The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

> Depends on what you do on Reddit.

I agree to some extent, but even highly specialised / niche topics on dedicated subs are getting slammed by the "hivemind". I guess it's more apparent for non-us users, as we're not the target audience, but the political brigading is showing even on subs like space and ML related. Reddit is now very similar to ~2015-16 reddit when the-donald and other subs really peaked, just the other way around. 10/25 posts on all are bad orange man and bad space man related. The technology sub is a mess of weaponised autism. And then you get the same political bs coming from weird subs, like the cute pics sub, or the knitting sub suddenly having political submissions w/ 3k-6k upvotes, all saying the same thing.

It doesn't help that it is still the easiest "social network" to create accounts on, and bot on. With the advances in LLMs I sometimes truly can't say if an account is real or a bot. And I work in this space...

I don't think the hivemind thing can be solved so long as people can see each others' comments. But then it's difficult to have a social media site without that.

The biggest problem on reddit is having both up- and down-votes. That allows the majority to effectively eliminate dissenting opinions on any topic it cares about by down-voting them to oblivion, and then pat itself on the back for the fact that everyone apparently agrees with it. Since it's possible to do that, some see it as an obligation and go at it with gusto, making it hard to have a conversation that strays outside the current-year party line.

Systems which only have up-votes/likes have their own issues, but at least not that one.

HN also has both, but the score is only visible to the person who commented. I think it's an improvement in this regard, but then I rarely have hivemind issues. What do you think about this?

I strongly prefer chronological sorting for discussions (and thus no voting). At least it gives all views a fair shot at being represented, and it's also easier to join later on.