reddit is a much more toxic place for fandom because it centers discussion instead of creation. and there's only so many things to discuss before you start spreading unnecessary negativity.

there was an actual popular post on the hermitcraft subreddit encouraging to voice your unpopular opinions which ccs read and it was, uhh. what you'd expect. at this point tumblr might actually be better for creators

Oh anon. You don't have to tell me about the infamous unpopular opinions post. I think I was the one who basically brought that one to hermitblr and my blog was pretty much entirely posts and asks about it for a few days--I was basically the center of discussion for that awful incident for tumblr users. I have NOT forgiven the subreddit for that. Some of the stuff there was practically libel and the moderators had to approve every comment individually before posting, and just....approved blatant character defamation. And I'm not using "character" in the narrative sense. That was so bad that it upset some hermits and one of the hermits reached out and asked for the post to be deleted (again, the post contained more than just unpopular opinions, and even had comments making baseless accusations.) The post was taken down, but then reddit does what it does best and cried about freedom of speech and censorship, so the hermits let the mods put the post back up and Xisuma (iirc) made an apology to the fandom for "censoring their opinions." When it is, in my perfectly honest opinion, extremely valid to to be upset about the things that were being said....like if you said that to me irl about a friend, i'd want to slap you, but they're on the internet so they're just expected to accept everything happily i guess....

Fortunately, the moderator who allowed and approved a lot of the worst comments has been removed. I think. I am pretty sure they're the same person that was involved in another incident but I'm not gonna mention it because I can't (dont feel like) confirming it and the last thing I'd want to do is make the same mistakes as in the thread by making random accusations.

I think you're right about about some of the discussion versus creation aspect. Even when you post a creative product, it just sits and accumulates comments where everyone can give their opinion on it. You can comment on art on tumblr too, but the emphasis is way more on sharing it with others. And you tend to see art only as a result of following people you like, so you're already vetting the list of what you see. Reddit is like...going to the town hall and just hanging a picture on a board. I guess? It's like the only thing you could do was browse the main tags on tumblr and everyone was mad all the time lol

I don't think having negative opinions on media is a bad thing, nor do i think being critical of it is. I think that a lot of discussion and analysis has to be critical in order to dig into issues in media (either via social issues or just regular narrative issues.) But it's the sheer concentration of it that is so exhausting. It's just not a fun place to hang out because you can't really vet what posts you see so the people who only want to discuss negative things will always be hanging at your periphery. Whereas, on tumblr, i can intentionally follow analysis centered people. I was big into the dsmp analysis community and it wasn't all positive posts. But if i wanted out I could just unfollow them and follow some more chill people instead. On reddit you don't really get that choice.