u/HealthyBee4209

It has often been postulated that laughter is the greatest of Man’s innate powers. Byron, putting his own rosily worldly touch on a common saying, called it “cheap medicine.” Like all of Man’s faculties, however, laughter too has its vulnerable and pitiful place in the world when his baser instincts and unreflected habits were to overtake him. Baser and more unreflected still were the merchants, commonly Polish, who despite the claims of superiority for being dormant and sleepy deign their supposedly noble presence to, as if without shame, gather the ridicule and mockery of those of us awake. Those blockheads are not so foolish as to not recognize that the works of a hawker must be done awake and slyly partake in an exercise of self-humiliation while tending to the needs of their loins at the drawing table. Tomatoes might have been thrown and laughter might have shrilled their ears, but the Clown carries home always a bursa plenty.

If I were to encounter you on the streets of New Town, our discourse of what I have written on this page could be conveyed in the plainer and more polite words: “posting about Lord of the Fallen’s gooner skins would just give them more exposure and sales.”

I am not that online and have only been using Reddit for smaller hobbies and shitpost subs. For years I have either been lucky or successful in avoiding the blight of conventional social media thus. But on my eighth return to Reddit, I have found that I can no longer post freely in good faith (having read the rules, of course), without being suspected of a myriad of ulterior motives.

Made an open question post → Got accused of engagement farming  (And then got made fun of for appearing that I did not know that people farm engagement on Reddit since I thought it meant click farming.)

Made a collective self-deprecative joke → Got accused of “Pick Me” (I don’t even know how this one works since I wasn’t implying I was any better.) (Also, this is another neologism I had to learn the hard way.)

This is the first year I decided to follow my sports team on Reddit and participated on the team sub. Done the due diligence of reading the rules and noted that they have no tolerance of trolling other team subs. Okay, that is fair, but I can lurk there, right? Found something amusing on another team sub and shared it in a game thread→ Got Told Off→ Approached the mod who told me off to seek explanation→ Got a condescending response as if I didn’t read the rules, when their rules say “don’t troll” instead of “don’t even look at the other subs.” I dropped them a mod mail to suggest the wording to be changed just so that people won’t have the same experience as me, but just got a non-response.

Conflicted I am since I do see whence they all are coming but man it really feels like we have ruined online communication to maintain a vague shell of communication. This is my eighth Reddit account since in the past there was always miscommunication that ended badly, but nothing to the extent that made me feel as if another world had been born and I wasn’t in it.

I rarely vent. There have been real-life and professional encounters that are infinitely more relevant and unpleasant than this, and I just pushed on instead of venting. I don’t know why this is affecting me so strongly, since all I had to do was to drop Reddit. 

At the same time, I fear that I might become too solipsistic if I drop Reddit as well since I work from home. There is also something like a ressentiment response for me that I want to stay here to paste over these bad experiences with better ones (i.e if I quit now my memory of Reddit seems overwhelmed by these incidents instead of the funny and positive ones). What is more I do enjoy the discussion on smaller and shitpost subs where the activity itself seems more important than avoiding to be seen committing this sly social misconduct or that.

(I hope I keep the details vague enough in adherence to Rule 6. If not, I accept the deletion of this post.)