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Comment by vostok | Hacker News Reader

> "Donald Trump's war on media is 'biggest threat to democracy' says Navy Seal who brought down Osama Bin Laden".

What is this an example of? This sounds like exactly the kind of thing that I would expect on the front page if there was no vote manipulation.

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It comes from the politics sub, which - to put it mildly - is one of the most suspect subs for manipulation on Reddit. They let that sub appear on the homepage, yet they ban a lot of other similar subs that are on the other side of the spectrum. It's one of those issues where I look at Reddit and think... something isn't right.

>something isn't right.

Is that a pun? Because obviously reddit has a leftist bias.

According to the right, basic concepts like logic have leftist bias

It was an accidental pun. I noticed it before posting the comment and almost rewrote it. I'm not one of those people who say "no pun intended", so I just let the pun go free for others to discover.

> They let that sub appear on the homepage, yet they ban a lot of other similar subs that are on the other side of the spectrum.

Perhaps I'm not familiar with the situation. What similar subs have been banned?

The very large Donald Trump subreddit.

(I dare not link to it. It is quite toxic.)

That has not been banned (yet)

I just took a quick glance at it and it doesn't seem to be similar. Here's an item from its from page.

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5vx3af/ (NSFW)

I don't think I've ever seen anything like that on the politics subreddit.

r/The_Donald is banned from being a default subreddit while /r/politics is not. That matters because users without accounts or who aren't logged in will see content from r/politics if an article is trending but not an equally trending(?) article from r/The_Donald.

The reasoning behind this is that r/politics doesn't ban people or articles that the mods disagree with. It's the community itself that downvotes pro-Trump stuff. r/The_Donald, on the other hand, bans people who make comments critical of Trump and people who submit anti-Trump articles. Similarly, r/enoughtrumpspam or r/communism should also be banned from making it to the default front page (I don't know if they actually are).

Because being an elite soldier does not make your opinion on democracy particularly newsworthy? It's obviously a clickbait headline. I would also add to that those "Pope says [insert political commentary]" articles.

I think he means the headline seems generated to get clicks and the underlying implied article isn't expected to contain any news.

Seems to me like the headline is generated to convey a message without requiring clicks, not to get them. The article doesn't add anything because the headline is the content.

Spot on. It's like going to a vegetarian restaurant and being upset there's no meat on the menu.

I don't understand all these people complaining that reddit does not have enough differing opinions. What the hell? Do you expect users of a site to conform to your beliefs?

Why don't you go find a different site that reflects your beliefs.

I don't go on HN and complain there's not enough discussion about camping.

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