Yeah, I don't experience a lot of obvious shilling on Reddit, but I've unsubscribed to most of the default subs and mostly just read small subs relevant to my interests.
When the same talking points are repeated over and over again on large subs and dissident opinions are automatically downvoted to hell, it's obvious there are organized efforts to push specific narratives or point of view. r/politics, r/news, r/worldnews are full of these, with sometimes the moderation itself in bed with the political astro-turfers, banning users that don't fall in line.
Regarding the article, the news that was astro-turfed wasn't clashing with r/politics narrative. And since journalists and bloggers themselves now source their news and stories from Reddit, it helped spread that news all over the internet.
Reddit is an extremely efficient viral marketing tool, both brands and politicians understand it now. When journalists start quoting reddit in their news that then get posed on reddit as news, we've come full circle.
https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...
What views can't be expressed on /r/politics?
And then in the comments, you'll be crucified by the posters for anything other than the pro corporatist democratic views that the posters espouse. Move on from bashing Trump to say, bashing Hillary because she was an utterly unlikable candidate and arguably the biggest political failure in modern history, and you draw the ire of dozens of toe-the-liners who see the world just as black-and-white as the idiot /r/the_donald posters.
There's also an excessive amount of hyperbole that just gets annoying as time goes on. Clearly Trump will be around for quite a while longer (until and unless Mueller finds a smoking gun or in the event of a massive Democrat success in 2018), but reading /r/politics you would think he'll be impeached by next week. Adding fuel to the flames are websites like WaPo and the Independent who publish articles with these terribly misleading and hyperbolic headlines that make it seem like Trump is going down, and you get a massive echo chamber fueled and funded by shitty media websites.
They are still there in politics as well, but they are usually way at the bottom of the thread. It is sad though, even if you assume that it isn't as "controlled" as it is -- pretty much the front page is all anti donald trump / republican stuff these days. While some of that is fair and is news, what is worse is that at least in the old days, there would be nice constructive discussion/counter points, usually as the top voted post in the comments. Now its mostly just circle jerking there.
It's a pretty toxic environment and by constantly focusing on Trump they're crowding out a lot of content that could actually make users happier.
The users control both comments and links. Yours is not a fair comparison.
That's just wrong. The moderators on both subs are actively curating the front stories and removing 'duplicates'. I don't care about TheDonald as they are not a pre-set sub nor proclaiming neutrality. But you can't be seriously claiming that the 16 out of 25 front page stories of some variation of 'DT colluded with Russia' on /r/politics are unique newsworthy stories.
I'm unsure what neutrality means at this point. I don't expect anyone to be "neutral", but I make a distinction between debatable news and troll memes.
> But you can't be seriously claiming that the 16 out of 25 front page stories of some variation of 'DT colluded with Russia' on /r/politics are unique newsworthy stories.
No, I'm certainly not, and while moderators remove some obvious duplicates (query string differences etc), the same story from different outlets are still left and often upvoted. I don't think that's a grand conspiracy but merely user habit.
Whatever you think of this is up to you, and I think there are a lot of issues worth discussing that gets drowned out by the clown in chief-stories, but I've seen no evidence of this being anything other than crowd selection.
And it's news (insignificant, duplicate or big) on one sub, and 80% memes on the other. That's the contrast I was commenting on.
It's not obvious to me, at least, that these are organized.
"As a reminder, this subreddit is for civil discussion"
It was more obvious before the election, when the shilling was so prevalent that different accounts were copy/pasting the exact same phrases into their comments. And you would see a new point brought up, then an hour or two delay, then a response would suddenly show up in multiple places, copy/pasted into many comments, in multiple accounts.
But watch /r/all sometimes... you'll see a topic just suddenly start appearing. As an example, you think Rick & Morty grew popular on reddit organically? No, that started over the course of about an hour one morning, as a clearly orchestrated effort, and it worked.
It doesn't happen all the time... quite a bit of reddit is still honest and organic. But watch it carefully, and enough of it is manipulated that I don't put much trust in what I see there.