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Comment by nromiun | Hacker News Reader

Reddit and 4Chan are the two sides of the same coin for me. Just their ideologies are different. At least the people on 4Chan are self aware about how toxic they are.

But the mods (at least on the popular subreddits) on reddit love to ban anything that isn't far left.

I don't mind echo chambers but the lack of self awareness always rubs me the wrong way.

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How do you develop a worldview where the grotesquely status quo mainstream of Reddit is considered "far-left"?

Because I have seen multiple times that any political post or comment right of the far left getting banned?

And reddit isn't connected to real life and "mainstream" in any way. In fact they can give Twitter a run for their money based on how disconnected from reality they are.

> Because I have seen multiple times that any political post or comment right of the far left getting banned?

Try posting anything that is mildly critical of Biden from a slightly further left position on r/politics and see how well you fare.

My original point was that Reddit is nothing but a toxic echo chamber. So I think you are agreeing with me?

I think in the big political (and even many of the non-political) subreddits, there is tolerance only for a very narrow band of centrist Dem opinions, and anything outside that band to the left or the right is heavily downvoted.

Is that the way that centrist democrats express themselves because the language and attitude comes across as extremely caustic. I considered myself a democrat for the vast majority of my life but now I no longer know what I am if that is the bar that is being set.

Yeah, this 100%. If you went by what Reddit and Twitter thought was going to happen in recent votes and elections, you'd think that Sanders would be the Democratic nominee in 2016, that Trump was not going to be president, that Britain would vote to remain in the EU and that Jeremy Corbyn would lead the Labour Party to victory over Boris Johnson and the Conservatives.

The fact that all those predictions turned out to be wrong indicates that at least a sizeable percentage of the population is further to the right politically than the majority of Reddit or Twitter seemingly is.

You may not always get banned for having the opposite opinion on topics like those (though it definitely happens in quite a few subreddits), but the point is, the prevailing consensus on those sites is certainly a lot further left than the mainstream as shown by election resultls.

Post something conservative on /r/politics, and see where that gets you.

4chan is unmoderated, reddit is heavily moderated. how on earth are they 2 sides of the same coin?

nowadays, it seems like anything unmoderated starts going right. it used to be the opposite.

mildly OT - the only thing they have in common is that they are infiltrated by bots which just serve to amplify the extreme discourse. there are some interesting bot-bait threads on 4chan where people communicate text via obfuscated text images, but bait bots with text replies (i.e. "hillary bad pizzagate"). the bot replies then become obvious because they reply to the bait text which is off-subject, but the real people reply to the text images with obfuscated text images. the bots were right wing extremist and comprised maybe 60% of the replies.

i saw someone had an interesting idea to make a "deep fried" image board or plugin, where text replies are posted as obfuscated images which are unreadable by bots, so people can more easily distinguish bot replies from human. i imagine discourse would improve considerably.

4chan moderates illegal content, porn on non-porn boards and content unrelated to the board such as cats on a dog board. Not completely unmoderated, but pretty close.

4chan has paid moderators and unpaid volunteer janitors keeping the beast in the state that its in, imagine what a wasteland that site would be in absence of any moderation.

4chan is moderated. https://4chan.org/rules#global

What do you mean by "far left"? Can you give an example?

Just take any (communism, revolution etc) agenda from the far left and try to post against that in some popular subreddit. I guarantee that you will get banned immediately. At this point they should just post a "Only Leftists allowed" banner. That would be so much easier.

Why even lie like this. r/unpopularopinion is basically conservative talking points 101 for instance. Do you seriously think posting "I don't think the means of production should be seized" will get you banned from r/pics? Come on.

So on a supposedly unbiased website the only place conservatives can hang out is at r/unpopularopinion? That doesn't sound wrong to you?

And yes, even on non-political subreddits politics has taken root. Any time there is a political photo it turns into a full blown political subreddit.

>So on a supposedly unbiased website the only place conservatives can hang out is at r/unpopularopinion? That doesn't sound wrong to you?

Conservatives are a minority in America, so it makes sense their opinions would be unpopular by virtue of that.

There's nothing that's not political, every aspect of life is political, how we distribute resources, interact with our neighbors, basically everything is political and sidelining political discussion is itself a political act which benefits whoever is currently wielding power.

If they are a minority then how did they manage to elect a president?

Not by the popular vote, obviously[1]. Don't confuse the electoral results of a quirky political system with popular opinion.

[1] https://splinternews.com/here-is-the-final-popular-vote-coun...

Well, not every eligible voter voted, and Trump lost the popular vote. The electoral college works in such a manner that the national popular vote doesn't matter, and a minority can elect a president. In fact, a conservative has only once won the national popular vote for President since 1988, and that was Bush in 2004.

The Senate holds a conservative majority because it's structured to represent land rather than people, and conservatives are occasionally able to take the House because they use districting to deprive the majority of voters of the majority of representation.

I mean, a quick search of /r/politics, which is liberal, suggests to me that you're over-stating the case. Conservative posts are often unpopular and people expressing conservative views get a lot of downvotes, but it was simple to find posts that go against the culture of the subreddit[1][2]. I wouldn't recommend /r/politics as a place to discuss politics - I agree it isn't representative of the median US voters' view.

I think it's one thing to say reddit is mostly people'd be leftists, which I agree with, and another to say that conservative opinions are explicitly banned. I think conservative opinions are unpopular and the imbalance makes reddit a poor place to understand the politics of the median person in the US, but non-leftists are allowed.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/fdpixv/city_of_mi...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/f8cdys/bernie_san...

Interesting, instead of providing an example you just confirm your own bias.

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