Poll of the Day > Would you say the "average user" of gamefaqs and reddit is similar?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Talking about the generalized "average user" , so the person you think of when you think of a gamefaqs or reddit user

On gamefaqs people have to bury their heads in the sand to avoid opinions they don't like, on reddit they just join reddit.

The kids of GFaqs users are on Reddit

I don't have hard data on it, but I'm convinced the majority of reddit users are bots. Either way, most people act like bots due to the incentives of the karma system. That's why if you go to a large gaming or movie subreddit or whatever all they talk about ad nauseam are super mainstream, popular releases. And it's fine to like those things but who wants to discuss the MCU over and over, not me.

GameFAQs users are the types who are dorks and they know it. Reddit users are normies who are trying too hard to be endearing dorks that they instead end up being annoying dorks.

Reddit is way too big and diverse of a website to be compared to present day gamefaqs

No idea. Never used Reddit.

bachewychomp posted...

I don't have hard data on it, but I'm convinced the majority of reddit users are bots. Either way, most people act like bots due to the incentives of the karma system. That's why if you go to a large gaming or movie subreddit or whatever all they talk about ad nauseam are super mainstream, popular releases. And it's fine to like those things but who wants to discuss the MCU over and over, not me.

This is actually really true. Post ranking has been detrimental to the quality of conversation and Reddit culture (and by that nature, Imgur as well) has seen the worst of it. Other platforms have upvotes as well. Youtube can get pretty cringe depending on what community you're in, but I feel like most videos I watch have decently balanced conversation. It just gets bad when the content creator breeds a community of toxic positivity or they go so much for mass appeal that you get every single normie trying to be funny or inspiring.

I don't bother with.....reddit. The upvote system makes me think folk (if real) just say stuff for attention.

The average gameFAQs user quit the site and moved to Reddit

I have no experience with reddit users except with a few Google search answers.

The main difference between GameFAQs and Reddit is that people still sign up for Reddit. No new users have found this place for like 20 years now.

We're all just old users, and old users pretending to be new users after making new accounts because they got their old ones banned for trolling/gimmick/shitposting.

I would say different. Although CE seems to be closer than reddit than we are.

The reason I would say it's different is because redditors have a karma incentive, have learned what comments do and don't generate karma, and essentially merge themselves into an amorphous blob of you must be fun at parties.

bachewychomp posted...

I don't have hard data on it, but I'm convinced the majority of reddit users are bots. Either way, most people act like bots due to the incentives of the karma system. That's why if you go to a large gaming or movie subreddit or whatever all they talk about ad nauseam are super mainstream, popular releases. And it's fine to like those things but who wants to discuss the MCU over and over, not me.

GameFAQs users are the types who are dorks and they know it. Reddit users are normies who are trying too hard to be endearing dorks that they instead end up being annoying dorks.

The ones who aren't bots may as well be. It's a weird form of conformity that we never grew up with.

They're not similar. Reddit is too gamified with the upvote downvote system, if you play the system you'll get tonnes of engagement via comments/upvotes. If you don't, you'll be lucky if anyone even sees your comment let alone engages with it and that fundamentally changes what the "average" user is.

I do hate Reddit though, but mainly because of how infested it is with bots and how much control power users have over narratives. Fake news makes it to the top of r/all regularly and regurgitated to the top of comments and multiple subreddits.

ew reddit

No, reddit is meaner

The real thing I don't understand is what the incentive is for the Reddit karma system. Like, sure, if you care enough you get the artificial feeling of praise and adoration, but you can't do anything with it can you? It's not like you can leverage a high karma level to draw attention to a side gig or some content you want to build a fanbase for. Maybe you could if you really pushed for it and shilled yourself, but it's not like Youtube where people assume everyone has made some kind of video of some sort and can easily check their channel. A lot of people there do in fact engage in grass roots comment engagement.

The incentive for karma is for your post to get seen. But it becomes something of a paradox/circular reasoning, because the posts that get high visibility are almost always just for karma-farming.

The minimal amount of times I used reddit, I found it pretty annoying how I had to "grind" karma on the unrestricted subreddits just so I could post on the subs I wanted to without being shadow banned. And I wanted my posts to be visible because I actually had questions I wanted answers to.

I don't get why some people have accounts with like 100,000 karma, since I'm pretty sure that's well beyond the level that is "useful". Some of it is probably just people who like watching the number go up. I've also heard of people selling high karma reddit accounts. But then you're back to asking why the buyer would need that much karma.

I'm not a big redditor so maybe someone else can explain how it works. Does more karma make your posts more visible (not karma on the post itself, cause duh, but I mean does just the poster having enough historical karma affect it)? Isn't the most amount of karma that is used for restricting posting something pretty low like 10 or 100, or are there actually subs where you need thousands of karma for posting privileges?

bachewychomp posted...

The incentive for karma is for your post to get seen. But it becomes something of a paradox/circular reasoning, because the posts that get high visibility are almost always just for karma-farming.

The minimal amount of times I used reddit, I found it pretty annoying how I had to "grind" karma on the unrestricted subreddits just so I could post on the subs I wanted to without being shadow banned. And I wanted my posts to be visible because I actually had questions I wanted answers to.

Oh... ew. I didn't know it was that gate-kept. That's just a direct recipe for an echo chamber.

When I did it you had to have 10 comment or post karma to post on the sub, which isn't really a ton, but there's a good chance on your "karma grind" that your posts won't be seen at all, so it takes several pointless threads. It's also ostensibly to cut down on bots/spam accounts, which I wouldn't mind so much if not for the fact that the site is littered with bots and spam anyway

bachewychomp posted...

The incentive for karma is for your post to get seen. But it becomes something of a paradox/circular reasoning, because the posts that get high visibility are almost always just for karma-farming.

A lot of it depends entirely on which subreddits you're on. If you're on the shit ones, the discourse is obviously going to be shit. But there are a lot of subreddits with relatively chill or nice communities where you can pretty much talk freely and not have to worry about being downvoted into the dirt or having to be massively upvoted just to be seen. The key is to just find the good subreddits and avoid the terrible ones.

In that sense, it's very much like GameFAQs. I've spent 20 years on PotD, but you couldn't have paid me to spend time on CE for most of the last two decades. The social culture was different enough that one was worthwhile to me, and the other very much wasn't.

Conversely, you have boards like Board 8, where conversation was always relatively chill, but also focused almost exclusively on topics I was never interested in. So while I could have spent time there and not been overly annoyed (like I would have been on CE), I just would have been bored and less likely to engage.

I post on multiple subreddits, and I've never really felt the need to try and self-censor, or make sure all of my posts fit the acceptable official doubleplusgood groupthink.

If anything, I'm probably more inclined to self-censor here.



bachewychomp posted...

I don't get why some people have accounts with like 100,000 karma, since I'm pretty sure that's well beyond the level that is "useful".

I've got 88,000 karma, and I've never really made an effort to farm for it at all, or try to self-censor so I don't say something unpopular and take a hit. I generally don't give much of a shit whether a post gets upvoted or downvoted.

I don't even spend as much time on some of the slightly larger subreddits, where I could pretty much guarantee every post I make would get hundreds of upvotes. I usually get a few karma points here, and few there, and occasionally a post will catch a bit of traction and get a few dozen. And sometimes they'll break 50 or 100. But if I was really looking for karma, I'd spend way more time on subreddits like the Stardew Valley one, where everybody's super-positive and lots of posts get upvoted just because there's so many people there seeing them. Instead, I generally spend most of my time posting on smaller subreddits where any given post is maybe seen by a few dozen or a few hundred people tops.

I don't really post any differently there than I do here. I just avoid the general subreddits and the front page like the motherfucking plague, and just stick to the specialty and special interest subreddits that are about things that I like (so in that sense, I'm far more likely to engage with things positively there than here).

If anything, my posting on Reddit is basically the same way I posted in the Geek topics here, when they were a thing. It was a chance to talk about things I like with people who also tend to like those things, and not just responding to a bunch of random musings from random people with disparate worldviews and opinions on things.

It can be echo-chamber-y if you let it (but so can GameFAQs, and most other social media besides), but it's better than a lot of the alternatives.

i would say the average gamefaqs user is smarter than the average reddit user

mainly because there's very few people here, so as a whole the averages will be higher towards smart

while there are many people on reddit, the vast majority of which are fucking stupid and outweigh the smarter folks

ConfusedTorchic posted...

i would say the average gamefaqs user is smarter than the average reddit user

I don't know that I'd say that, I've seen the average GameFAQs user.

20 minutes in CE makes me question the existence of intelligent life on Earth.



ConfusedTorchic posted...

mainly because there's very few people here, so as a whole the averages will be higher towards smart

That's not even remotely how averages work.

see po you'd be one of the few to skew the average down because yes it is.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

see po you'd be one of the few to skew the average down because yes it is.

No.

Larger sample sizes normalize to the center of the bell curve. That in no way guarantees that a swingier result from a smaller sample is going to fall on the positive side of the curve.

If anything, it increases the chances about as equally that we're worse than the average Reddit user, because it takes fewer people to pull the whole average down.

what is it about irony you don't get

the fact that there's no actual iron involved.

I find the "echo chamber" thing about reddit to be a bit overblown. Or maybe it's actually underblown? There's so much astroturfing and botting and karma baiting going on there that I guess it's like the final form of an echo chamber, but the problem is more how fake all the interactions are. It's not even just that things have to "agree" with the sub's point of view, but they have to be "worthy" in terms of karma-baiting. Like good luck posting about a semi-obscure game on r/gaming (which on that sub seems to mean anything that sold less than 10 million copies).

I know the smaller subs are better, but I just haven't really found one I need to post on yet. The couple times I did someone pointed me to an active legacy forum for the same subject and at that point I realized, oh yeah I should just do that if it's an option. I suppose the advantage with reddit is you have one account for every subject, but meh. I haven't needed to post in enough different subjects where that's been a problem yet.

bachewychomp posted...

There's so much astroturfing and botting and karma baiting going on there that I guess it's like the final form of an echo chamber, but the problem is more how fake all the interactions are. It's not even just that things have to "agree" with the sub's point of view, but they have to be "worthy" in terms of karma-baiting.

Yeah, I think that's a bingo right there. It's so far above and beyond the realm of filling a specific echo chamber that every comment needs to fit the final form hivemind. It's toxic fandoms, Kpop Stans, political circle jerking, and formulaic copy/pasting all rolled into one.

Yes, I'm sure the smaller subreddits are better. But they probably run the risk of being rendered obsolete from lack of engagement and fractured into too many even smaller subreddits that wither away into obscurity.

Lokarin posted...

On gamefaqs people have to bury their heads in the sand to avoid opinions they don't like, on reddit they just join reddit.

wouldnt they suffocate

Okay, so very rarely I've posted on subs where I don't know of a forum equivalent, so my prior comment wasn't 100% true. Coincidentally I did attempt to post on one again today, which I've posted at before, but my comment was shadow banned. So I guess they upped the karma threshold again? But they aren't transparent about what the minimum is. On a lot of subs you also don't even know unless you think to check the thread logged out, since they don't use the auto moderator "not enough karma" reply. Not like when you do get an auto moderator they're very likely to tell you the karma requirement either.

I guess it's again a thing to prevent bots/spam/low quality posts, but they aren't doing a good job with that and only alienate new users instead. I think if you've been at reddit for a long time and have long since accumulated a lot of karma, it's tough to realize how unappealing it is to try to make a new account in 2024/2025. All these hoops to jump through just to ask a simple question on a subreddit where most of the posts are the same few recycled karma bait topics, complete with the predictable approved jokes in the replies. I know it definitely didn't used to be that bad, as someone who has had a peripheral awareness of the site for a long time and occasionally lurked.

Salrite posted...

This is actually really true. Post ranking has been detrimental to the quality of conversation and Reddit culture (and by that nature, Imgur as well) has seen the worst of it. Other platforms have upvotes as well. Youtube can get pretty cringe depending on what community you're in, but I feel like most videos I watch have decently balanced conversation. It just gets bad when the content creator breeds a community of toxic positivity or they go so much for mass appeal that you get every single normie trying to be funny or inspiring.

Upvote/downvote systems are always bad that way. "I don't like your opinion about my favorite movie so you suck and I'm downvoting you".

Revelation34 posted...

Upvote/downvote systems are always bad that way. "I don't like your opinion about my favorite movie so you suck and I'm downvoting you".

Clown Awards on Steam are an even funnier version of this. Actually, I find the entire Steam Award system obnoxious.

Salrite posted...

Clown Awards on Steam are an even funnier version of this. Actually, I find the entire Steam Award system obnoxious.

People purposely farm those because you can spend the points on things.

I donno, but I do know that potd isnt really representative of most other gamefaqs users. Some of you folks are pretty alright.