Reddit is so manipulated at this point. The front page always has a political agenda, unbelievable what happened to that website.
see, i'm not conservative (i'm absurdly socially liberal and a bit fiscally conservative -- i prefer less taxes and less government spending in general) but it's baffling that people call reddit a "right-wing-cesspool".
if you look at unfiltered /r/all right now, most posts are related to the current protests.
Reddit is comprised of a lot of younger people who are indoctrinated to think in certain ways and haven't ventured far outside of their ideological bubble. So I just chalk it up to that and don't even go there anymore because nothing there adds much to my life other than pointless distraction.
People who have great points against the hive mind are often downvoted into oblivion. It's less of a place for discourse and more a place for voicing agreement. The worst experiences I've had are in the socialist/communist subreddits themselves. I've been banned from those places for saying things like "artists and homemakers are proletariat." I guess if you don't have a hammer in your hand you're just a neo-liberal reactionary??
And sure, T_D is a violent cesspool that should have been gone long ago, but in general I'm sick of social media platforms deciding for us what views are acceptable and what aren't. Their algorithms constantly guide people into weird places that drive engagement but at the expense of critical thought and real public discourse.
I'd much prefer free speech and neutral platforms over corporations deciding what we are to believe. But I suppose reddit's problems are now cultural and that's a more difficult problem to fix than adjusting an algorithm.
i couldn't agree more. i never commented/subbed to the_donald. i added to my /r/all filter and i don't have to see it anymore.
btw, i do that to 99% of all political subs -- i just filter them, and now i don't have to interact. now, do i want them banned? nah, no way -- everyone deserves a place to discuss whatever they want, be it extreme left or extreme right politics. hell, i even disagree with chapo trap house being quarantined! no community should be "quarantined".
The whole left vs right, liberal vs conservative thing is so stupid, but our FPTP voting system and media are happy to keep the fight raging.
that's how i feel -- i want a small government and i want people to do whatever they want with their own bodies while being able to own guns.
people say i'm libertarian, but i don't agree with a lot of libertarian points of view (i still think government has a place in society and i think we do need some social safety net, like public health care and even negative income taxes.).
there's not a box that i feel inside other than "classical liberal" (in the milton friedman sense of the term) but whenever i say that, i' met with either laughter or hate.
honestly, it's quite hard to discuss political issues nowadays on the internet, where everyone is super extreme and if you don't fit any boxes, you get silenced (including here, btw).
I wonder if that's the path reddit is headed towards.
I will say that true conservatism is few and far between, and it doesn't help that the viral strategy the GOP has settled on in recent years is heaps and heaps of outright false or racist memes, so there just isn't much good right leaning content being written or created to begin with that isn't far right.
I would say that Reddit began as libertarian, and is now far-left.
In the same way that Biden, who pushed Reagan from the right on 'tough on crime' laws, is portrayed as the far-left.
I don't remember it that way. I remember it being very libertarian (Ron Paul was the Bernie Sanders of 2000's reddit) for a very long time. I believed that the shift to a left-wing orientation was organic and representative of the general population UNTIL the whole T_D thing came along... T_D was doing the same thing, pulling the site to the right, until Reddit's owners worked overtime to make sure that didn't happen. That makes me suspect that the liberalism was also artificial.
In terms of the user base, I definitely remember early Reddit having a strong libertarian bent, or at least significant conflict between libertarians and more mainstream leftists. Things seemed to shift left roughly when the Digg influx happened.