Yeah, but my point is, you get a lot of stuff like women complaining about how their boyfriend is a jerk, as he just cheated on them, and looking for a shoulder to cry on. Fair enough, there are people who want that, and there’s legitimately a demand for that. But then you’ve got the combination of women who are upset with various men for various situations in their life complaining about men and Reddit routing huge numbers of new users – including men – into the subreddit and it’s not a very happy mix for either half of the equation.

Honestly, I’m not really enthralled with politics subreddits being the first place to send new users either. It kind of results in a lot of yelling and angry people, because you’ve got unhappy people who have conflicting views being shoveled in a pile together.

I’d rather that Reddit had let people just find their own way to subreddits where people maybe had sharply-conflicting views, but as an initial place to send people, maybe landscape photos or cooking or stuff that doesn’t tend to lead to conflict between groups of users.

I remember reading some article arguing that outrage tends to tremendously boost engagement, and that that’s one reason that media – both social and traditional – tends to encourage it. I think that there’s something to that. I used to read a magazine aimed at Macintosh users. The last page of every issue had an article written by a columnist named John C. Dvorak who would write an article that tended to be about how Apple didn’t know what it was doing and how Microsoft had the right idea. This was at a time when Apple was risking maybe going out of business and a lot of Mac users were really worried about the future of the platform. Invariably, the letters section of each issue was full of letters from outraged readers saying that Dvorak didn’t know what he was talking about in the article in the previous issue. Years later, I remember reading something by Dvorak talking about how he did that intentionally, to get people worked up. It did make me wonder how long that that had been a convention in journalism.