OK to build on my post from a couple of months ago about my experience as a relative newcomer to Reddit, this is bizarre.
I've been posting on online forums since the 90s, and probably wasted too much time on some of them (...), but I've never got particularly wound up. Yet Reddit for whatever reason has me seething like a stereotypical keyboard warrior meme, due to the sort of responses you get on there. You write something and then people try and twist it to imply you hold a particular opinion rather than judging it purely on face value as written. A throwaway comment can be pounced upon and logic doesn't seem to apply there. The echo chamber ramps up and the wolf pack circles looking to pile in when they have safety in numbers. Some people seem more interested in attacking the character/person than actually debating the topic at hand. The odd white knight recognises the stupidity of it all and steps in to back up the 'victim' and is drowned out. It feels like the sort of place you have to 'have your guard up' at all times, if you show weakness by acknowledging counter-points it gets pounced on. Probably the closest I felt to that that here was a few years ago when I delved in Speakers Corner for a bit.
Thankfully I take the voting with a pinch of salt as I've had hundreds of upvotes for throwaway comments and then loads of downvotes for detailed reasoned arguments, plus i've even seen two posters write essentially the same post in the same thread with one getting upvoted and the other downvoted. No logic to it. I'd turn off the the display of votes if I could. Would actually make a interesting use case for AI though, make bot accounts that experiment and are then tuned to try and garner the most upvotes, get a synopsis of the model and see what the biggest influencing factors are.
I'm feeling like it may be best to step away from it, which is a real shame because it has high traffic and a lot of interesting topics, sufficient weight of numbers around niche topics you are interested in, etc. Not great for 'mental health' though, which as I say is a bit bizarre, I've managed to survive on forums for over 25 years without this sort of feeling, and Reddit is a mainstream place not some shady corner like 4chan or the old Something Awful or whatever.