I publicly called out a user whose photo was on the front page of a local publication for racking up over $10,000 in unpaid red light tickets (at about $75 per offense).

He threatened to sue me in response. The cognitive dissonance 😂

Don’t really know what the “best” experience was. I can’t say there was anything life changing for me. It was nice to have access to so much stuff in a very well designed app (Apollo) that let me share that content super easily with friends and family via Whatsapp or Telegram.

Worst interactions? There were many…the groupthink can be real bad. There are a lot of people who take karma very seriously. There was one sub, dedicated to a podcast, and it was clear there was a person that had six or seven alts because of the language they used and the debate style, and they would get so upset and downvote any disagreeing comment. Other subs had plenty of trolling, transphobia, shitty moderators, etc. Other subs became basically unusable because of how large they got and how many people posted “hey, look at me!” low effort content. You know, “art I did of X character” with 2,600 upvotes for what was a 10th grader type drawing done on a notebook. That kind of kills the visibility of posts with the potential for deeper or more meaningful conversation that don’t get as many upvotes.

In the end I think the main issue with Reddit is that it got too big. It attracted too many people on a superficial level, too many trolls, and most subs worth visiting at this point are dedicated to niche subjects and have smallish communities.

Good: I got support from people when things in my DnD group got weird.

Bad: Once, I asked a technical question that I had asked people irl and researched a lot and not found what I was looking for. On reddit, I had people making assumptions and nitpicking the terminology while avoiding the actual question completely. It was a good example of the CS/math departments friction (which makes a whole lot more sense to me now). I did get a better answer on another site by just posting the equation and using zero jargon but I ended up abandoning that topic bc it was impractical.

I don’t have a specific worst. The best was when I was complaining about my [then] wife for the umpteenth time. I don’t remember which sub it was. Someone responded with, “Are you familiar with Borderline Personality Disorder? If not, you should look it up.”

I did look it up. It explained everything I had seen up to that point. It is as like someone had written a text book about my wife. I was both relieved and terrified.

That was the starting point of getting out of that awful abusive relationship and getting my life back on track.

Best experience: A bunch of strangers getting bored during lockdown and setting up an impromptu hemotology class to amuse each other. This eventually became more of a generalized whatever-today’s-instructor-likes class after one user stole the entire show with their brilliant rant about chemistry.

He and I were pretty good friends for a while and though parting ways was inevitable, I’m still sad to have had to. We can’t get along, but I do miss him and I wish him well.

Worst experience: every time I posted anything about my mental situation ever. Without fail, İ would come away with multiple of the shallow, dismissive “oHH, if everywhere smells like shit, check your shoes!!” reply. They’ve never taken the time to think it out, but they know it’s snarky enough to win upvotes and shut down the conversation.

I’m forced to assume the people parroting this are themselves abusers irl, because that’s sure as shit not a sentiment r/raisedbynarcissists would take well to. Or really any PTSD-centered community/professional. Trying to convince the victim it’s their fault is a common tactic, it’s what the R in DARVO stands for.

If I needed someone to tell me I deserved to get beat with a table leg, I’d still be talking to my mom.

The best experience for me was two actually. Both times they ran r/place were my favourite experiences I’ve had on the internet. I truly cannot describe how wonderful the experience was, as well as how interesting it was from a sociological or anthropological perspective. People coming together to build and destroy art by placing one pixel at a time. It was also a cool representation of resource scarcity. At the beginning, everyone was able to build what they wanted, but as time went on and space came at more and more of a premium, the wars over space became more and more intense. I’m done with Reddit (haven’t touched it since the start of the blackout) but if r/place ever comes back, I will take part in it until it’s over.

Worst was briefly getting brigaded by a toxic community mass downvoting and commenting toxic stuff on my recent posts.

My best experience was help with learning python. The community was great then and a lot of helpful people.

My worst experience was opening up about my sexual abuse that happened to me from the ages of 4 to 14 by my grandfather and brother who is 9 years older than me. Because of the subs rules I had to leave a lot of stuff out. People didn’t believe me and started attacking me and calling me a lair when I was just looking for some support after cutting my family off. I had another post but it was on a FB group called tell someone. There I could post all the details. I had to dm all the people attacking me and calling me a liar that FB post. They felt horrible afterwards which wasn’t my attention, but thet saw the truth then. It was really discouraging at a time when I didn’t have a lot of support from family or friends.

My worst experience came just before the API disaster started. Someone posted on the ELI5 subreddit asking what autistic people experience when they are nonverbal. Now, I’m autistic and, while I’m verbal most of the time, I do have moments where I can’t speak even though I want to. Typically in moments of high emotion or stress. (It feels like the words are in my brain, but the highway to my mouth has a twenty car pileup blocking all traffic.)

My comment was upvoted many times and many people replied positively to my comment. Then, suddenly, my comment was deleted. The mod said that because this was my personal experience, it was too subjective. Meaning, only an “objective” experience from someone who wasn’t autistic would be allowed.

Needless to say, I was upset and needed to vent. I vented in the Autism subreddit about the situation and got people replying in support of me. Now, I did make a mistake where people started asking to see my original comment and I posted a screenshot. That was on me - especially because I forgot to blank out the original poster’s name. (In my defense, I had nothing against the OP or their question so nothing lept to mind saying “better blank that out.”)

The whole thread was suddenly deleted from the Autism subreddit for “doxing.” I deleted the person’s username and asked for the thread to be restored. Instead, I was given a 30 day ban. Then, I quickly got notified that I was permanently banned from ELI5 for “sh*t-stirring.” My goal was never “raise an army of autistic people to attack the ELI5 mods,” but just “blow off steam for something I felt wasn’t just.”

I decided not to contest either and just stop going to either sub. In fact, I was deciding to reevaluate my Reddit use altogether. And then the API debacle started.

Gated communities on Reddit suck.

A thread hits /r/all, you type out a long comment in reply to someone, hit send… then get an automod message that your comment was denied. Because you aren’t part of that subreddit, or you aren’t verified in that subreddit.

Probably the worst example was /r/blackpeopletwitter. They have open threads where you can talk with people. Then at some point they lock down their threads (make it verified black users only) and your next comment in a chain of replies simply gets nuked. Even though you had a civil discussion and just wanted to continue it.

Often those threads aren’t even about race, just general things happening. Reddit has shitty support to lock things down where the UI doesn’t get greyed out. So you already type a long reply, hit send and only then you get kicked out. I had to block several of those subreddits because I kept running into this issue when browsing /r/all.

I can’t say there was a worst interaction, but there’s two candidates for best. The first is that when he was just starting out, shittywatercolour painted one of my photographs.
The second is not just a reddit thing, but about 7 years ago I wrote a tutorial for r/fanfiction on how to use calibre to save stories from various websites. It was well received at the time, but since them ive had multiple times where people said it was useful, including one a couple weeks ago on a completely different website.

College football subreddit on game day was amazing. Gonna miss that

Interaction with r/conservatives. I made a comment that I downvote memes that dumb down complex ideas. I was banned for it.

I once had a post blow up and spend two days featured on r/all. It was great to see so many people reacting positively to something I wrote!

I also love the old Reddit switcharoo. Having a big, silly inside joke really made the site feel welcoming.

The worst is that moment when I realize I’ve been mindlessly scrolling down my front page for who knows how long, just pissing my life away doing nothing of value.

Worst, up until the current fiasco, was having told a very deeply personal and unique story, but being torn to shreds because I wrote it pretty. That meant it had to be fake.

It taught me the lesson to never waste effort on reddit.

But the best was kinda the flip side of it. Similar thing, talking about death and dying, which was a large part of professional life, and despite writing it pretty, it resonated with people and I got some really nice conversations commiserating about the way that can change you.

My best Reddit experiences were where Reddit facilitated meeting people “IRL”. I found my first D&D group on Reddit, made 3 great penpal friends, scored a couple dates, …, and one romantic relationship.

I really don’t know my worst… A couple times I let people get under my skin, but I eventually got good at blocking people.