[Discussion] The culture on /r/CCW is toxic and we need to have a serious look at ourselves

I think /r/CCW has some serious cultural issues and this is my plea to try and make a change. I want to share some observations that I’ve made over the last several years and explain why I think this is to the detriment of our community.First, it seems like this community operates on a news cycle. What I mean is, it only has the attention span to focus on one topic at a time. A year ago, it was Dara holsters. Then it was Vedder. Right now it’s T1C. If you post about Dara right now, no one cares. If you posted about T1C a year ago, no one cared back then. This type of “news cycle” attention span only contributes to the echo chamber.Two years ago, TREX Arms was all the rage on /r/CCW and everyone was posting about how much they loved their Sidecar. Once in a while someone would share their negative experience with the holster and get downvoted. No one wanted to hear it. Then Lucas started sharing his unpopular political opinions and all of a sudden the Sidecar was trash. Well, I’m pretty sure the build quality of the holster didn’t change. But /r/CCW’s opinion of it sure did.Earlier this year the P365 was released and obviously had some issues. But even to this day, someone who has never held the P365 can talk about all its faults and get upvoted to the top of a thread, while someone who actually owns the P365 will get downvoted for sharing their positive experience with it. How does that generate meaningful discussion in any way?I have 5 years experience as a SOF medic and 10 years experience in civilian EMS. The majority of discussions on emergency medicine in this forum are usually completely wrong. Go to any thread about tourniquets and you’ll see dozens of comments about how to apply a tourniquet posted by people who have never used a tourniquet. I’ve tried to correct some of these misconceptions and get downvoted, even though I’m talking from a place of actual experience. But because the echo chamber has heard what it wants to hear, it doesn’t matter what anyone else has to say.These are just a few examples, I could go on but it would start to get even more repetitive. I get it, reddit as a whole is an echo chamber largely due to the upvote/downvote format. But people on this forum are making decisions that could have live or death consequences—we owe it to each other to be better than that. This forum has a pretty poor reputation due in part to some of the issues I’ve addressed here and if we want to attract more experienced or knowledgeable people to contribute to our discussions, we need to make ourselves willing to hear some new and different things. Otherwise we’re going to continue seeing the same (often incorrect) comments posted over and over. via /r/CCW https://ift.tt/2CzsVqv