A Scientific Ranking of Which Parts of Reddit Are Most Racist and Bad
An easy way to find a part of Reddit filled with toxic speech
and disturbed personalities is to go to Reddit.com and close your eyes and wiggle your mouse and click a bunch. But if you want to find the absolutely, quantitatively worst parts of Reddit,
someone did that work for you.
How could you count the bad things on Reddit any more than you could count bumps on a toad or granules in a dune? Idibon, a company that makes language-processing software, took on this suicidal task. To calculate toxicity—which they're defining as overt bigotry and ad hominem attacks—Idibon pulled thousands of Reddit posts, checking to see which had been upvoted or downvoted. Did a particular subreddit upvote a racist attack? That's toxic! Was a nice or supportive sentiment upvoted? That's nontoxic.
The full tally will probably not surprise you. At the number one Most Toxic Place on Reddit stands /r/TheRedPill, which describes itself as a "discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men." A message board used exclusively for misogyny and male whining is of course deeply toxic. Next up is /r/OpieAndAnthony, devoted to the
racist
radio show for dipshits. Again, not shocking. Other top slots include /r/BlackPeopleTwitter (as racist as it sounds!) and /r/4chan—along with some surprisingly normal subreddits like /r/Videos, /r/News, and /r/Gaming. It's a given that /r/NaziShitWhoreWatch will be a toxic spot to browse, but when even the innocuous general discussion sections are filled with abuse, that tells us all we need to know about the internet's premiere link swamp.
The full rankings can be viewed below—hover over a bar to see the name of the subreddit it corresponds to.
