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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.
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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.

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Pretty sure the average Redditor is AI now.
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How the hell is a study on stanford.edu assuming posts on Reddit are genuine? That should be enough to get you kicked out of Stanford.
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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…
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Is it the _average_ redditor? The most upvoted would be even worse.
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I would say people on /r/amitheasshole are more biased towards the poster, i.e. nicer.

There's plenty of those I've read where I thought it sounded like the poster was the asshole and the top replies were NTA.

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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.

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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.
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I wouldn't blame reddit, it's what you get when you ask several thousand teenagers to give collective relationship advice.
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“I got divorced based on advice from complete strangers on the internet, AITA?”
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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.

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It’s gendered, by the way

Many of the posts are A/B tests of a prior post where only the genders were flipped of the OP and antagonist to see how the consensus also flips

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