Reddit: Hobby or Addiction? Oh wait, both of those are awful.

Reddit, for those of you who don't know, is a site where users post links, and users vote on which they would rank as the "best" or most "relevant" and really that's it. It's full of pictures of cats dressed up as people, and memes that were invented the week before, and will be played out within a few days (if they aren't over already).

And it's damn addicting.

When I first joined Reddit, I couldn't help but notice how many people would be saying cryptic things like "damn you for introducing me to Reddit!" or if they saw a new user saying "I'm so sorry." I'd see stuff like "I've been here a month and... damn you Reddit. I hate you."

Months went by, and I was still casually checking on the site, but it was nothing crazy, so I still had no idea what the big problem was.

Then I began posting.

You see, in addition to the links that are provided, each link has a comments section, where the comments follow the same rules of being voted upon. The more votes your comment gets, the higher and more visible it is. And all these votes are tracked.

My problem developed when I, after reading these for a while and making a few little one sentence comments here and there, made a long post about a personally embarrassing story that I thought was pretty funny. I forgot about it and went to sleep.

The next day, I had tons of replies to my story, heaps of "upvotes", and worst of all, a new desire for more. More!

So I began commenting more and more, in search of these upvotes. Some posts worked quite well, and got me upvotes. Some had the opposite effect, and I was given downvotes. I was reading so many comments, I hardly cared about the topic we were supposed to be commenting on.

This is why Reddit is so bad. The comments.

They are all the same.

The same things get voted to the top. The same lame jokes, the same stupid memes, or just the same boring ideas; they're never original. And the people who vote on it just want to see the same things over and over, so they upvote it. And the people who got upvoted, obviously figure they are doing something right, so they do more of those things to get those upvotes.

Here's an example: Someone's thread in AskReddit (a place where you ask people to comment on a topic you pose) asked women some advice on men that they found attractive. Something like "weird things guys do that you actually like," or in the same vein as that.

At the top of the post, there were a bunch of answers about specific things, with a bunch of guys replies being saying things like "I do that!" and "that's me, sweet!"

And buried far, far into the bottom of the post, was someone quite rightfully pointing out the ridiculousness of the whole affair. The answers that these guys were getting weren't great advice. These guys would see the answers that women gave. And once they see an answer that applies to them, of course they upvote it. Not because the answer is necessarily "true" or a good answer, but there confirmation bias is going off. So they upvoted them. Other people see these highly upvoted answers, and figure they must be true too. As well, the answers being given are just fishing for upvotes. So it's a vicious, vicious cycle the produces no discussion of merit and just feeds the ideas already implanted in our heads.

So it's that's you see those same discussion with those same answers getting the same amount of upvotes, and all the new ideas and interesting things that are said are never voted or read.

It's too bad. Because sometimes the site is pretty cool, and you read some intriguing stuff.

What has changed though? Not much. I still go to Reddit, and I still try to make interesting comments.

But really I should just be working on my homework.