To be fair, it’s easier to concisely explain cutting someone off than justifying forgiveness. And the latter will land with some people versus others, while the former will only be rejected by people who have themselves concluded a theory of forgiveness. As a result, the simpler pitch gets upvoted. Even if the majority would have been swayed by a collection of arguments the other way.

Someone has a chart somewhere that shows responses in that subreddit getting more and more anti-conciliatory over time. I think it’s online misanthropy (measured by Reddit responses) increasing over time rather than it being objectively never the correct choice.

This wrongly assumes people are good at judging what easy problems are.

Not to mention nowadays an untold amount of posts to subreddits that invite commentary are made up stories from accounts trying to get engagement.

I don't think this is necessarily that the advice is getting worse. My friends are pretty mature and stable people and I've found that they've had way more issues staying in relationships longer than they should've compared to breaking up earlier. Especially for relationships earlier in people's lives (where many people I know has a story about being in a relationship for way longer than they should've and seems often to be the ages of people asking for advice) erring towards breaking up seems prudent.

Not that these relationships subreddits are good (often it's obviously children trying to give advice they don't have the experience for) but I don't think that telling people to break up more is less accurate advice.

I don't think Reddit is a great place to determine social consensus for well adjusted people or representative of the average adult view. I never see people on Reddit have opinions of any the people I consider reasonable in real life and I don't mean politics I wouldn't know, I don't frequent political subreddits.

It seems fairly consistently miserable in any of the common high traffic subs and you have to get down to really niche communities to see what I consider reasonable behavior that matches the behavior of people I know in real life.

How the hell is a study on stanford.edu assuming posts on Reddit are genuine? That should be enough to get you kicked out of Stanford.

r/AmItheAsshole is biased towards breaking off relationships rather than fixing them. They also hate social obligations.

e.g. If the OP is asking "I ghosted my friend in AA who insulted me during a relapse", Reddit would say NTA in a heartbeat, while the real world would tell OP to be more forgiving.

On the contrary, if the post was "the other kids at school refuse to play with my child", Reddit would say YTA because the child must've done something to incite being cut off.

Yeah every single time I click on one of those posts the top comments are NTA. A couple times I tried randomly opening a few dozen posts and checking the top comments to see if I could find a single YTA and struck out.

Granted many of the OPs are very biased in the poster's favor. Most I've read fall into one of two buckets: either they want to gripe about some obviously bad behavior, or it's a controved and likely fake story.

It’s gendered, by the way

Many of the posts are A/B tests of a prior post where only the genders were flipped of the OP and antagonist to see how the consensus also flips

Simon Sinek has a lot of good content around this. Step one is building trust. People won’t speak up if they don’t feel safe doing so.

That's not a good solution. We don't use medical textbooks from 20 years go.

Strangers from the internet, bot or otherwise, are not your mental coach.

> At which point the bots, with all of their karma will be basically worthless.

Not really, it will still be kind of valuable for influence campaigns, a lot of people don't get it when there is a bit in the other side. Hell, a lot of times, I don't get it.