reddit is a whole different beast. It does not have a sense of humor, rather it is a biased cesspool of partisanship.

You may have thought this is an objective observation.

For anyone over the age of 16 this comment is a loud expression of your political views.

Also, I find Reddit to be super funny. Just yesterday someone posted a photo of their brain MRI showing a tumor the size of a tennis ball and everyone, including the OP were having a great time.

> For anyone over the age of 16 this comment is a loud expression of your political views.

I'm curious as to what you think those political views are, because I strongly agree with what sidcool wrote (even if they didn't mean it the way I interpreted it) and I disagree with you.

I think that Reddit "is a biased cesspool of partisanship", but very much in both directions. Many subreddits are so wholly hard right or hard left that I think they're almost caricatures of themselves. And even for subreddits without a hard political bent, they are often the very definition of an echo chamber - they are great places to go where you want everyone to agree with you and you can see people who disagree with you get downvoted to oblivion. And, importantly, this is literally by design based on how subreddits are created and moderated.

I have rarely (not never, but rarely) made a comment that took a somewhat nuanced opinion where I wasn't heavily downvoted. And, contrarily, I have made similar comments on HN where, if I wasn't particularly upvoted, I received what felt like fair dialogue and back-and-forth with other commenters.

All that said, I still use Reddit frequently and find it frequently interesting, sometimes informative, and often pretty hilarious.

You really don’t know adherents of which political stance are constantly complaining about “lack of a sense of humor”? Or who has been complaining about the “tech bias”? I am glad if you were somehow not exposed. I don’t find it partisan. I come across a lot of criticism of Democrats. And the current administration. Also, if you’re claiming subreddits are partisan in the way mods want it to be, we can’t conclude Reddit as a whole is partisan, can we?

Edit:

The sibling comment offers a more concise explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329213

I sleep better at night thinking it is just a battleground of astroturfing bots fighting each other (at least on the main pages).

Everything from massive Russian state-actor bot farms testing newly trained LLMs popping out AI-generated meme formats before deploying domestically unknowingly getting into arguments with Israeli bot farms trying to raise support for some new movie series that will enable them to raise money for their next missile strike competing for eyeballs/attention from some uni student in a dorm room paying mid-sized black market companies in India to post comments telling you that cast-iron pans are too hard to clean so you should buy the non-sticks you saw on instagram (which are just marketing dropshippers in the USA selling the QA rejected pans from established brands).

The online world is a wild place.

Hacker News is Reddit with a nuclear downvote button and tone policing.

It's not that much better in terms of "dead internet," the bots are just more eloquent. In some ways the HN flavor of gamified engagement actively encourages worse outcomes than Reddit.

(In case you didn't realize it, you're replying to one of the OG reddit admins.)

Hello fellow OG :)

I joined from the Webmonkey sidebar in like 2008.

Lived in San Francisco for a while. Liked seeing you pop up in that sub, even after you retired.

"When we do it, it's called sense of humor. When they do it, it's bias and partisanship."