Reddit - it's not great is it

Never got the UI on Reddit, never tried beyond a glimpse though, to be fair.

I think Boards has definitely changed as was described above. It's not Vanilla or whatever else that's "killed" it (I know, I know, it's been dying since it was born), it's the lack of humour (for the most part). It used to be a bit of craic, lighthearted, you could take the piss out of people in a good-natured way without causing offence, you could have a decent discussion and agree to disagree without getting piled on. People, on AH in particular, were out for a laugh.

Not to say there is no humour here these days, of course there is, but there is also a portion of the user base who seem to sit on here all day, waiting for any chance to be a prick. That usually stops any fun or discussion that would have been had. They should take a leaf from my book and only pop in on occasion to be a prick.

Reddit and Quora are opposite-world.

Most redditors will get angry if confronted with a true statement about the world or human nature. Which makes me wonder how much real life experience many redditors have - are they just sat in front of a computer screen all the time?

So out of that 70 million just subtract all the discussion of hobbies, purely technical and specialist knowledge - objective areas like comp-sci, engineering, mathematics, law, linguistics, automotive tech - gardening, music, film, cooking, sports and then focus on any sub-reddit touching on life, the world (by which I mean knowledge of the ways of the world) and human nature.

I came across a thread in Reddit from r/dating today. A guy just asks if going from being obese and sedentary to becoming physically fit will make him more attractive to women. One on the top posts is from another redditor basically warning him that most of the other posters are deliberately lying to him because they feel they have to pretend that women only care about what's on the inside.

This is my experience reading Reddit and Quora in general - any question about life stuff is met with a wall of double-talk, usually with large dollops of effeminate outrage mixed-in. Worst might be r/ireland and r/Dublin which are a tissue of lies - because many Irish people are practised naifs, feigning outrage at every-thing, coyly reinforcing every kind of deliberately counterintuitive "take" and luxuriating in demonstrating pseudo-virtue in approved ways. But with little in the way of frankness and truth-telling.

There's a self-selection bias because people who lead lives of "virtuality" are comfortable having made the choice to exist for large chunks of time in a textual, abstract, media-curated world - so lots of academics and pseudo-academics (with mandatory babble about "peer review" and hi-larious references to Schrödinger's Cat), lots of IT workers, news-media/politics junkies, and just the general flotsam and jetsam of people who up-front like to call themselves "educated" and/or can type the phrase "Please educate yourself" without irony or cringe.

Also well done for resisting the temptation to type "very, very stupid". It's become a cliche to go for two "very"'s instead of one but you had enough restraint not to. Respect.