Admins do nothing to prevent extreme moderation as occurs on there from deleting any comment with an alternative viewpoint. Yet it appears quite consistently on the front page with only agreement in its comments section.
There have been plenty of instances where someone just turns off a subreddit, now nobody gets to use it, have a nice day. Let alone the more subtle problem of a toxic person who should not be moderating a sub in the first place.
I think this hits on the underlying problem I see with Reddit and similar forums, though. Look at the evolution of subs like /r/LateStageCapitalism or /r/FatPeopleHate or /r/Incels or T_D or TRP or Flat Earth or Broneyism or whatever. I don't think in all cases the communities started out as extreme as they eventually became.
I'm not defending their original charters by any means, I just think there's some kind of sociological reality or formula these subs are tapping into that allows them to purposefully moderate/evolve into echo chambers and bring a community of followers along with them, to a point where the community even starts to self-moderate to the extreme -- but they don't just start out that way.
It's almost like you can take some ridiculous idea or some interesting but archaic belief system, build some interest in it using humor or shock value, then once you have an audience with critical mass slowly turn it into a cult without anyone noticing, like the boiling frog analogy (hmm, the irony of that comparison just now struck me). I almost want to try this myself with something absurd just to prove the theory.
And I'm sure this isn't a new concept in sociology or anthropology and there are people researching how it works at Internet scale. Can anyone point me to what it's called?
They delete anything questioning their viewpoint, not just spam, hate speech, harassment etc.
Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/8crq8r...
latestagecapitalism's output is relatively tame, and given that they have a politically contentious subject matter, heavy moderation is necessary in order to keep the subreddit free of people from any part of the spectrum who'd turn it into a monkey-flinging shitfest.
Also, it's nowhere near the front page today; it's nothing on what r/The_Donald used to be like.
Sometimes the truth leaks out, for example in the interface that advertisers use. The number of subscribers listed there was over 6 million, far in excess of what a normal reddit user would see. In various ways, inconsistencies reveal that all the numbers are being manipulated to suppress /r/The_Donald.
Read their sidebar. I don't think that's exactly "in the eye of the beholder".
Toxic and hate speech are recently invented terms to curtail free speech. If I said anyone who wanted communism were hateful (they hate capitalists) and supporting a historically violent ideology, I'd be as right/wrong as people on the left doing the same.
Anti free speech are a means to an end really, power.
I can definitely see a completely open alternative viewpoint, but reddit has already gone in a very different direction.