Just don't hypocritically declare that other people can't also do the same. That's the point here. The hypocrisy.
So no, going flair-only is explicitly to silence those of differing opinions.
Don't get me wrong, they are well within their rights to do so, it is _their_ subreddit, after all. However, if they're going to dance around and act like a bastion of free speech, maybe it's time for some introspection.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/wiki/index/flair_rules...
That's what the OP was referring to. If everyone is going to call out Parler for being a propaganda channel, then apply the same standards to Democratic Underground, r/politics, r/antifa, etc.
But sure call it propaganda if you wish. Perhaps it is. Many anarchists such as my self are well aware of the propaganda we proactively distribute on a daily basis.
What the ancestor is complaining about is that when the right wing does propaganda, it is not called propaganda, it is called free speech.
It hasn't been just the downvoting, but as the crowd is thinned, increasingly more bots inflate votes, and those who remain are more deeply steeped in their bias perhaps it will be mainly downvotes from here on out.
Maybe if everyone disagrees with something you say, it's not the rest of the world's fault?
Are you Principal Skinner going "Am I so out of touch? No, it is the children who are wrong."
Sounds good but what happens when a loud group bases their beliefs on alternative facts (and select only alternative facts that specifically support their belief)?
What is the basis for this belief?
However I think you are wrong in assuming HN has remained non-political. There is a lot of politics going on in most threads. While blatant partisan shoutouts are usually not voted to the top and remain at low impact. Participants regularly engage in heavy political discourse. This includes responsibility to security breaches, workers rights (especially those of tech workers; e.g. should remote working be encourage; is flexible vacation policy good actually), taxation policy (especially those around start-ups), housing policy, transportation policy, justification of international sanctions and their effects, etc.
And no, this isn't a troll; it's one of those reverse-name subreddits.
And now we have a most recent grievance of a group getting removed from all platforms, creating their own platform, only for it to be removed from existence by mobile devices and web infrastructure dropping it.
To the credit of the moderators of r/conservative, they don't really claim that, though some of their users try to. They're very open about their intentions. They absolutely do not welcome non-tribe members.
I love this incredibly sanitized version of what goes on in /r/conservative.
They also took in an massive influx of new users after the_donald was banned which permanently changed its discourse.
And as the biggest right-leaning political subreddit, r/conservative also took in an influx of people posting death threats and insults due to its visibility. Examples are occasionally screenshotted by the moderators, and I'm not surprised they moved to 'flaired users only' to keep up with moderation.
Smaller government, free-speech conservatives on Reddit tend to hang out in more libertarian subreddits.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/ajg8ng/rlib...
Slashdot is the only major site that was unmoderated in this sense - during the 10+ years I read it the only post ever removed was one with links to Scientology materials that they'd been threatened with litigation over. They replaced it with an explanation of why they'd removed the comment followed by a bunch of links to anti-Scientology sites :)
It had a lot of crap posted there but mostly coped with it, simpler times I think. Their system allowing you to choose the vote threshold for visible posts helped a lot with that.
Probably the biggest thing keeping it in check is that they still a fully editor driven website. No article shows up that hasn't been seen by someone at Slashdot HQ, so it's nearly impossible for trolls to flood the zone with hate speech, and even if they try it's easy to filter out by just changing your post threshold. Also, the community is so small these days that nobody would even bother.
I was active on kuro5hin around the same time and that had a story queue where anyone could submit stories and other users could approve, disapprove and suggest changes; when a story hit a positive or negative threshold of approves - disapproves it was posted or deleted, and if didn't hit either within a week it was also removed. Again the thresholds were higher to get a story posted and to get it rejected, and only users with enough positive karma could see the queue at all. That worked pretty well.
In the early 2000s I was active on the "hidden" sids such as trolltalk where people would troll Slashdot and share it with others. At one point one poster ran a dictionary attack on the first 10k accounts using some very simple password guesses and captured several hundred or so - and then built a system that had them log into Slashdot regularly in such a way that they were most likely to receive moderation points, which were given to users who browsed regularly but not frequently. He then wrote an interface that wrapped Slashdot and allowed anyone using it to be able to moderate any comment there as if you had mod points, but actually by using moderation points from one of the pool of accounts.
If you ever saw posts with (Score 30: Troll) on them, that would be why...
It keeps people from simultaneously expressing their opinion and downvoting other opposing opinions.
What you should realize, and this is a general fact, is that when any group is withering under constant barrage and assault by what is really objectively an evil agenda of oppression (freedom of expression is in fact a human right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), regardless of what you believe or say, they do not have the luxury of high moral consistency while facing free-speech eradication by an evil regime hell bent on controlling all aspects of humanity.
And kid yourself not, what the tech companies are doing to suppress free speech is not only purely and objectively evil, it is a threat to the US Constitution, which is the lynchpin and capstone for freedom and liberties all over the world too. If the American Constitution/values of free speech falter as they seem to be, I pity all the poor souls around the world who have lived under an umbrella of the US Constitution who will suffer immensely more and in deafening silence of globe dominating regime censorship.
There will be no people to take up the cause, e.g., of the Uighurs if the US regime wants to make nice with the Chinese regime for whatever reason. There will be no reporting of atrocities or even knowledge of the lies that justified the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq and the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis defending their hime against an evil invasion. There will be what the party wants … ney, demands you believe. Please see the book 1984 for reference. Many say they have read it, I seriously wonder if that is true.
What are some other human rights?
They see anybody who doesn't toe the Trump line as a brigader from r/politics. Everything is a conspiracy. But there are a number of very moderate conservatives that (for whatever reason) continue to call r/conservative their home, and they respond positively when something sane gets posted. I've had a couple great conversations over there with those folks. I just avoid the endless meme threads and other trashy pointless tribal gunk.
But let's also not forget that the government clearly does engage in rather evil conspiracies … Iraq WMD, anyone? And there are hundreds more proven conspiracies.
What we are ally seeing here is the onset of a dissolution and dissolving of our social and national cohesion. It was a clear and provable risk from immigration and diversity as shown for decades in research after research from evidence all over the globe and history, but her we are. Social cohesion has been replaced by not only disintegration, but also by a destruction of the methods and ideals that unified the USA before. All that I have read and studied on the topic over years, essentially condemns the USA to breaking up absent of increasing levels of control and repression and imposition of a fake kind of unification around hollow ideals and values not shared among the actual people and cultures that now inhabit the the territory of the former USA (a bit of foreshadowing there).
I would love to hear theories on how you keep what are essentially distinct colonies of foreign nationals (by ethnicity) across the country in a cohesive jurisdiction like the USA, especially when you have an increasingly and justifiably angered native population that is noticing that the promise of utopia through immigration was a con job to disenfranchise them of what all people of the world would perceive as their birth right, the right to keep what those before us created for those after them. I just don't see it happening without extreme repression, which of course will see escalating reaction that will either end in victory or vanquish, for one side or another.
You appear to think of it as some kind of opposing sports team. I know the following will incense a lot of people here, but reality though is that the basic dualism is those how have and built something wanting to keep that; while those who did not build or have, want to acquire and take what they did not contribute to, build, or have. A thief is a person that wants what he did not create, deserve, or earn; yet wants to benefit from (or he would not steal it).
Essentially a person with such a mindset is a "liberal" with other people's things, opposed to a conservative that wants to keep what he earned as well as you keep what you legitimately earned. It's really just age old conflict captured in Aesop's fable of the Ants and the Grasshopper. That model manifests itself in the real world through things like the "communists" who want to take over what they don't understand and did not build and yet think they can operate, let alone even maintain; the people that object to huge student loans they willingly agreed to and want to benefit from, while not wanting to pay the cost; or immigrants to anywhere who want to receive what is essentially a part of the wealth and what others of a country built, not only zero cost, but to immense benefit and profit at the cost of the local population.
Those conservatives absolutely rely on other peoples stuff just as much as liberals.
It isn’t nearly as cut and dry as a couple small paragraphs in a forum may make it out to be.