TL;DR - Reddit is trash.

I am more and more convinced that Reddit is entirely / largely populated by under-18s. It's not only completely nonsensical posts like the one above that give me that impression (though they're always quite illuminating), but posts across the site more generally as well.

I used to be a pretty active user in /r/Books. At one point I was even in first place in their karma 'leaderboard' and had a blue star flair and everything. Meaningless internet points are meaningless, but validated me uwu.

Anyway, the majority of posts on /r/Books were remarkably childish: People desperate for advice when they're paralysed by indecision about what to read next; People asking inane questions about whether to read in bed or on a sofa; A never-ending parade of posts about Stephen King. Most telling of all, however, was the vitriol poured on anyone who suggested that, maybe, possibly, you should try reading books that might challenge you, rather than reading the Harry Potter series for the N^th time.

Don't gatekeep what people read!

Fuck off. Some books are better than others. I love the Harry Potter series (not least because I want to support our gender-critical queen) and will occasionally go back to it for nostalgia and escapism. I get it. But you're likely to get a greater return on your investment of time if you spend forty hours reading and digesting War and Peace than if you spend the equivalent amount of time re-reading Order of the Phoenix for the 2^nd time this year.

And when I made trenchant, insightful (gone now, so you can't prove otherwise!) posts about grown-up literature, they would languish on 'New' with two upvotes because nobody had read the book and nobody had any actual interest in discussing literature.

1984 [It's actually called Nineteen Eighty-Four but whatever] wasn't meant to be an instruction manual!

Hundreds of upvotes.