Interesting... For most websites, there's considerable gap between registered users and active users, and this just makes the gap appear to be worse for Reddit.

Everything I've seen on facebook is usually some form of circle jerk.

That's a problem with your friends, not intrinsic to Facebook.

What they hype in the article is quite familiar and not particularly novel.

While the backyard pitmaster could assemble a similiar system from component parts (a ceramic grill like the Egg along with some aftermarket accessories), an integrated turnkey system is moderately novel.

The telling thing is that people complain from all sides of various issues. For example, if you ask a libertarian, they'll tell you that Slashdot groupthink is liberal leaning socialist. If you ask a liberal, it's libertarian. But truth is, you see +5-modded comments from practically any perspective. About the only way to be consistently downmodded here without being a troll (or sufficiently troll-like in behavior, even if not deliberate, to make no difference) is to be a hardline creationist.

While you *can* see +5 comments from practically any perspective, they aren't in any way evenly distributed along the political spectrum - the vast majority are some flavor liberal/left. Conservative viewpoints are dramatically underrepresented in general and more likely to be downmodded or not upmodded even without being in the batshit crazy demographic.

But there are more axes than the purely political - Slashdot groupthink tends somewhat towards the highly racist and heavily to the highly sexist/misogynist (which is curious given the overall leftist/liberal bent of the site). On factual matters, upmodded comments are far more likely to be those which match what is commonly believed - regardless of the veracity of what is commonly believed.

You're not OCD about your music library, a small minority (not including me!) are. And websites always need clickbait with headlines implying a world shaking problem that hits all users... so the problem gets blown out of proportion.

It's not *like* a commercial meat smoker, it *is* a commercial heat smoker... and they've been around for years. It's also a Big Green Egg with a few accessories, which has also been around for years. Yes, I know they claim it's better - but their claim is based on failing to operate the Egg properly, a hotspot should not exist under the vent and even if it did it should have no effect on an Egg properly rigged for a raised indirect cook.

Electric vehicles are expensive and most people only buy a new vehicle every X years while electric vehicles have only been (easily) available for the last few years.

This. The last time I looked into it, the statistics I found showed that the average car in America stayed on the road around eleven years - less in good time, more in bad times. And not only have the times not been all that good for most of the last decade, the available electric cars aren't exactly 'average'... they've been targeted towards the upper end of the income range.

That and the assertion by the submitter that outlets are "prevalent at home and work" is complete bull. Charger stations are still pretty thin on the ground, especially if you don't live in California or a major metropolis.

But that's not why it works. It works because you only get 5 or 15 mod points at a time, you have 3 days to use them or lose them, and you only get them when you get enough micro-points (I think they're called "tokens") from normal usage such as reading threads.

When EVERYONE can upboat and downboat EVERY post with no limit, that's when the groupthink and circle-jerks begin.

Yet, even so, Slashdot is (in)famous for it's groupthink.

It never was a really thing for the majority of Slashdot, as a whole Slashdotters have been frothing at the mouth over it from pretty much Day One of it's existence. (Second Life comes in for the same treatment.)

Which is sad for a site supposedly interested in technology and it's effects on the world.

Ahh... the good ol' Slashdot rationalization - "Facebook is dead, really, it'll die any day now, seriously!". Which would be funny if it weren't so pathetic - since Slashdot has been predicting the imminent demise of FB since 2007.

The Reddit administration is interested in one thing, and one thing only right now: Milking the site for as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, and fuck the users.

How do you differentiate between that and a site that wants to remain open for it's users despite the actions of few?

That means Reddit as a whole is popular (and fairly large) but popularity != influence.

Especially when you consider that even the largest subreddit is but a fraction of that traffic - much of the traffic is spread across thousands of subreddits (many of them quite small, even though they're popular among their habitues). It's essentially a collection of independent websites (though bound by a common interface and portal) ranging from fairly small (in terms of the overall web) to infinitesimally tiny.

Looking at this list of subreddits that have gone dark is instructive. Relatively few break the 100k subscribers mark, most are under 10k. And unless Reddit is very unusual in it's counting, the number of subscribers is a significant multiple of the number of active users.

Reddit has unbelievable traffic and reach, so stuff that earns popularity there gets spread to virtually everywhere and everyone.

[Remainder of tinfoil hat rant snipped]

That's what the Reddit hivemind thinks... In reality, not so much. Reddit only makes the news when it's on fire, again.

I actually lost IQ points reading that mess...

I should have stopped at the third paragraph,

Charcoal, in this case, is not the briquettes you use on your grill, which often contain no actual charcoal, but is the carbon residue left behind by organic matter (like wood) once it has been charred (or pyrolyzed)

Um, who is this moron? Yes, charcoal briquettes contain actual charcoal. They most certainly do contain (among other things) "the carbon residue left behind [etc...]". The rest of the article, breathless clickbait written at the kindergarten level, just goes downhill from there.

Looking at his submission history, he has a record of submitting equally moronic content all from the same site. (And one comment, over a year ago.) Pure slashvertisement.

because it's still wildly popular in Japan. The US shards are, as the author notes, virtually complete ghost towns. I recently went back for a month, and other than banksitters in Luna or house collapses I'd literally go days without seeing another player.