Why doesn't Reddit have the same bad rep Tumblr has?

[Joccaren]

A few reasons.

Firstly, as said, Reddit is far more segmented. Reddit has a bad rep as a hivemind of memes and shit reposts, but it doesn't have a reputation as a gender war haven because, well, it isn't. Sure, r/whatever may subscribe to that, but you can also find r/theoppositeofwhatever, and its probably far more popular.
Tumblr doesn't have this same ease, because its individual users who do this, and there are a reasonable number of them. Rather than being able to just lump it in as "r/x is shit", you'd have to list them off as "user x, y, z, m, n, o, & p are shit", and that's way too much effort. Tags can help, but again, being completely user defined and not moderated it ends up just being a bit of a mess.

The structure also works to isolate these incidents from those who aren't looking for them. Lets take the JonTron controversy, and see what would happen if he was on Reddit, or Tumblr, instead of Youtube. On Tumblr, people follow JonTron the user for his gaming content, subscribing to him after seeing some of his posts on the gaming tag. He then posts a bunch of racist crap on the politics tag, and everyone who's subscribed to him sees it.
In reddit, you don't do this. You subscribe to r/gaming, and when u/JonTron posts something in r/politics... Nobody notices because nobody is notified. It keeps it much more under wraps by following a topic than following a user. It also labels its user following function, which is much harder to find simply because who the hell clicks on a user's profile on reddit [As opposed to a general blog on Tumblr], and on Reddit its called a 'friend' - which has a completely different connotation that causes many people to avoid it, even if it is literally just a 'follow this person and see their posts in r/friends and r/friendscomments' button.

Another piece to the puzzle is the types of comments. General sexism? Its fairly old hat, and its fairly well known for existing in some form everywhere. Even here on the Escapist you sometimes get posts hinting at that sort of thing in the political section, though often either only implied to avoid Modwrath, or having incurred Modwrath. Hence, it seems... wrong, to label general sexism as "Reddit's Thing", when everywhere does it. Conversely, on Tumblr, we have that new sort of ultra-feminist, which is kind of exotic and new and "Ooh, I ain't seen that before". Hence, it gets labelled big time, for being a relatively new thing. While other websites do have posters who are undoubtedly similar to these people on Tumblr, Tumblr seems to be the only place actually accepting of "I am actually a helicopterkin and have 125 genders, preferring the pronounces Kzhe and Kzhim", and taking it seriously, thanks to just being a collection of user blogs making it easier for people to just form an unmoderated group about this stuff, whereas on other websites its often more seen as "Dafuq?" and isn't taken seriously by almost anyone, with these websites instead being open messaging boards where you can't just pick a group of friends and reinforce your own fantasy in isolation, and instead have to put up with the ridicule of the general internet.

From a purely anecdotal standpoint, the userbase probably also affects it. Literally the only people I know who use Tumblr are <20 year old girls. Half the people I meet day to day use Reddit for some reason or other. Reddit has a much broader user base in my experience, and thus the 'special snowflake' types that everyone loves to ridicule, as well as the hyper-racist types, tend to just get drowned out in your general cacophony, and if you try to generalise a redditor, you constantly run into surprises when you find that attractive 26 year old female uni student sitting next to you browses it, as does your 45 year old male boss. Tumblr? When the only types of people you see using it day to day are the types of people closest related to the whole "I'm a unicornkin" craze, then its much easier to just label the entire site as that.
As said, purely anecdotal, and I'm sure there are a variety of users who use Tumblr, I've just never met them, and I'd hazard a much larger portion of its userbase is the somewhat self absorbed <20 year old looking to make their own personal blog - its kind of the whole point of the site afterall. This drastically alters the type of content you're likely to find on Tumblr, and hence it gets a reputation for that content.

More anecdote; logging out, going incognito, and activating a VPN browsing just the front pages of Tumblr and Reddit ATM:
Tumblr; A post about Club Penguin, a post about racism, 4 memes, a PC vs Console post, a music post, several poetry posts, a bunch of fandom posts, a nice landscape picture, and a bunch of that 'edgy' life inspiration quote stuff that's really a crock of nonsense.
Reddit; News, a post thanking someone for intervening to help his daughter who was being sexually harassed, some sport, pet pictures and memes, in-jokes, normal jokes, more memes and pet pictures, and more news.
The feel of the two is naturally very different. Tumblr feels like an angst ridden teenage cespit, Reddit feels relatively neutral, at least from just the front page of both. Its easy to see then why someone that takes a quick look at each might just believe and repeat the 'Tumblr is crazies' stereotype while not seeing it apply to Reddit.

As other have said though, Reddit does have a negative reputation, especially some subreddits. But it tries to hide and segregate it, and IMO has a much more varied user base. Tumblr just throws everything against a wall, and doesn't try to hide any of it, with a userbase that just feels much more angsty. Its any wonder one gets a reputation while the other doesn't.

 

[Tiamattt]

Maybe I've just been lucky but overall my experience with Reddit has been very pleasant, especially compared to other....less moderated boards. Like if I go to a Blizzard message board a good % of the topics/comments will be people complaining about how much they hate the game/how much the players suck/how anyone that disagrees with them are morons etc etc. But I encounter this kind of behavior a lot less on reddit and when I do I can report the post and expect to see it deleted later, compared to Blizzard's boards where all the hate/flames just gets ignored by the mods and just replaced by new hate/flames. Again maybe I've been lucky and I don't actually visit that many sub-reddits but compared to some of it's competition I have to say I like reddit a heck of a lot more.

 

[cleric of the order]

It's simple and i can give you 3 thrusts
1. scope.
plebblit is from what i've seen a group of insular circlejerks with very specific communities that interact within themselves. but they do have quite a range of topics and can stay on track. They can even be very useful in very specific locations
tumblr on the other hand is a blogging site where a bunch of people post either porn, or about cartoon fandoms or mild political issues to show how great they are. It's sort of like myspace for that matter. you don't avoid the weird and rude shit because it's right out there in the open.

2. how they engage.
Aside from the le reddit army maymay you don't see plebbitors attack people as much as you see tumblrites doing so. Tumblrtort fandoms will become murderous and will attack folks for the slightest transgressions. If you haven't heard the story of the lass who drew fan art and was hounded nearly to suicide because she drew rose quarts skinner than normal or how gashi-gashi for drawing some character lighter skinned (from which i was told is commmon parlance) and you get shit like dash con or the raids on 4chan.
it's a very simple thing and 4chan summarized it well: "they shat in our toilet, we shat in their flower box" and that
s how it is places like 4chan and consequently the slightly less autistic cousin plebbit (those oh so alarming quotes sounds like some fucking robot from /r9k/) don't fuck around with people as much and irrationally.
I honestly couldn't care less what some fucking diet robot(users /r9k/) thinks about normies or women, nor what inflammable language they use, they are pathetic.
But the pathetic wastrels of tumblr who in their moral fortitude begin doxxing harrassing and attacking folks in the name of feminism, or their mental disorders (see headmates, -kin, etc) or their fucking shitty fandom is beyond pathetic, at least the redditor had the notion not to go out from his dank corner of the internet and try to harm people. Have them, doxed, swatted, slandered, attacked, fired, harrased or otherwise or if they do they have the good sense to do it deep in the underbelly of that site, deep down in there. But with tumblr their show it and their ignorance wildly in the open, reacting poorly whenever the right herd is roused.

3. You are wrong
plebbit has a bad reputation.
it does, it's a goddamned circle jerk machine, full of cowards too egoic and weak willed for 4chan and too contrarian and self satisfied for more normal forums. It's a place where the status quo exists and the overton window is small, those that fall out of line are smacked back into it.
It's a place that routinely produces the most unfunny trolls to show up chan side and often brings their self rightoues gender ideals with them into a place that doesn't need it.
It's more censored then a dictator's government documents, it is the place that to my knowledge invented shadowbanning and from what i've heard often enforces progressive views via moderation on most subreddits and that leads to exceedingly anti progressive sentiments in very worried subreddits.
/r atheism is known as perhaps the most insuferablely small brained idiots on the planet and one of the main reason i disliked atheists early on.
It's the living breathing personification of safe, smug, smarm.


But not because of diet /r9k/ screaming REEEE NO NORMIES NO WOMEN because they have been made away of the face we are a tournament species and they aren't going to win it.
I mean i can't even hate the poor sods. they ain't normal folks they were fucked up pretty badly and likely mildly autistic.

 

[cleric of the order]

Ew, no. Naked anthro ponies are just weird.


We all know the best pony porn keeps the characters quadrupedal.

God that sounds way too much like /mlp/ on 4chan.
they actually want to fuck horses you know.
only board worse than /pol/,/b/ and sometimes /v/

 

[cleric of the order]

See my comment above where I guessed which subs your example quotes came from. The topic, way of viewing the topic and choice of language suggest where it came from. You certainly didn't pull those quotes from /r/feminism for example, nor from /r/games or even from "evil misogynistic hate subs" like /r/mensrights or /r/kotakuinaction.

I've been wondering is KIA "evil" because gamergate or has it become something else.
Personally I don't like nor can i operate the site so i've avoided it but I want to just see how kneejerk that assesment was.

To be fair, sometimes the sentiments given can be weirdly similar in a very horseshoe theory kind of way, which leads to subs about that similarity like /r/StormfrontOrSJW and /r/MenKampf which are essentially about how social justice/feminist statements are often weirdly resemble white supremacist/nazi speech just aimed at different targets.

I've never actually been able to do very wellv at those games. It's funny though, the germans likely thought themselves oppressed by the "jewish conspiracy" too.

 

[Darth Rosenberg]

Y'know, I still don't quite understand what all this use of / and individual letters means... I can't help but think of the Blur lyric, 'texting, abbreviates the brain' (from Brothers And Sisters), that it's all reducing and abbreviating (expression and thought) into a singularity of absolute idiocy and echo chambers, and it's not helping anyone or anything. The thing designed to facilitate communication is actually sabotaging communication.


I don't use reddit because evidently I'm old and confused (I only tend to ever see the site as a search result for some game bug/query. the most time I spent reading stuff on it was during the whole thing-ending-in-gate incident, and that clearly wasn't a healthy introduction to the site or its culture/s). I don't really understand why people can tolerate the site itself - every time I'm exposed to it I wonder if someone's not finished writing the website code yet, or there's a glitch in the system.

...what's wrong with proper forums, I ask?

So yeah, in my day these were all fields, etc.

As far as I'm aware, Reddit has an awful reputation - just a different one than tumblr has.

 

[RedRockRun]

Clearly you have not spent much time on 4chan, OP. It doesn't really matter what board you're on; Reddit is anathema. Disagreeing with or challenging the majority belief on /pol/ for example will get a nice assortment of ">le ___" reactions from people - that or you'll be called some variety of le JIDF shill cuck. I know it might sound like I'm describing a screeching chorus of narrow-minded howler monkeys, but you must remember that /pol/ is always right. This may be a tough redpill to swallow at first, but soon you'll see the truth.

 

[CaptainMarvelous]

isn't it because you can pinpoint the subreddit which is being terrible whereas Tumblr you only have users to go off?

 

[Joccaren]

Y'know, I still don't quite understand what all this use of / and individual letters means... I can't help but think of the Blur lyric, 'texting, abbreviates the brain' (from Brothers And Sisters), that it's all reducing and abbreviating (expression and thought) into a singularity of absolute idiocy and echo chambers, and it's not helping anyone or anything. The thing designed to facilitate communication is actually sabotaging communication.

In case you are legitimately confused rather than venting, its shorthand for a web address.
When you go to a thread on the escapist, and see its in the "Gaming discussions" section, it has a /forums/read/[Set of random numbers here]-[Title here]-[Page # here] appended on to the end of www.escapistmagazine.com

When on, for example, the gaming subsection of reddit, you are at www.reddit.com/r/gaming. Hence, the gaming subzone is referred to as r/gaming, because its a simple shorthand of the URL that references exactly where you found certain threads.
Likewise, users are www.reddit.com/u/[Username], and can be tagged in a Reddit post by typing u/[Username], sending a PM to the person to check that post. Hence users on reddit are often referred to as u/[Username], as it clarified you're talking about a user rather than a subzone [Some users have unintuitive names], and allows you to tag them if on Reddit so they can join in on whatever you're talking about them for. And, again, its shortening the URL.

From what I understand, its similar on 4chan, just their naming conventions are often... Weird. For example, our "Wild West" forum is the equivalent of /b/ on 4Chan IIRC, and thus that part of 4chan is referred to as /b/, to reference the different segmented communities on the site. Thus, if you wanted to refer to any posts from that specific community, which is just named /b/, you can't say anything but /b/ to label them. Its a weird naming convention, and some like /mlp/ and /pol/ make some more sense, but hey.

So, by and large its not actually an abbreviation done to shorten things, its a direct reference to where something is found. Either a subreddit via r/[Subreddit name], or a board on 4chan with /[boardname]/. Subreddits tend to be intuitively named, usually, but there's so many of them [I.E: r/games, r/gaming, r/oldschoolgaming, r/gamedev, r/truegaming, r/gametales, r/indiegaming, r/gamedeals and literally a hundred more] that saying "The gaming subreddit" is actually a rather broad statement, so defining it specifically at the subreddit at address r/gaming is a much better way of communicating it.

 

[babinro]

I've never used Tumbler and as far as Reddit is concerned I've only gone there for forums related to a handful of games.

In my very limited experience Reddit is just a vastly more professional and mature forum avenue than going to the official forums. My experiences with Reddit have been entirely positive.

Even more so than at the escapist forums which itself is a far more welcome and opinion friendly website than many others out there.

I guess what I'm saying is that I have no reason to bash Reddit, and if others have had similar experiences then maybe that's why it doesn't have a negative stigma.

 

[Charli]

Eugh no god no. Not into multicoloured boobed horse women. Dooooes not do it for me.

Ew, no. Naked anthro ponies are just weird.


We all know the best pony porn keeps the characters quadrupedal.

I guess when I run into it that's all I see on tumblr. Bucket of Nope.

 

[Sexual Harassment Panda]

Show me a forum with no users and I'll show you a forum that hasn't earned a bad reputation yet.

 

[faeshadow]

Since when has Reddit not had a bad rep? From my experience, you don't ever post a link to Reddit in any discussion you're having, because it will be instantly disregarded without being read and you will be instantly labeled as not only a dude, but a full-on MRA dude who screeches about Gamergate. Even if the link you've posted has nothing to do with gender issues. Sometimes even if the link you've posted has nothing to do with politics at all.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

The idea that there's some kind of rivalry between the two sites baffles me because they serve such radically different purposes that it's almost like comparing Ford to General Electric. Reddit is one of those old-school "hey look at this thing I found on another site" type sites, like Digg or Del.icio.us (remember them? I feel old), that through the advent of subreddits and "Self" posts evolved into a weirdly formatted version of a giant discussion forum that has subforums for every little thing under the sun, or maybe more accurately a dumping ground for groups of people who are too lazy/cheap to start a real forum. Meanwhile, Tumblr is more like the bastard offspring of LiveJournal (which is where a lot of its early members directly hailed from) and Twitter; it's nothing but personal blogs, which makes it completely useless for having discussions on purpose but very useful for sounding off in a vacuum that if the stars align just right might turn into an echo chamber (although if you're not already a "content creator" of some kind you might as well forget about that too).

How the one came to have a reputation for being right-wing (or what passes for it among people too young and cool to watch Fox News) and the other got a reputation for being left-wing is a question that I'm sure would make a fascinating sociological study, but I am not a sociologist. Hell, I was only vaguely aware Reddit was still around before the big culture war with Tumblr (which I was slightly more aware of because people were starting to use it instead of DeviantArt) started.

 

[Allaiyah Weyn]

I see Reddit as more of a 4chan/8chan competitor while Twitter is the new Tumblr.

 

[totheendofsin]

you don't see Reddit get hate like Tumblr because it's more likely individual subreddits getting that hate like r/the_donald or r/Shitredditsays

 

[Schadrach]

Snip

Well shit me a brick. There are two subs dedicated to that?

Yep. /r/incel tends to be more depressed, /r/incels more angry.

Yet another set of subs I know about only because people go fishing in them to find quotes to disparage people that don't follow them.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

So why does Reddit not seem to have a simiarly bad rap for its insane inhabitants? How did it get off the hook that Facebook and Tumblr got put on?

I thought it did. I mean, have you seen /r/The_Donald?

In my understanding, Tumblr had the reputation for obnoxious social justice crusading, and Reddit had the reputation for toxic pseudo-masculine moaning. Like two sides of the same pressed dog turd.

Maybe it's because with Reddit, you lay the blame on the subreddit, not on the site as a whole. That way the site owners have that thin layer of glad-wrap between their hands and the shit that they're handling.

 

[Metalix Knightmare]

Reddit is full of circlejerking attention whores. Not just r/TheRedPill or r/TwoXChromosomes or wherever you got these from.

I think you're confused. You described the non-porn areas of Tumblr there. (And some of the porn areas too.)