Why Reddit is an Awful Resource for Gamers

#1. It's an Echochamber

Reddit is intentionally designed to be an echochamber. How so?

Well, in general, the concept of liking and disliking or upvoting and downvoting posts is already conducive to popular opinion begetting itself. However, Reddit takes this two steps further by:

-Giving you a publicly visible score (Karma) based on your recieved up/down-votes.

-Subbreddits being able to deny you privileges, like being able to post in that subreddit, based on your Karma score.

The result is two things:

-People with unpopular opinions don't share them, for fear of negative Karma.

-People with unpopular opinions just plain decide not to use Reddit in general.

When it's all said and done, you end up with a community of exclusively people who all agree on the vast majority of things.

#2. It's a Cesspool of Vitriol

Reddit is full of unhappy cynical people who feed off of each others negativity.

After over 15 years of using Reddit, I have noticed a certain pattern. Whenever I would make any post at all, regardless of its tact, I'd get all these negative vitriolic comments. The pattern is revealed when looking at the Karma score of the worst ones. Every time, their Karma score and post-count are very high.

I kept asking myself

"This person is a total [Jerk], so how is their Karma so high?"

After over 15 years of this, it's become clear that Reddit is just a bunch of miserable people who feed off of eachothers negativity.

#3. Few on Reddit Care About Being Helpful

If you make a post on Reddit in an attempt to be helpful, strap yourself in for a bad time. Your tips and advice will be thoroughly criticized and dismantled by miserable pedantic losers and with not a single positive thing to add to soften the landing of their nasty vitriol.

Inversely (Because of the above), you won't actually find very many useful posts on Reddit. You will, instead, find a litany of complaints, memes, and general negativity. After all, those are a delicacy of the miserable.

#4. Don't Even Bother Asking for Advice

Don't get me wrong, you'll get plenty of answers. The problem is that they are most often low-effort and vague. If you ask for clarification, the responses you get ooze with condescension. To them, either you are asking too much of them or you must be too stupid to understand their original response. Either way, watch as you get downvoted and they get upvoted.

#5. How I got -99 Karma once

I am a veteran Magic: the Gathering player of over 22 years. I have dabbled in all of the formats but a few. My primary enjoyment of the game is tinkering and deckbrewing.

A few years ago, I made a post, very tactfully worded, outlining three things:

-Magic is a game with a high luck-factor

-Piloting decks has a skill ceiling

-Building your deck is half the game

I started out with positive Karma. That post plunged me to the minimum -99 Karma. Why? Because the prevailing approach of so-called "competitive" Magic players is to copy decklists instead of brew their own. Also, these "competitive" players like to believe that winning events means more than it really does. They don't like it when the reality that Magic is rife with luck-factor is thrust in front of their fragile ego. They also don't like it when you suggest that being able to pilot decks flawlessly isn't some generational talent. So of course I struck a lot of nerves with that. But over 150 downvotes? That was hilarious 

After 15 years, I have uninstalled the Reddit app from my devices and I intend to never use it again. It isn't very useful and it never really was. I should have dropped it a decade ago.