Chat of comment suggestions in reddit’s relationship advice sub. Shows break up increasing over years
One time my buddy had sex with a girl he was seeing on my sofa. I just thought meh, I’ll clean the cushions, no big deal. My wife was pissed about it being on the sofa so she posted it on Reddit.
The Reddit response was fucking insane. We had a threesome. I watched it. I orchestrated the entire thing. My buddy wasn’t even there and I was just cheating on my wife. Somebody posted detailed advice on how to hide secret cameras around the house to catch me next time I’m cheating.
These aren’t cherry-picked, they were 95% of the responses. Those people don’t want to give relationship advice. They want drama.
People always remark how /r/relationshipadvice tells everyone to break up without considering 2 self selection biases:
- People in happy healthy relationships don’t ask for a lot of advice. “I love my wife, we go on weekly dates, have couples therapy, are helping each other in our careers and our sex has never been better. Wat do?” is not something people will post
- If you go to a drama discussion, shockingly, more dramatic content gets more attention. More drama in relationships almost always leads to" just stop dealing with it and break up" as advice
While that is true, I think those same selection biases also make the sub quite a poor source of actual advice.
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The posts obviously only talk from the perspective of one party. This makes it very easy for responders to think that the other party is unequivocally bad. I remember several times where the OP seemed in the right, until the other party reveals that the OP was lying and manipulative.
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Building on point 1, the type of people who would be willing to post their problems on social media tend to also be the type of people who would be unwilling or unable to consider the other party’s perspective.
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People who browse r/relationshipadvice tend not to be the types of people who appreciate nuance, nor do they tend to notice discrepancies or omissions in the story. Where a normal person might ask for more details, a responder on this sub is more likely to “trust their gut” and fill in the gaps with what they assume has happened.
There are multiple times in which a post asks for advice about what appears to be a minor problem but then gets overwhelmed with “just break up” responses
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This is interesting, but in general meaningless, as we don’t have the data of what triggered the advice.
That has probably also changed over the times.
With the rise of dickheads like Tate influencing more men, and the general awareness of abuse in relationships, I can absolutely se reasons for breaking up increasing.
Ragebait content has also increased. Most stories are made up to increase engagement with over-the-top problems. You can find some normal questions if you sort by new and they will have a handful of answers and soon disappear. The posts that get a lot of engagement are the ones with crazy stories.
Every weekend my [47F] gf chains me [16M] to the bed and disappears until Monday. I asked her to at least leave me a water bottle and she punched me. Should I propose?
Have you tried communicating?
Talk to the gym, dump the lawyer and hit the wife!
ESH.
Yeeeeah this is the takeaway for me. A lot of those posts are just GPT slop churned out to karma farm.
Also posts with more crazy stories leads to higher engagement which leads to more people advising to break up. People aren’t browsing the sub for normal issues they want the scandalous.
So you’re saying reddit is like the news, and that outrage is what makes social media most popular/engaging.
How do you fix the problem of sociopaths hoarding wealth and power/control? Because that seems like the underlying problem to me. A platform is only as bad as the people running it.
I think the root cause might actually be the political polarisation of gender. Women are moving to the left men are moving to the right etc. Also as a man blaming it all on men seems a bit extreme if not strait up sexist.
“As fascism took over, divorce became the only reasonable option.”
Everyone in the comments speculating, but no one bringing up the obvious: for the past couple years, 90% of the posts and replies in those kinds of subreddits have been bots. It’s become painfully obvious when you look. Dead Internet Theory in action.
But why? What’s the purpose of creating bots that post replies in subreddits that don’t concerns politics or other topics which can be used to propagate aomething?
Yup. Copy Pastas are the favorite dish of Reddit because that’s where the money is.
Love it that this chart’s purpose is to convince people to breakup with Reddit.
So many of the posts there are related to just straight up abuse. Physical, mental or emotional. It’s rampant and highlights some bigger issues that need to be addressed on this planet.
So many of those are also fiction. There was a post somewhere, where the op had compiled a list of top relationshipadvice posts that were highly suspicious at the very least up if you went into their posters’ histories. People were eating them up.
That sub became mostly a creative writing gym a long time ago.
Don’t doubt that one bit. That’s like 99% of Reddit. Lies, bs, creative writing, bots. And, it’s gonna be used to train all the AI models. Well it, 4chan and twitter….the future of AI is bright.
Indeed and the chart backs up the idea that abuse, and the many forms it takes, is being recognised more and more.
The internet has become a toxic shitfest that echoes negativity.
Not that I don’t think that Reddit’s favorite advice is ‘dump his/her ass’, because it is. But there is another relevant thing to consider here. Have the posts seeking relationship advice also become less nuanced/serious over time as people realize that they’re less likely to get valuable feedback and more likely to get cathartic (extreme) support? In other words, are posts being less complicated advice seeking like “My husband and I have different parenting philosophies, how do we resolve this?”, and instead becoming more obvious attention seeking, like “My husband hits my daughter with a puppy, what should I do?”
