You can take a look at my profile if you’re curious what I’ve been up to, but long story short I’ve had some opinion-based posts and getting downvoted on many of them, big surprise.
Personally, I actually don’t care very much about getting downvoted. It’s a little frustrating that my posts won’t get more engagement because of said downvotes, but for me this is just a minor annoyance since I honestly just expect everything to get downvotes by default. I’m usually just looking for conversations or information, basically the only reason I ever post anything.
What concerns me is that with the way Reddit is set up, I feel like this system biases basically every post you see that gets any upvotes at all. Being able to essentially attack a person’s account from any of their posts is a feature exclusive to Reddit, no other forum I’ve ever used does that.
Ideally I’d want Reddit set up so that, if someone gets downvoted to hell, they might just leave the post up because people finding it later on Google or whatever might think it’s interesting. The fact that one really bad post could result in a karma bomb on your account probably discourages a lot of people from posting on certain things.
I feel like a ton of people sensor themselves purely because of the karma system. I think deleting a post because you’re embarrassed by the results is perfectly normal and human, but to me Reddit’s system has always felt a little weird because of how much it guides your hand, even if you don’t notice it doing so.
The result is that most of the conversational posts we see are extreme opinions that lack nuance, or feature a distinct lack of disagreeable opinions. This results in many subreddits just feeling like echo chambers, which I’m not into. When I see opinions I disagree with, oftentimes I want to engage with that person to see why they feel that way, I don’t want to just delete them entirely because I disagree or whatever.
There are exceptions like r/unpopularopinions , but besides these niche cases you pretty much have to conform to expectations or you are passively informed that your content is unwelcome and that you shouldn’t exist.
I’m happy I don’t suffer from Reddit-induced anxiety, but I know for certainty a ton of people do for this very reason.