It's more then dumb, it's hurting discussion. Some of my views are not well accepted, trying to explain my view in a mannered way would lead to a lot of negative comments. About me, about my kind, about my mother and so on. Other times the my message will just get down voted to oblivion. But there was no discussion, my actual views got challenged very rarely. That led my to delete my account and creating a new one, one which I avoided a lot of subreddits with, nothing political. Even in the none-political subreddits I've avoided a commenting most of the time. When I did comment, the comments had to be self-censored, dumbed down. Late edit: that's not to say I think reddit is bad or irrelevant, the web-site stills works as a good content aggarator, it just mostly fails miserably when it comes to encourage well-rounded open discussion and leads to echo chambers.