking and comformity and how you will be treated if you post any opinion that is even slightly out of line or if you mess up a social taboo that you didn't know existed. but if that's not happening, a decent amount of threads will still be, like, normal and mature.

meanwhile on gamefaqs, literally any board other than board 8, every thread is just a bunch of 13-year olds squabbling with each other and accusing each other of being trolls. which made sense 20 years ago but its still the same today even though the site doesn't get new users, and if you check the account dates of the people involved, there's no way they're in their teens at all anymore, so i really don't get how they're somehow all still so immature.

reddit's toxicity is kinda more insidious though because at least on gamefaqs its a bunch of socially stunted adults who can't help themselves and are mostly harmless, on reddit it comes from people who are otherwise proper adults but still can't resist a bit of bullying when they see that someone has stepped out of line.

Dels posted...

i can't believe i'm saying this since i think reddit is insanely toxic, but gamefaqs is more toxic.

reddit's toxicity mostly comes from the groupthinking and comformity and how you will be treated if you post any opinion that is even slightly out of line or if you mess up a social taboo that you didn't know existed. but if that's not happening, a decent amount of threads will still be, like, normal and mature.

meanwhile on gamefaqs, literally any board other than board 8, every thread is just a bunch of 13-year olds squabbling with each other and accusing each other of being trolls. which made sense 20 years ago but its still the same today even though the site doesn't get new users, and if you check the account dates of the people involved, there's no way they're in their teens at all anymore, so i really don't get how they're somehow all still so immature.

reddit's toxicity is kinda more insidious though because at least on gamefaqs its a bunch of socially stunted adults who can't help themselves and are mostly harmless, on reddit it comes from people who are otherwise proper adults but still can't resist a bit of bullying when they see that someone has stepped out of line.

You think this board is one of the better ones on here? Yeah sad many are like 40 and not 14 and still......maybe both sites users act much better out in irl with actual people

GranTurismo posted...

So you are a mod and even you think this site is worse, a lot worse?

I browse very specific reddits in fairness which are very much good vibes only type places. The Taskmaster reddit for example

XIII_Rocks posted...

I browse very specific reddits in fairness which are very much good vibes only type places. The Taskmaster reddit for example

What subject is taskmaster?

Reddit also has a massive problem with fostering hate, with a lot of subreddits basically just designed to promote bigotry. Not aware of that here!

The more niche a sub is, the less toxic it is (which is probably true for any online community, frankly). But gamers having embarrassing arguments and squabbling is not nearly as bad as the kind of stuff there's on reddit if you bother to go exploring a little. It's not just the amount of deep hatred a lot of people seem to have for just about anything, it's also reddit's very many advice subs that attempt to push buttons or push certain ideological agendas. It's the usual hot take from GameFAQs trolls becoming a craft of its own, posting ragebait with no other goal than to piss people off and start fights, which quickly escalate.

I've taken a particular interest on reddit and its trends because I find it kind of fascinating. It's like submitting stories to magazines or the newspaper in the past, except there's no filter - everything gets published. So we have weeks in which suddenly several people have stories about heavy topics like paternity fraud, incel fantasies, or women making fake sexual assault allegations, and then by next week it's all stories about fat people being delusional and trans people acting insane. Most of these stories are very obviously fiction, but the userbase doesn't realize this or doesn't care.

What's particularly interesting about reddit culture is their emphasis on the idea that you don't owe anyone anything (extreme individualism), their constant need for (often nuclear) revenge and self-validation, and that morals are almost entirely dependent on what is legal or not. It may seem like flame wars over games are more toxic on a surface level, but reddit's kind of toxicity is just a different beast altogether. Apples and oranges, but one feels far more layered than the other to me.

Most of this is outside the gaming spheres, but to be honest, reddit is famous for overreacting and jumping to conclusions, as well as starting witch hunts and harassment campaigns. I'd be surprised if GameFAQs has the ability to make an impact outside its own boundaries the way reddit often does.

Even the niche reddit subs are ruined by the upvote system. It's such a bad system for actually running a community. It actively destroys conversation and incentivizes hivemind and interruption, even if there's only a handful of posts.

There's this phenomenon that I don't know what to call, where you'll have a "conversation" of 5-6 posts, where each post is from a different person. But each user speaks as if they were the previous poster, so it reads like a 1-on-1 conversation. It's a preview of our future AI-generated social structure, where individuality is completely forgotten. This is why it's ideal for bigotry-driven communities.

I don't know if that's "toxic" in the way most people use the term. But it definitely rots your brain. The positive is that it sorts information pretty well. But also like AI, there's a ton of hallucination which is optimized for sounding good rather than actually being true, so you can't trust anything there.

Omniscientless posted...

...

Yeah this is all true. I unsubscribed from everything but a few niches and gaming subs so I guess I forgot lots of reddit can be like that. And it's a good point that the sort of toxicity that represents an actual lifestyle/worldview that would make you miserable, is probably worse than just fighting about anime and video games opinions on a gamefaqs board.

I deleted my Reddit account and felt my mental health improve massively.

I've tried to go to Reddit in the past and I just can't. There's one specific gaming subreddit I go to, but otherwise mostly stay off, unless a Google/Bing search takes me there.

Gamefaqs I feel better about going to different boards, maybe because it's at least the trolling/arguing is more gaming related. And it's also small enough to not get lost and waste a bunch of time in the vastness of all the different subreddits out there.

foolm0r0n posted...

Even the niche reddit subs are ruined by the upvote system. It's such a bad system for actually running a community. It actively destroys conversation and incentivizes hivemind and interruption, even if there's only a handful of posts.

There's this phenomenon that I don't know what to call, where you'll have a "conversation" of 5-6 posts, where each post is from a different person. But each user speaks as if they were the previous poster, so it reads like a 1-on-1 conversation. It's a preview of our future AI-generated social structure, where individuality is completely forgotten. This is why it's ideal for bigotry-driven communities.

I don't know if that's "toxic" in the way most people use the term. But it definitely rots your brain. The positive is that it sorts information pretty well. But also like AI, there's a ton of hallucination which is optimized for sounding good rather than actually being true, so you can't trust anything there.

This is pretty well-stated. Although I wonder if any system can truly work at the scale Reddit operates for its larger communities.

Something I find incredible about Reddit is how you can have an article posted on an article-based subreddit, and all 500 of the comments will be doing some form of free association with the headline.

foolm0r0n posted...

Even the niche reddit subs are ruined by the upvote system. It's such a bad system for actually running a community. It actively destroys conversation and incentivizes hivemind and interruption, even if there's only a handful of posts.

There's this phenomenon that I don't know what to call, where you'll have a "conversation" of 5-6 posts, where each post is from a different person. But each user speaks as if they were the previous poster, so it reads like a 1-on-1 conversation. It's a preview of our future AI-generated social structure, where individuality is completely forgotten. This is why it's ideal for bigotry-driven communities.

I don't know if that's "toxic" in the way most people use the term. But it definitely rots your brain. The positive is that it sorts information pretty well. But also like AI, there's a ton of hallucination which is optimized for sounding good rather than actually being true, so you can't trust anything there.

man I wish I could upvote this post

redrocket posted...

man I wish I could upvote this post

r/beatmetoit

I need my karma!!!

redrocket posted...

man I wish I could upvote this post

if your post gets massive downvotes is it almost like being modded? have never used reddit

The upvote system is actually pretty neat for when people are looking for help, in the same way GameFAQs Q&A or whatever it's called gives you a top answer. I'm often directed to reddit when looking something specific up, and it's very nice that instead of reading through dozens of comments trying to find the actual answer, people have upvoted the most reasonable and/or helpful comment.

On the other hand, for discussion subs, it creates all the issues foolmo has mentioned. Groupthink and hiveminds are a big problem, especially with subs having their own mod teams (or super mods that own hundreds of subs, another weird phenomenon of reddit culture and a whole can of worms in itself, all of whom usually have very specific ideologies and control a sub's acceptable opinions). When a sub leans too hard to one side, it usually ends up in someone creating a splinter sub that promotes the opposite ideology, which incentivizes groupthink even more. And because upvotes are like crack to some people, they all try to one-up each other by trying to make the funniest comment, creating endless chains of frequently terrible jokes and puns. None of this is precisely toxic, but I find it incredibly annoying. The loss of individuality is weird too to us who come from old school message boards, but it's kinda like that everywhere now when you think about it - tiktok, twitter, reddit, instagram comments, whatever else.

Naturally, reddit is also a news source for many, which means it can risk spreading misinformation or selling a specific narrative, which can have actual impact on people in a way that teenagers calling each other Nintendrones will never be able to replicate. I'm subbed to the Today I Learned and You Should Know subs, and a lot of heavily upvoted threads are completely false or blatantly misrepresenting the information that is being shared. Then you have karma farming to sell accounts, bots that repost threads and comments, and bots who post merchandise and advertise websites trying to pass themselves off as real people. It's wild out there.

Reddit has had numerous subreddits so toxic that the government started monitoring at them

GranTurismo posted...

if your post gets massive downvotes is it almost like being modded? have never used reddit

No, it just gets pushed to the bottom of the page. But you can also sort comments by controversial/downvotes, so in a way they probably end up receiving more attention than if they had just been left alone and ignored, which results in slapfights in which one user gets dogpiled by the rest of the community. Some redditors tend to report things they disagree with as well, so mods and admins often do take action on those heavily downvoted posts.

GameFAQs as a whole is pretty toxic, but B8 is the most wholesome community I've been a part of in decades

yeah i voted just based on this board

the game-specific boards are much worse than reddit

SantaRPG posted...

No the worst of the worst are on reddit, but they also have the best of the best.

Gamefaqs is like the equivalent of an american based irish pub. Most people here are old stubborn goats with fairly toxic ways and there's no one to really bring up the average.

It's been a while since I've used reddit or any non-b8 gamefaqs boards in any real capacity, but that sounds about right

so depends on time period and board being talked about. like the worst of reddit isn't "toxic" as much as it's just outright disgusting, illegal, and needs FBI knocking on their doors. toxicity being like... internet drama that can bleed into real life drama, or just weird ass internet trolling/flaming, they'd win on scale but at least it's closer if you're looking at a percentage in our peak. certainly not nowadays. like i'm not looking at our game boards that often unless there's questions i'm searching for but i'm not looking at r/fortnite or whatever either and i'm sure any place with a populated League board is gonna be shit.

B8 > Reddit Average > GameFAQs Average > Worst of GameFAQs >>>> Worst of Reddit

Omniscientless posted...

they all try to one-up each other by trying to make the funniest comment, creating endless chains of frequently terrible jokes and puns.

I feel personally attacked

I think what makes Reddit so bad is that its a collection of echo chambers, many of which become toxic due to the people they attract and the sentiments being regularly upvoted to the top of each thread

I think its hard to weigh how toxic Reddit is overall because you can easily compartmentalize it, but you can do that with gamefaqs too. I never leave the same like three communities on gamefaqs so to me its infinitely better. I think Reddit bleeds together a bit more so its harder to avoid bullshit

They're both full of humans so they're both toxic.

The more "general" reddit forums are full of antisocial puritans who preach from a moral high ground because it's easy to do that when you've never left the house.

GameFAQs still might be worse. Some of our most active posters haven't grown a day in 20 years, and that's a really sad reflection of the community as a whole.

Reddit can be okay if you avoid most mainstream subs

KamikazePotato posted...

B8 > Reddit Average > GameFAQs Average > Worst of GameFAQs >>>> Worst of Reddit

Fairly bang on tbh

I only visit like 2 reddits for hearthstone and they have typically been fine. I have gone to other reddits though like ranime when I was a panel member or epic seven and kings raid when I played them.

Obviously hearthstone and battlegrounds reddits are large. But on the bg one at least the vibe is that people are pretty helpful and positive towards things. Except beasts. The reddit hates them and one of the first things a new user should know is not to post how you won with one unless it's a weird build.

For something like epic seven which I played in it's prime the reddit has basically always been new players asking for help and fan art.

A lot of it does come down to the mods and rules on a reddit etc. Social boards like b8 are a pretty special card for gamefaqs and the wide breadth of insane and meme posts we have would not fly on a lot of reddits.

KokoroAkechi posted...

I only visit like 2 reddits for hearthstone and they have typically been fine. I have gone to other reddits though like ranime when I was a panel member or epic seven and kings raid when I played them.

Obviously hearthstone and battlegrounds reddits are large. But on the bg one at least the vibe is that people are pretty helpful and positive towards things. Except beasts. The reddit hates them and one of the first things a new user should know is not to post how you won with one unless it's a weird build.

For something like epic seven which I played in it's prime the reddit has basically always been new players asking for help and fan art.

A lot of it does come down to the mods and rules on a reddit etc. Social boards like b8 are a pretty special card for gamefaqs and the wide breadth of insane and meme posts we have would not fly on a lot of reddits.

What is hearthstone though?

subreddit has active communities for almost anything you can think of. but when you go there it's about an 80-90% chance that the place is filled with people complaining. at least on board 8 there are some people who sometimes have fun and encourage positivity.

I don't frequent any other social forums besides B8. I think I'm better off just staying here and limiting the amount of social media I consume in general.

Reddit is worse (almost by nature of how its setup), but I've also learned that on the internet that no matter where you are....not to really speak your opinions/thoughts or you probably will get bombed

the internet can be a cesspool echo-chamber at times lol

I used to post on Reddit a lot and still find it useful to browse subreddits relevant to my hobbies.

I basically only like reddit for the creative writing subs (relationshipadvice, aita, etc) which is super toxic but damn some of those posts are absolutely brilliant

Reddit has a lot of toxic mobs and is generally worse but the unfiltered toxicity on some parts of GameFAQs are somethin else.

Accel_R8 posted...

Reddit has a lot of toxic mobs and is generally worse but the unfiltered toxicity on some parts of GameFAQs are somethin else.

like which parts of this site?

Random game boards are always just cancerous AF on this site. 90% negativity all the time. Don't get me started on GameFAQs' wrestling boards, DBZ board, its all bickering and childish bullshit. At least on Reddit you can put people on blast and downvote their BS out of sight.

Issue with Reddit is that if you don't agree with the hivemind of whatever subreddit, you're going to be silenced.