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Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

Why do people use Reddit for political or controversial discussion? I think everyone knows by now that it's a circle jerk. There are plenty of other forums out there and you can set one up in 5 minutes.

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It is indeed bad, but there are gems to be found. Some of those gems may not always avoid this issue, but they at least strive to. For example /r/geopolitics. It's obscure enough and the mods participate well enough that generally you can find some really good discussion there. There are a few subs like this, but they are rare and the exception.

Geopolitics has really degenerated. It is now dominated by users that post unending barrages of unrealistic, low-quality "fall of China" articles.

Incidentally, I was banned for saying that China would end up with less deaths due to the coronavirus than the US, as a result of their stricter interventions, which turned out to be true. The moderators of that subreddits decided that it was such an egregiously incorrect point-of-view that it had to be deleted, and the poster banned.

So no, r/geopolitics isn't really good anymore. It was interesting a few months to years back, though. But now it's mostly biased, moralistic and americentric takes with artificially limited debate, with such scathing and interesting discussion as "Western culture is the best culture, and that's why the US will be an eternal empire", or "China will be sublimated by the US just like the US beat Japan". This is a stark contrast to the more realpolitik, realist discourse of yesteryear. Non-China related threads are better, though.

And that's the problem of today's Reddit. People get banned for disagreeing with the mainstream of a sub. Fear of controversy.

Because for the 1% that have a legitimate disagreement/different opinion, there are 99% of "new posters" that act like that sub was worldnews or some other frontpage subreddit

Then it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff and the mods, (as much as I agree that in some subs are totally going for the echo chamber) have a lot of work to do.

Idk if it's just me, but I feel that even r/geopolitics has begun to slide in the last few months.

Mods are typically great though. They seem to try very hard to keep the discussion academic.

r/geopolitics has been on the downturn from at least a couple of years. Mods try very hard to keep it academic, but it’s hardly that anymore with opinions (without sources) being passed off as academic routinely.

It’s still great for analysis related to American foreign policy, but it’s hard to take any other analysis seriously especially when it comes to Asian countries as the quality is lacking.

Most people prefer to reinforce their own views instead of challenge them.

There are definitely activists of sorts visiting the site. Though I don't think their strategy is to disrupt circle jerks, but to create their own.

The "wholesome" movement on reddit seems like an example of that.

where do you go for serious political discussion?

Online in a forum format? I haven’t seen it exist, the medium simply isn’t conducive to it. It requires very heavy handed moderation, which in turn stifles political discussion. It’s why HN largely bans it all-together as simply not worth it.

Real-life political conversations are difficult enough ;-)

There's something about having a public political decision that turns it into combat in front of an audience instead of a collaboration between two partners trying to better their situation.

I've found the New York Times's comment section to be surprisingly decent for some reason. But that's in comparison to my very low expectations for these things.

Could this have to do with the fact that the site is paywalled and not open to the bots and trolls that overwhelm other news organizations' comment sections?

It’s because they are heavily moderated.

See https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014792387-Comm...

what if there’s no moderation? I mean, what if moderation is part of the problem..

Then people just yell past each other and everyone becomes Hitler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

Generally, when unmoderated, the loudest user(s) will drown out everyone else

There are a few dozen smaller Discord servers whose community nature allows you to engage with more interesting political viewpoints and discuss. There are still incidents, but in general if its possible for a communist to debate an anarchocapitalist in good faith, most political discussion should be possible.

I don't think that it requires heavy moderation.

Reddit, up until some years ago, was great for political discussion. Simply ignore low quality opinions and focus on the few people who have actual knowledge.

Then the "safe space" movement started and anything that wasn't mainstream opinion was banned all over the place.

Suddenly, political discussion became impossible, because you could not discuss any non trivial things without few of being misunderstood and your account getting banned.

Libraries, or marginalrevolution.com.

But Marginal Revolution is well known for having the worst comments on the internet. Literally nothing but edgy one-sentence snark. It’s just a step above caveman grunts.

Marginal Revolution is more interesting than HN precisely because "X is widely believed, therefore X is true" doesn't fly as a line of argument over there.

Although of course they do lack civility.

Marginal Revolution is run by Tyler Cowen who is an economist. He has largely libertarian views and uses economic theory to justify them over the span of about a blog post. I personally don't think that's enough time to make a point about the sorts of things he talks about.

Up until five years ago, it was great for political discussion. One of the few places where you could actually find a knowledgeable person once in a while.

But open discussion is now largely banned. Each sub only allows you to repeat their own ideology else you get banned.

I deleted Reddit when that started, around 4 years ago.

It's a feel good mechanism. A circlejerk aligned to your views is the best place if you want to do virtue signalling and get quick cheap validation and dopamine hits for your views.

It's bad, but really understandable

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