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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

I enjoy Reddit when logged in and unsubscribed from all the large default subreddits. I’m always shocked at how different it is when I accidentally view it logged out. The home page feels almost like a piece of carefully curated political performance art in order to somehow get a result allegedly from folks across the nation that is so perfectly aligned with a very specific agenda and advertising platform.

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Certain subs are heavily curated. You will immediately get banned if you go against the mods view of the world. And they do this to even the most innocent posts.

If you are used to these subs, as soon as you leave your perfect bubble you will see a Reddit full of (to your eyes) lies and deception. Of course the same applies to outsiders visiting your sub, they will be shocked by the amount of lies casually presented as facts.

That's why everyone should subscribe to at least two subreddits they don't agree with.

I came here to say this. Mods on most major subreddits exercise their own politics and force their views on everyone. What makes matters even worse is that there is a very narrow group of users being mods on the most influential subs.

These are perfect conditions for creating world view bubbles and what always baffled me is that reddit admins don't seem to care.

It looks like Reddit wants their platform to be like this.

> That's why everyone should subscribe to at least two subreddits they don't agree with.

Certain subs will automatically ban you if you ever participate in another sub mods of the former sub do not like. r_offmychest will automatically ban you at the first comment for instance.

This very thing does prevent good faith people from participating in subs that are antagonistic.

It's against reddit rules but admins do no care. Admins do not care about brigading either (a sub encouraging the harassment of another sub or person), unless some specific subs/users are victim. r_ch* p* tr* ph* * s* regularly engaged in the bullying of users and subs until they attacked the wrong person and got quarantined.

I don't care what the rules are, only that they are enforced very differently depending on who violates them and who is the victim.

> Certain subs will automatically ban you if you...

Reddit obviously needs to fix this, that's a whole different problem.

> r_ch* p* tr* ph* * s* regularly engaged in the bullying of users and subs until they attacked the wrong person and got quarantined.

I'll admit I don't really understand the practice of censoring things that aren't clearly swear words from context, but in this case you've censored it so much (and I suspect thrown in spaces so Hacker News doesn't italicize bits of it) that I really have no idea what you're talking about.

I frequently read the specific sub he censored, and even I could not decipher the name initially.

The sub is chapotraphouse, based upon the podcast of the same name. I've never listened to the podcast, I tried once and within a few minutes found it obnoxious. As somebody interested in political theory/history/whatever label you want to apply to "the study of power structures", I often find the perspective of the sub interesting, and can usually be summed up as "21st century communists in America".

Lots of subreddits will ban you if you post on a subreddit they don’t like..

Past totally apolitical random subs like /ski it is just silly. Reading stuff right now going on about US protests I can easily see how anyone with 2 brain cells can write a bot that will creat posts driving certain agenda. If you have few hundred minimum wage posters on staff and some tools it should be really trivial to creat a lot of shit

>That's why everyone should subscribe to at least two subreddits they don't agree with.

So the solution to reddit's partisan and out of touch politics is to consume more of it, but make sure that you have a good cross section of dumb viewpoints?

I have a better suggestion: find political insight literally anywhere other than reddit. It's a naive place with all the perspective and context of a 15 year old first discovering the world and trying to express opinions about it.

Not to mention that reddit basically pushed the_donald to its own website by removing all the mods and only allowing new ones they help handpick. Which has been zero to the best of my knowledge.

I’m actually surprised with how good the software powering theDonald dot win has become. I stalk them to see what kind of bananas they are throwing around and it’s a more pleasant experience than reddit is these days.

It's a monolith in terms of ideology and content, they face no challenges in terms of managing tensions within its community of users.

To be fair The_Donald was not really the champion of free speach themselves. They did absolutely everything they could to silence anyone who did not 110% agree with their views.

This post pretty much sums up T_D:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BannedFromThe_Donald/comments/6thno...

/r/The_Donald did not pretend to be anything it is not. /r/BernieSanders operates in the same way.

The problem is when /r/politics, /r/news, /r/worldnews, etc. do so as well.

It's so different you immediately think it's orchestrated from behind the scenes, other subreddits with politics banned are so much more bearable.

I assume you believe it to be left orchestrated. My guess? The overwhelming majority of young people (and people overall, though not by nearly the same margin) are left leaning or very left. It's probably just a demographics thing.

Sure, bans such as the board dedicated to support the current US president is "due to demographic".

It is due to systematic rule breaking even after multiple warnings. If you break the rules of HN you get banned after a while. And if there were sub-HNs here and one would take almost all the moderation time it wouldn't exist for long.

Also, if it is about a board usually called "TD" that one is quarantined, not banned.

I would argue this is precisely the impression they’re trying to manufacture. There’s a vast and stark difference between the Reddit of today and the Reddit of 2016. The viewpoints of tens or hundreds of millions of people have been systematically removed from the site in the last 4 or so years in one of the most aggressive and vast campaigns of censorship and manipulation I’ve ever personally seen on the internet.

Maybe the reddit of 2016 was more manipulated? How would you tell the difference between new manipulation and change of manipulation?

That's really simple in this case. The space of expressible opinions has been strictly contracted. If it had shifted in some other more complex way then I think you could have a point. In this case though the contraction was very clear, rapid, and enforced through a variety of visible and prominent site-level changes (e.g., introducing extreme quarantines or bans of many subreddits or re-engineering the frontpage to hide content [like introducing r/popular, which selectively only shows certain political content]).

>The overwhelming majority of young people (and people overall, though not by nearly the same margin) are left leaning or very left

for some reason that phenomena only manifests itself on heavily moderated platforms.

on unmoderated (chans) or barely moderated (youtube) platforms, you get a much more diversity of thought.

It's not more diverse on unmoderated platform it's the opposite. Unmoderated platform (like chans) mostly attract those who despise any censorship, that's far from everybody.

It would depend on what you would define as a diverse opinion, problem is who should define that and whether they took their own biases into account.

It's impossible to have a diverse opinion when the range of acceptable opinions is enforced from on high on threat of banishment. At least the worst that will happen on an average chan is that people will yell at you.

And you get a whole lot of people leaving for moderated platforms because they're tired of arguing with white supremacists.

I have never heard of anyone doing this.

I used 4chan a lot and got to know a lot of people of a subcommunity that started there nearly a decade ago, and "4chan has become an alt-right hellhole and I don't go back because of that" became a common enough position among them over the last few years. I get the impression from a few of the progressive online communities I've dipped into that there's a number of ex-4channers that got sick of the culture shift at 4chan, but it's hard to quantify. A lot of people on Mastodon use it specifically because it has more protective rules than Twitter.

I don't think people like to talk too much about why they leave online hangouts, because it's like admitting defeat, because people still at the place won't sympathize with you because they either disagree with your criticisms or think you're slandering the place (or else they'd have already left too), and because outsiders who agree with your criticisms of the place may have other criticisms of the place and judge you for being associated with or expecting differently of the place.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories but if I'm told to watch my unconscious biases in check then maybe social media sites, their admins, and their moderators should do the same in regards to conservative thought on their sites.

>but if I'm told to watch my unconscious biases in check

Assuming this phrase is about biases about race, then this is a dumb comparison. Biases about race and minorities are different than biases about political positions and opinions. Political positions aren't a protected class.

Ah yeah, the biggest subs are a mixture of Astroturfing + Eternal September + Power Hungry Mods + (the cheapest form of) Meme Culture

I get much more value out of medium to small subs.

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