Not sure that is valuable anymore. They say when something becomes the benchmark it ceases to be a useful metric.

That is to say marketing departments have been long aware of peoples use of reddit and have sewed themselves into the fabric of the “what do you recommend” posts.

It might be useful to make sure you arent buying trash, but it wont ever give you the unbiased best answer on those recommended threads.

Something like r/diving also has immediate consequences for anyone who participates in an unsafe dive. They resurface with the bends and need immediate emergency treatment, or they die.

Canning is different, because the things people can typically get put on a shelf at above refrigeration temperatures, and then sit there for months (or even years) before being consumed. The harm from unsafe canning often isn’t seen for quite a long time after the canning itself was completed — and worse yet, as canners often love to give the things they’ve canned to family and friends, there is a contagion aspect to it that doesn’t exist in something like scuba diving. So the dangers of bad home canning are more insidious.

Back in 2015, an Ohio woman died and 23 others were sickened at a church picnic because of improperly canned vegetables. What’s extra insidious here is that the people who became ill didn’t even know they were eating home canned foods — the vegetables in question were mixed into a salad and brought to a potluck attended by around 60 people — over 1/3 of which became ill.

Lesson being, don’t fuck around with canning. Dangerous diving may affect you, your dive buddy, and possibly whomever eventually tries to retrieve your body. Bad canning can destroy your entire family along with friends, neighbours, and other members of your community — and it can happen years later, without you even necessarily knowing you’re eating badly canned food (or canned food at all).

If anything, I think the r/diving example would have been a good choice to include alongside the others. It demonstrates how something that’s already risky can quickly turn even more dangerous when inexperienced (or outright deceitful) mods are appointed.

It’s not that I find the examples in the article to be wrong, more that they give the impression (rightly or wrongly) that the author really had to dive deep to find any material to support their view. It gives off the same vibes as the articles claiming everyone’s outraged about ABC, when really the whole thing is based off three tweets and a TikTok. I’m not in any way trying to say that that’s what’s actually going on here, merely that it’s the way the article reads (at least to me).

I’ve been learning to control the outrage, and figuring out ways to turn things around. It’s like my time with conspiracy theories helped me to discern bullshit, fact check, be objective, etc.

That didn’t stop the circle-jerking, romanticism, and ignorance of the sub’s participants, or the ridiculous and inordinate amount of positive and negative karma coming from subs about weevils, for example. Easy karma just for posting ‘aww lawd, here we go again’ in r/bedbugs. Post a pic of a steak in r/steaks with ‘cast iron’ and ‘reverse sear’ and get easy karma too. - Post the same steak or even a much better one with ‘tri-clad / air fryer’ and get nothing. -First-hand experience with a crappy AI generated steak and one I put in an air fryer for 25 minutes at 180F before finishing in a tri-clad. -Edge to edge medium looking better than 99% of theirs. -lol. (The karma system is shit)