> Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison.

Yeah especially on r/AmITheAsshole. Those comments never advocate for communication, forgiveness and mending things with family.

Additionally, I'm sure many posts and replies on r/AmITheAsshole are LLM-generated in the first place.

Before LLMs, it was a frequent haunt of fiction writers.

reddit in 2026 is the ghost of pandemic-era humanity.

Yes, it is a toxic sub, where the notion that there can be greater happiness on the other side of forgiveness than cutting ties is all but absent.

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.

It’s a good theory. My theory is, for whatever reason, jaded, narcissistic, miserable people congregate in r/AITA and try to drag other people into their misery because that’s easier than accepting responsibility and doing something to change.

Before Reddit made hiding profiles easy you'd click on a user's unreasonably scorched earth advice to the OP, and find their post history is essentially going to every story they come across and advocating for scorched earth.

Hiding profiles has genuinely made the platform profoundly worse. It's impossible to tell if you've just got a troll on your hands or someone who's making a good faith argument. It used to be enough to check their profile, and either downvote and move on, or engage with someone on a human level.

Now everyone is a troll/bot by default unless proven otherwise.

What are the chances you were seeing the anti-civ bots and now reddit makes them easier to hide? (And I'm not saying regular people acting like bots, but an anti-civ campaign.)

Except it’s not toxic to suggest that cutting toxic relationship out yields greater happiness.

Well, maybe.

The challenge is interpreting what is toxic, correctly.

Also, if everyone I know is “toxic” then that’s a good sign that the problem is me and not everyone else.

> The challenge is interpreting what is toxic, correctly.

Correct. It is always case by case review.

> Also, if everyone I know is “toxic” then that’s a good sign that the problem is me and not everyone else.

Why “everyone”? Generalizations like these are the same mistake that Reddit, that you’re calling out, makes.

Also, toxic is relative to your perspective – it’s not a universal merit.

It's often that a lot of "NTA" answers are downright antisocial.

"No one owns you anything, you don't own anyone anything" mentality, without a crumb of social awareness.

We're missing the other obvious problem, most of the content there is AI generated anyway. I personally posted a fake story generated by Chatgpt and even posted screenshots of that at the start of the post and yet, the post ended up on the frontpage...

Well, because that's never the correct choice. There's a big big filter on people actually posting there. Any easy problems with obvious solutions never make it to there.

Think about it, how fucked does your relationship have to be to post on Reddit for advice?

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.

Also the rules and norms of the subreddit has changed over time, which has led to spin-off subreddits that serve those purposes.

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.

when people post there it’s for the self justification

Oh man, I have 8 reddit accounts (AFAIK) one for each purpose so that I am not branded based on my open comments. Anyways, one of them is abandoned because ... that's where I got started at reddit about 7-10 years back. Got hooked actually to the relationship subs. Very addictive to start with. Then I tried to play the "Indian family values" where I would advocate communication and compromise for small matters, of course I recommended "get a lawyer, divorce" once in a while, but more often than not, I would advocate reconciliation and provide practical solutions for that. And wow ... the amount of downvotes and pushback I will get on those. I just stopped using that account at one point because what is the point of discussions when either my values are totally out of sync with the mob, or the mob does not want to listen to me. Now I just read the best of redditor updates for vicious pleasure.

That's amazing you have more than one account, aren't a power mod, and haven't been IP banned yet.

You can't use IP address to ban someone without significant abuse. All home network routers put everyone in the house behind the same IP address. For all reddit knows, there are 8 people in the house using reddit.

Want a new IP address? Reset your router or cycle it. Typically it'll procure a new IP address from the ISP.

I guess that makes IP banning residential nodes even more stupid.

CGNAT is a benefit in disguise

Having more than one account isn't against Reddit's ToS.

If you use your different accounts in different subreddits and never have your accounts interact, you won't be banned.

If you don't restrict each account to specific subreddits, it's quite likely that one will get banned somewhere without you noticing or remembering.

If you happen to post to the same subreddit with another account at some point, Reddit bans all of your accounts.

I've definitely posted to the same subreddit with two different accounts by accident without being banned.

The android reddit app annoyingly doesn't check for account matches. If you click a browser notification link on Account A it can open a reply form on App account B.

I meant if one of the accounts is already banned there, it counts as ban evasion and Reddit bans all of your accounts.

This might easily happen if you like to participate in political discussions.

In hindsight, I understand. But I did this 6-7 years back and no one has come after me, should I care at this point?

Anecdotal but I've noticed Reddit has gotten very ban happy in general in the past year.

I actually gave up using it because, perhaps in part because I'm behind a VPN (required in my country), any new accounts I create get banned very quickly once I start commenting.

I haven't been able to create a Reddit account by any method in years. It always happens in one of two ways: you create an account and instantly get the red banner at the top of the page saying you're banned, or you create an account, post a few comments, notice nobody's replying to you, try loading your profile page in private browsing and it says you don't exist (a shadow ban).

There's nothing of much value on that website, but sometimes I try creating an account to comment on something.

Sure but the background chances of an account getting banned for clashing with a mod is quite high.

Nope. Started my first maybe 8-10 years back, and then added the others over a year or 2. None since. I do not use them all nowadays, but I was very active in my early reddit days.

Since someone downvoted my parent comment, I am not hiding anything, this is just being safe in the modern world, and here are the 8 alts:

1. This same name - bay area / tech

2. entertainment - least used, but it becomes useful when i am watching something live. It was my place to be during game of thrones last season (and sadly so)

3. indian left politics + bollywood - pretty much unused.

4. indian right politics + bollywood. i got banned from one sub for an innocent comment, so i decided to just form personas. and maybe that's when i created health / finance / bay area accounts -- but memory fades after a long time. pretty much unused.

5. relationship advice - unused for a long time. it does not exist on my main phone, but i have all of them on my work phone so i know it exists

6. american politics. i do not participate much nowadays, with age my brain has dulled and it needs to shed load so this is used minimally, but at a point i was so active that my karma pulled me into the sweet reddit IPO. I kept only 100 shares btw

7. health - only health topics, also unused, but i go there and use that account when i need to read on a specific topic

8. finance - only investment, trading

nowadays you can hide reddit history, but earlier you could not, and my point is i do not want to 1) delete my comments, but 2) be hounded by them when i have a question about a different topic. but i did not care if people read my past 100 comments about politics when i talk about politics.

so i flip between 2-3 accounts on a daily basis, and maybe 4-5 in a good week. i have not been challenged by reddit, but if they do, i will adapt. Switching between them was much easier earlier in the Apollo days and even at reddit - they have made navigation worse for this specific use case.

> indian right politics + bollywood. i got banned from one sub for an innocent comment

You were banned from a Indian re subreddit or banned because being rw ?

FYI: I was banned from r/india for commenting basic info on how economy works.

I do not recall, it is long time back, I looked and could not find the ban notice or the specific comment that may have been the issue. But I was banned from /india - same as you. And I think it was barely political. I do not discuss politics much on India but once in a while a comment slips, or needs to slip. And when it needs to slip, I used to know how to lean ... but like the dirty harry movie ... at this point I have forgotten which one is which, so it is more a question of am I feeling lucky to comment about a hot topic.

It doesn't help that the actual submissions are difficult to distinguish from creative writing exercises.

That sub is so toxic that I would seriously question the wisdom of any of its posts simply because the authors are member of that sub.

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.

The US (and developed world more generally) is full of people living alone, suffering from loneliness, and increasingly trending towards widescale mental and psychological illness. This has correlated quite strongly with the trend going from 'just stick with it' and having large families to 'mature and stable' people still being in a dating phase, childless, in what I assume is a relatively late stage in life.

At some point I think it helps to take a look at the macro, because it's so easy to get lost in the micro. And it often reveals the micro, in many domains, to be simply absurd.

The people I know not in good and long term relationships now are the ones that stayed in bad ones too long in their 20s and 30s. Staying in bad relationships seems to be what has people in the "dating phase" later in life. Trying to make bad relationships work had people I know miserable for a decade and then dating again in their 40s when the relationship inevitably failed.

Especially when you consider that the set of people asking Reddit of all places for dating advice are probably young and in bad situations (it seems like people in abusive relationships often ask the internet for advice because part of abuse is separating them from their loved ones in real life), then "stick with it" seems like the riskier statrgy generally.

Nothing is inevitable. I think people are often looking for something that they're not going to find anywhere, which is a very poor state for living a contended life. This is certainly amplified by the nature of social media where people get mistaken realities of positive relationships. Great relationships on the outside often have endless issues on the inside, that they work through, that people on the outside aren't going to be aware of.

Because an important part of keeping a relationship healthy is not airing your dirty laundry. It's almost like these endless hokey folksy sayings were built up over millennia of wisdom that kept society moving along in a great and healthy direction. And now that we've decided to rethink everything, we have societies that are, at the minimum, no longer self sustaining.

> I've found that they've had way more issues staying in relationships longer than they should've compared to breaking up earlier

Consider that if ending a relationship causes noticeable problems to external observers, it’s almost by definition because you were in it “too long”. That is you developed a strong attachment, shared assets, or had kids with what was in hindsight obviously the wrong person.

Essentially you can know which relationships a person stayed in too long, but you can’t know how things would have worked out in relationships people ended too early.

Also it’s probably good advice to tell a 19 year old to break up with her boyfriend over a half dozen serious red flag issues, but that’s not the only kind of thing Reddit relationship advice is generally dealing with. It’s not even the majority. If you’re advice is always to beak up over every petty difference or minor slight, you might reduce the number of people who stay in bad relationships, but your advice, if taken, would make good long term relationships impossible.

>Consider that if ending a relationship causes noticeable problems to external observers, it’s almost by definition because you were in it “too long”. That is you developed a strong attachment, shared assets, or had kids with what was in hindsight obviously the wrong person.

Reducing it to "right person / wrong person" is a very narrow viewpoint. People can change in unpredictable ways, including yourself. Relationships end - or continue - for so many reasons, both emotional and pragmatic. It's simply too reductive to say that if a relationship causes pain when it ends, there was necessarily some sort of mistake. It could even be that the pain is a price to pay for a life experience that you'd be worse off for not having...

> I don't think this is necessarily that the advice is getting worse.

> but I don't think that telling people to break up more is less accurate advice.

Those are subjective determinations based on personal experience. But breaking up more without addressing the underlying issues is likely to cause steadily worsening problems at both individual and societal scales. I'm not a mental health professional, but I can see several problems with this approach.

The first is that the determination of the issue is really tricky and needs careful work. The partner who seems abusive may not always be the actual perpetrator. They may be displaying stress response to hidden and chronic abuse by the other partner. For example, a short temper may be caused by anxiety about being emotionally abused. Such manipulative discrediting of the victim may even be a habitual behavior rather than a deliberate one. And it's more common than you'd imagine. When you support the second partner based on a flawed judgment, you're reaffirming their toxic behavior, while worsening the self image of the victim that has already been damaged by gaslighting.

Another issue is the degrading empathy. All relationships, even business deals, are based on sacrifices and compromises meant to bring you benefits in the long term. Stable long term romantic/marital relationships have benefits that far outweigh the sacrifices one usually has to make. But the evolving public discourse, especially those on r/AITA, is more in favor of ruining the relationship rather than make any sacrifices at all. In response, relationships are becoming loveless, transactional and so flaky that any compromise is seen as oppression by the partner. There is zero self reflection and very few advises to examine one's own behavior first. It's all about oneself and the problem is always on the other side!

And unsurprisingly, these negative tendencies are bleeding into their social lives as well. Over the past decade or so, I have observed a marked increase in unsympathetic and somewhat radicalized discourse. Amateur advice is very harmful and this is definitely a massive case for the professionals to manage. But they're also products of the same system (with exceptions, of course). So I'm going to criticize even the professional and academic community in this matter. In their drive towards hyper-individualism, many seem to have forgetten that humans are social beings who won't fare well physically or emotionally without relations, relationships and society.

Although I do think they're not conscious (yet). I think the reasoning 'it's just math' doesn't hold up. Intelligence (and probably consciousness) is an emergent feature of any sufficiently complex network of learning/communicating/selforganizing nodes (that is benefited by intelligence). I don't think it really matters whether it's implemented in math, mycelium, by ants in a hive or in neurons.

Agree, I also don't feel they're conscious, or close, but these arguments don't pass the smoke test for me either.

We don't understand how our own consciousness exists, much less functions. You could argue we are a box of (biological) numbers.

I think we just don't know. Because scientifically, we don't. So I'm skeptical of anyone arguing hard for either side and stating absolute facts.

The "it's just math" argument may not be technically rigorous, but it's directionally correct. The unstated reasoning invites us to consider why this particular math would be conscious, but not many other forms of math all around us.

First, it seems you've shifted from "intelligent" to "conscious". "These math operations produce consciousness" is different from "these operations produce intelligence".

Second, "it's just math" doesn't mean literally "it's a branch of algebra". It means "it's a computable function". So it can be relevant to the discussion only if you think that intelligence is somehow non-computable, and therefore that there are non-computable processes going on in our brain. Otherwise it's a perfectly pointless remark.

The person you replied to isn’t the one that switched to conscious.

>non-computable

Something like 70-80% of all humans believe in a soul or spirit, and of the remainder, many of them are unsure whether human like intelligence can be produced by computable processes.

So it wouldn’t be surprising that the OP does think there are non-computable processes going on in the brain.

> The person you replied to isn’t the one that switched to conscious

Yes he is, the message he replies to is about intelligence:

>> Intelligence (and probably consciousness) is an emergent feature

> Something like 70-80% of all humans believe in a soul or spirit

Then they should say "I believe intelligence only comes from the soul" or "I believe intelligence is not computable", if that's what they mean. "It's just numbers" as an argument is either incomplete or not entirely honest.

> Yes he is, the message he replies to is about intelligence

No, I'm not. The comment I replied to is the one that mentioned consciousness.

> First, it seems you've shifted from "intelligent" to "conscious".

Not true. Take a second look.

I think you're right, and I think that's in large parts perfectly fine. As long as the important skills that we need continually keep replenishing themselves in young people.

The problem is identifying which skills those actually are. Without an true answer, I'm going to be prudent, and assume that things involving learning and critical thinking are some of the important ones.

The website of Bazzite says it comes with 'cpu-governors that are optimized for gaming'. A governor basically decides when and how to change the power level of your CPU. If a core is experiencing high load, it might increase power and clockspeeds to compensate. Of course this draws more power, so 'optimized for gaming' kind of means unoptimized for battery. I think most distros come with a 'power-saver' governor by default. This option should be available in power settings called 'governor' or 'power profile' or something like that.

Also, I recently switched from KDE Plasma (one of the Bazzite options) to xfce4 and I've seen massive gains in battery life, about 1-2hrs extra. I don't remember how many hours I used to get on win10 on this laptop, but I'm sure it has never been as good as this.

Idk which desktop environment you're using, but window tiling on KDE Plasma is quite good.

Thanks. Though, I can't find much about it's capabilities. Does it do "automatic" tiling, where windows just snap automatically into spaces and resize? Because popos can optionally do that too, but it's not what I'm looking for.

I want Windows-like functionality where new windows are full size and then I can use windows key+ arrow keys to resize and it will then automatically prompt me to select a window to snap into the remaining space. That's what's missing in popos

Although prebuilts often come with preinstalled garbage, that is software that only runs after the whole OS has started and intialized. Before that there are several pieces of code that run.

When the motherboard first gets power, there's a chip that 'runs some code' that powers all devices connected to the motherboard, and loads the BIOS from another chip on the motherboard. Then once all components of your computer are powered and in a ready state, the BIOS takes over. Once the bios performs its checks, it loads the 'bootloader' from the harddrive. This is the first piece of MS code in a windows pc. The bootloader will locate the installation of the windows installation, and then load and run the actual windows install..

That's what the guy above you meant. Any motherboard can be used in any desktop, because the chip on the motherboard provides a standard way of loading a bios. The bios can be changed out, as long as it uses the same standard of talking to the motherboard, and it is able to load a bootloader, it should be able to function. The bootloader and the OS itself can be changed too. Basically the whole system is designed around standards that allow people to do whatever they want.

Apple on the other hand doesn't do this at all. The write every piece of code themselves, and all their chips are custom built to do whatever apple wants it to do. This is why it's hard to replace certain components, because there's code in some chip on the motherboard that runs way before the OS even starts, that checks if all your components are allowed by apple. And in contrast to whatever Microsoft this is something they build into the hardware, so it can never be disabled by the user.

That's the difference in control that you have between an apple and a (Microsoft) PC. If you install linux on a pc, there is nothing MS related left on your pc. If you install linux on a macbook, you will still have apple code running on your device.

I do hope you understand that 'bad thing X happened to me, therefore any measure to prevent X is good' is a logical fallacy?

"As someone who had a brand new mbp stolen from me, I'm personally 100% in favor of the remote-c4 installed in every mbp. Just imagine if he could have accessed my banking information?"

Nice. Now do the same thing with "as someone who lost a loved one to a drunk driver, I think harsh penalties and license revocations are a good policy." You can probably find a similar straw man to apply?

The start menu is a react app? What the hell.