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Comment by etrabroline | Hacker News Reader

>if there’s even a slight lean to one [...] view

While group-think is real, the views that are allowed to be expressed on Reddit were not selected because a majority of users held them and pushed out those who disagreed. They were selected by the corporate owners of the site to promote their ideological beliefs, and to appease the very similar ideological beliefs of the major corporations who buy ads there.

Contrary opinions were driven off the site simply by repeatedly deleting the subreddits and users who expressed them. Down-voting or any other organic user interaction had nothing to do with it.

Placing corporate representatives as moderators is just a way of preventing the organic accrual of power to those with popular opinions that challenge the ideologies of the site owners.

View on HN

Reddit contains massive left and right wing communities, and on both sides there widely-held that are antithetical to the corporate establishment, so this narrative doesn’t seem true at all.

There seems to be a lot more left than right. Something that ought to be neutral such as r/barcelona has a heavy left wing slant to it. The delete posts about crime in case anyone notices any demographic patterns involved. And they have now turned into the corona gestapo, posing pictures of people not social distancing enough for their standards all in the name of "saving lives".

Perhaps this isn't a conspiracy but actual mainstream political thought in Barcelona? The city has a very rich leftist history, being one of the centers of Spanish anarchism during the civil war, for example.

> The delete posts about crime in case anyone notices any demographic patterns involved

Probably because, just as in every other country, demography is the confounding variable and poverty/inequality the actual predictor of blue collar crimes?

> corona gestapo

Because, after Belgium, Spain has the highest per capita Covid death rate in the world?

What went wrong? Italy got hit early and failed to control care home deaths, but I've not heard why Spain and Belgium are so bad.

Football matches and Womens March right when the cases were starting to get bad must have been a contributor. Spanish and Italian culture are quite physical compared to the UK, people greet with kisses. Cities are quite dense.

Now that the virus is out there, they are trying to make up for it retroactively with overly strict measures.

> Probably because, just as in every other country, demography is the confounding variable and poverty/inequality the actual predictor of blue collar crimes?

Is that a good reason to not be allowed to discuss the problem?

> Because, after Belgium, Spain has the highest per capita Covid death rate in the world?

We also had the strictest lock down in Europe. Children were allowed out for the first time with their parents on 5 weeks and were being shamed for standing too close by some reditors standard.

It's gone from "flatten the curve so the hospitals aren't overwhelmed" to some bizarre sort of virtue signalling where the more you complain about the actions of others the more virtuous you are. If you look at this study, outdoors doesn't seem such a problem. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.04.20053058v...

And? Social distancing during the epidemic saves lives indeed. Perhaps public shaming is not the best way to deal with the problem, but the general idea is correct.

> And they have now turned into the corona gestapo, posing pictures of people not social distancing enough for their standards all in the name of "saving lives".

If you view social distancing as a left wing/right wing issue, you should reassess your approach to politics.

When the right says women shouldn't work for capitalists Big Social suppresses it.

When the left says to smash capitalism Big Social suppresses it.

Go figure.

> Reddit contains massive left and right wing communities

But are they really massive?

If you take a look at a lot of those "massive" subs you'll find that certain posts from certain accounts always get tens of thousands of upvotes, and all of the posts from their real users get tens of.... well... tens.

If a reputation system on the internet exists, it has been exploited / manipulated.

when 9gag started flooding my feed with non organic posts that would get hundreds of upvotes instantly I left that community

Name one right wing community that's not under quarantine and not a literal mouthpiece of the gop.

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