I have a reddit account.
Reddit is pretty stupid. It's like Twitter that way. I have a Twitter account too, but it mostly serves only to popularize these blog posts.
Reddit, well I'm not sure why I got an account. Probably because I was researching something historical and I tapped into a thread there. There's a reddit sub on everything.
I like a couple of reddit sites, mostly those that deal with history. But a few years ago I removed myself from posting on Asks Historians, which is moderated by people whose sole role, it seems, is to remove posts on a difficult to discern and dictatorial basis. In checking into the moderators at that time I was quite unimpressed with their qualifications as "historians" and I packed up and left. In that case the "historian" was a student working on a masters, I believe, in one of the highly rarified and highly irrelevant categories of any discipline that exists anymore, that one being a "woke" one that demonstrates a lack of understanding of the era upon which he was writing to start with.
About the same time I left all of the ones that dealt with the law. I deal with that at work. Why would I want to read about that when I'm not at work?
Today I packed up and left from a pile of reddit "subs" including an economic one on which I posted quite a bit. Being on an economic sub was just an invitation to constant argument with people's whose views don't matter in any real sense in the larger world, but whose presence on a sub gives them a place to massage their often off centered egos and pretend like people are listening. To make it worse, economic subs tend to be flooded with teenage socialist and anarchists who aren't that in the real world, and those who have a completely Utopian view of the world such as, and I kid you note, Christian Monarchist who seek a restoration of a world that never existed.
Indeed, reddit is really characterized by its anonymity, which is true of the net in general, but particularly true of reddit. Economic subs, for example should be populated by the fairly serious, but they tend to be populated by some who are really on the margins of the topics. Added to that, you never know if the person you are debating is a 60 year old PhD in economics or a 14 year old writing in their parents basement. Indeed, the Socialist Anarchist Monarchist stands a good chance of being the 14 year old son of two orthopedic surgeons in suburban Detroit rather than a down and out machinist in Dresden.
I suspect, moreover, that this is true of all threads on serious topics of broad interest. They probably all start out populated by a very few who care deeply, and know deeply, on the subject, but then the margins come in. I'm a pretty serious Catholic, for example, but I avoid the Catholic reddit subs like the plague and from what I hear they're deeply rad trad, which probably leaves the orthodox normal in constant highly rarified debates. The same with economic and political topics. You may start of with the economics of subsidiarity but sooner or later you'll be debating with teenage socialists. About that point the people who really cared about the topic leave.
Who needs it?
I sure don't.
Needless argument only serves angst. So, on day 2 of 2021, I've reduced my participation in that.
I also did that, I noted, by wiping out not only a whole bunch of reddit subs I had on my follow list, but a bunch of Twitter accounts I was following. Twitter is even worse that reddit for its screaming irrelevancy but thanks to the times it's become something that is actually influential. Our departing President hasn't helped that by posting on Twitter all of the time, but this didn't start with him.
Following anything on Twitter is nearly a guaranteed way to end up disappointed in somebody. For example, I like some cartoons quite a bit, and one of them is Dilbert. I made the mistake of recently following, therefore, Scott Adams, who writes the cartoon.
I can't say I wasn't warned by eee gads, his political posts are the far edge of outright nuts. Just a few days ago he was repeating the "won Georgia" fantasy that Donald Trump also posted on and it wasn't too long ago that Adams was insisting Trump would still be re-inaugurated on January 20. I really don't care what Adams thinks on politics and now I wish I didn't. I removed him a couple of days ago. But after weeding the reddit patch, I went in and did the same on Twitter. Stuff than just causes angst has gone.
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
Thoreau.
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