IMHO it's not about being nice. AITA threads show an interesting phenomenon of social consensus, I think the authors wanted to show that the LLMs they checked don't have that.
I don't think Reddit is a great place to determine social consensus for well adjusted people or representative of the average adult view. I never see people on Reddit have opinions of any the people I consider reasonable in real life and I don't mean politics I wouldn't know, I don't frequent political subreddits.
It seems fairly consistently miserable in any of the common high traffic subs and you have to get down to really niche communities to see what I consider reasonable behavior that matches the behavior of people I know in real life.
The AITA social consensus is a specific kind of groupthink which differs from nearly everyone I know in real life. I assumed yard2010 meant the specific AITA social consensus and not general human agreement.
Even the premise of deciding who's right and who's wrong is miserable. Most problems are like those daisy-chains of padlocks you see on gates in remote areas[0]: there are multiple factors that caused the problem, and removing any factor would remove the problem too.
r/AmItheAsshole is biased towards breaking off relationships rather than fixing them. They also hate social obligations.
e.g. If the OP is asking "I ghosted my friend in AA who insulted me during a relapse", Reddit would say NTA in a heartbeat, while the real world would tell OP to be more forgiving.
On the contrary, if the post was "the other kids at school refuse to play with my child", Reddit would say YTA because the child must've done something to incite being cut off.
Absolutely. I wonder how many parents have been no contacted, SOs broken off with, friendships broken because of the Reddit hivemind's attitude. Pretty sure it's doing a huge amount of societal damage.
> e.g. If the OP is asking "I ghosted my friend in AA who insulted me during a relapse", Reddit would say NTA in a heartbeat, while the real world would tell OP to be more forgiving.
That’s a nuanced discussion. It depends on what you value most, not what “real world” tells you. Most of the time Reddit would be right, because you need to prioritize yourself instead of continuing toxic relationships.
1) Reddit is horrible at nuance, almost non existent in some subs.
2) The toxicity is being defined by reddit to give the advice which is mostly wrong as outlined above.
If OPs had a understanding of what they valued and what is toxic, they probably wouldn't need a advice from biased readers [biased in the sense that they're on that sub].
Yeah every single time I click on one of those posts the top comments are NTA. A couple times I tried randomly opening a few dozen posts and checking the top comments to see if I could find a single YTA and struck out.
Granted many of the OPs are very biased in the poster's favor. Most I've read fall into one of two buckets: either they want to gripe about some obviously bad behavior, or it's a controved and likely fake story.
The problem with any of these is that they are so incredibly biased towards the author's frame of reality (understandably so).
Who among us are able to 1) Understand a 2nd persons view of a issue we're in and 2) have the ability/courage to write it in a post seeking advice.
My point is that the author will specifically frame the problem clearly on their side. Occasionally redditors will seek additional questions but rarely.
If it is the AITA subreddit (or one of many similar ones) it might not be that bad. It is after all dedicated to outrage farming, so there will be many human responses. It is just the original posts that are all baits, and it doesn't really matter if they are made by LLMs or as a creative writing exercise.
Though interestingly, the observed difference in assessment suggests (though does not prove) that sampled AITA posters are not one of these models. I guess it’s possible they have a very different prompt though…
