A few months ago I had to change iPads, and in the process awoke a long-dormant Reddit app from its slumber. Reddit to me was a site that I occasionally dipped into for quite specific guitar info, but I never actively browsed. With its reawakening, however, it has bombarded me with content like an octopus looking for a keyhole in a door, and as soon as I show even the mildest flutter of interest in a topic it then seizes on this and targets me with other content that its algorithm has coughed up. And so I find myself at the start of 2025 ,and helped in part by some idle hours over Christmas, a Reddit expert on a quite bizarre range of topics. Here are my results.
Guitar/Luthiery: 50% rich kids who have been bought expensive guitars/amps and don’t know how to use them (extra points for restringing the guitar completely incorrectly and then trying to convince everyone that they are a gigging muso), 50% kids who have shitty gear (usually an amp the size of a lunchbox) wondering why they don’t sound like Slash/Metallica etc.
Explain the Joke: 20% of the time the OP is just fucking stupid, another 20% of the time it just isn’t actually funny by any metric, 20% of the time it’s a hyperspecific geek-culture reference and 40% of the time it’s a sexual reference again using very specific subculture jargon (“In the furry world, people who dress as blue otters are called waffles, so in the cartoon when the waffle is being inserted in the toaster..,.”etc etc).
Dinosaur/Palaeontology: I was actually excited about these, hoping for some interesting evolutionary info etc, but they consist almost entirely of people posting pictures of plush toys, cartoons etc wondering what species they are and then having huge arguments about their accuracy.
Coins: They are never worth anything.
Stone/Rock ID: They are never worth anything.
Painting ID: Usually some tacky and garish junk-store find. They are never worth anything.
Jewellery ID: They are never worth anything.
Crappy Design: This is actually quite entertaining.
What is this thing?: Can be really entertaining as a mystery, although it usually turns out to be some boring, menial item in the end. But it’s an interesting exercise in a Rorschach kind of way.
Am I Overreacting? Usually consists of screenshots of text messages between partners. 100% of the time, she (and it’s always a she) needs to immediately leave him (and it’s always a him). The top-voted comment will always be a pop-psych assessment proclaiming him to be a sociopath. In reality, they are usually both just broken people living sad lives in rancid and obviously doomed relationships. I actually have no idea why I read these.
They did the Math: Can be fun. People try to mathematically dissect scenes/feats from movies etc.
Any others I should look at? I’m sure there are many more, and when my hols finish I’ll return to my usual past-time of commenting under YouTube soft-rock music clips from the 70s (“I’m so lucky to have been a kid in a time when there was actual talent”, “No half-naked dancing, no auto-tune, just actual talent”, “This is real music, from a time when it was played by real musicians with actual talent” etc etc).
“It has bombarded me with content like an octopus looking for a keyhole in a door”! What a wonderful turn of phrase. You’ve certainly had an interesting few months.
I’ve come across Reddit but didn’t really know what it was. Wiki put me straight
“Reddit (/ˈrɛdɪt/ ⓘ) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and forum social network. Registered users (commonly referred to as “Redditors”) submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down (“upvoted” or “downvoted”) by other members.”
“As of August 2024, Reddit is the 9th most-visited website in the world.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
I do occasionally stumble across Reddit discussions which are mildly useful.
Quora is another site of the same ilk which I sometimes stumble across which can have useful content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora
2014 – “Quora was evolving into “a more organized Yahoo Answers, a classier Reddit, an opinionated Wikipedia”, and became popular in tech circles.”
I wonder how many people every month stumble across the Afterword by chance and are fascinated, amused, perplexed or delighted by what they find!
Christ, KFD! What have you done! I’m a classy guy so off to explore Quora…
Literally the first post that came up and things aren’t looking good. I was waiting for the punchline (“But the little ones have the juiciest flesh” etc).
A boy entered a pet shop and asked the price of puppies
“From 300 to 500 euros,” replied the owner. The boy took the little money he had from his pocket and said:
“I only have 100 euros. Could I at least see the puppies?”
The shopkeeper called Lady, the puppies’ mother, who came running, followed by five little fur balls. One of the puppies trailed behind her, limping.
The boy pointed to the lame dog and asked:
“What’s wrong with him?”
The shop owner explained that he had a hip problem and that he would walk like that forever. The boy lit up and said with great joy in his eyes: this is the puppy I want to buy! The shop owner told him:
“No, you can’t buy this. But if you want to have it, I’ll give it to you because it’s worth nothing.”
The boy was silent … he looked at the shop owner and said:
“I don’t want you to give it to me, because that puppy is worth as much as the others. And I will pay for everything. Now I will give you 100 euros and I will bring you another 10 euros every month, until you reach its price.”
Surprised, the shop owner said:
“But this puppy will never be able to run, jump and play with you”…
The boy slowly raised his trousers revealing his left leg, showing off the prosthesis he was wearing. –
“You see, he said, I don’t run very well either and the puppy will need someone who understands him”…
Yes, Quora is a bit like LinkedIn with this kind of thing.
I use Reddit a fair bit, but I don’t post there. Main subreddit I lurk on is the one dedicated to the city I live in. Lots of useful information, even if people there tend to be a bit paranoid.
Is it Birmingham?
(If this wasn’t the AW, I’d have to explain that’s a Black Sabbath joke..)
🙂 You didn’t need to explain. No, Ottawa, which is probably not as exciting as Brum
I don’t look at it much, but I have found it useful for XBox/gaming queries. Whenever I’m stuck or having an in-game issue, I soon discover that somebody on Reddit has been in the same boat and has a solution.
Based on this admittedly cursory experience, I’d say it’s a decent sort of site.
I dip in on a frequent basis. It’s quite US-centric, has a largely Gen Z-based, politicially left-leaning user base (from the subs I frequent, anyway) and frequently makes me laugh.
I look at around thirty subs regularly, from r\Championship, r/tvtoohigh, r/mildlyinfuriating, r/LinkedInLunatics, r/learnspanish, r/lebowski to name but a few.
Just do a search on some keywords, there is guaranteed to be something on there devoted to any of your interests, or you could stumble on something amusing like r/Giraffesdontexist.
Like anything else, it is what you make it. I think it adds to the gaiety of (English speaking) nations in a small way.
Apart from Whatsapp, Reddit has been the only social media I’ve used for about a decade. It’s fine, although as the OP notes the app has become much more aggressive in recent years, and I think it’s good to be mindful of its strengths and weaknesses.
It’s good for memes, cheap laughs, specific questions, seeing what other people made of movies/books/games, funny animal pictures, business reporting and entertaining short videos. It’s also good for music – “if you like this, try that” kind of stuff.
I don’t find the politics stuff particularly helpful – like all social media, the more extreme voices on each flank seem to be elevated, and there’s definitely a hivemind in effect. During the US election I found that reading Reddit threads actively took me further away from understanding what was actually going on. Reddit is a good place to go for laughs and to have your eyebrows raised, probably not so great for facts and truth (the Boston Bomber farrago demonstrated that).
When it’s good, it’s very good. I’ve picked up some great recommendations and read some really interesting thoughts about life in general.
My suspicion, however, is that it’s now on the downslide: you can feel that its owners are shifting from their original utopian mission statement of being a crowd-sourced “front page of the internet” to figuring out how to monetise as quickly and effectively as possible. If anyone is interested in the background to the platform there’s an excellent book by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin called “We Are The Nerds”, which I would strongly recommend.
The last year or so I’ve tried to avoid doomscrolling. My best interactions with Reddit have come when I go in looking for something specific and find it. Wandering around the place increasingly feels like a brain-rotting timesuck, so I’m steering clear.
The best communities are often the one note joke subs. r/fuckmyshitup, r/meirl, r/brandnewsentence, r/interestingasfuck, r/natureismetal, etc.
I’ve never posted anything, and I highly doubt I ever will.
Timesuck – TMFTL…