Reddit feels very Soviet lately. Everything is heavily manipulated and it seems like users are aware of that fact but are powerless to change anything.
These days just about any popular thread that I wander into, I see wide swaths of "deleted" comments. I'm sure they were deleted for many good and valid reasons.
IMHO, reddit's aggressive moderation suppresses spontaneous comments and is off putting to lurkers. The wittiest comments are likely spontaneous. And lurkers are not likely to engage in a discussion if they feel it may be off topic.
So we miss out on spontaneous humor and the random insights of brilliant people.
All of this makes reddit a sadder experience.
Reddit is where you go if you begrudgingly vote Democrat but think that liberals and progressives have gone too far.
I do wonder what the political landscape is going to look like in the next decade if/when Republicans realize that there's huge huge swaths of young and young-ish people they could easily convert if they just dropped all the gods & guns & murica branding and gave up on social issues.
This is just a passing trend though, 10 years ago everyone on the internet was libertarian. Which is how you knew the internet wasn't real. Nobody's actually a libertarian in real life.
I'm going to assume what you mean is that nobody lives entirely by Libertarian ideals. While that may be true, it's true of every other political category as well, so I guess nobody is anything under that logic.
On the internet there's that political compass site that tells people they're libertarians, but it was made by libertarians so I think it's a recruiting tool.
But it's also true that people don't practice it in real life. Drug legalization, yes, that's going somewhere if slowly, but the right wing libertarians still tend to be NIMBY in local politics.
They haven't, like, done anything though. Not many politicians elected, no drugs legalized, noone freed from prison, state control over people generally not reduced. I have heard of a few attempts to start libertarian cities that failed because you can't get a Walmart when your taxes are too low to construct a sewer line.
Practically nothing makes it to the front page organically these days. It's all orchestrated.
Admittedly, I think I see those more on obviously humor subreddits (r/jokes) or smaller subreddits. I'm actually happy that places like r/science delete comments that are simply effortless jokes.
Reddit might have cleaned their act up a bit but it still a gross wild west.
On an unrelated note, isn't spivak a gender?
Then they changed the subreddit rules and only accept "Notable" people for IAMAs and r/casualiama was born. In the 10 years I've been at Reddit it has changed a lot, including some "niche" communities that I was at, as Reddit becomes more popular all it's subreddits degrade into Meme collections.
If you want to find older posts you have to use a search engine.
Unfortunately, it seems like the only options out there are either:
1) Reddit clones, that attract people who are angry about the worst subreddits getting banned at one point or another. Pretty much nothing but non-witty hate speech, and meta discussion about how much Reddit sucks.
2) Random phpBB bulletin boards, that are too small to have the critical mass of early Reddit. Of course, today's Reddit is WAY too big, and suffers from the "Eternal September" problem. A smaller, lesser-known alternative would be great. But it has to be large ENOUGH, or else it's not much different from a private Slack or Discord.
Today I'm out looking for alternatives again, which brings me to HN. There's something magical about early reddit, but I don't think it's unique, I think it existed on usenet and bulleting boards and other stuff before my time, I think it will exist again, but if it exists right now, it's a carefully guarded secret that I haven't stumbled upon yet.
I hope a new one emerges.
I also miss when the youth of the time weren't so in favor of heavy-handed censorship. The current zeitgeist puts the CCP to shame.
The notion that individual subreddits mean Reddit Is What You Make of It is useful only to distract just like you’re (unintentionally) doing here. It helps deflect some of these situations by having folks who unsub all defaults saying “looks great here!”
The subreddit was banned, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, a very popular conservative social media platform was kicked off of its hosting providers, etc. Regardless of your political views, it is abundantly clear that certain viewpoints and opinions are being suppressed, which is fundamentally contradictory to free speech and American values.
Donald Trump is a billionaire and a former president. He can and does call into Fox News, et. al and immediately has an audience of millions. The idea that his speech is being suppressed is absolutely ridiculous .
Why exactly should private entities be forced to host content that they choose not to host?
Where did you get that idea? No one is forcing a provider to host content they do not wish to host, and my comment made no mention of such a thing.
Regardless, that's completely orthogonal to the fact that certain view points are being suppressed. How do you consider such an assertion to be ridiculous? Do you consider something suppressed only when all mentions, everywhere, of a particular topic, are erased? I don't think you do. Just because those opinions have not been _fully_ suppressed does not mean they _are_ being suppressed, as indicated by examples such as the bans and erasures previously mentioned.
You previously said:
> a very popular conservative social media platform was kicked off of its hosting providers, etc
The hosting provider kicked off the social media platform. They didn't want to host that platform. Nor should they be forced to host it. What's more, your whole point seems to be that because Donald Trump has been banned from some platforms, that his speech is being suppressed. But those platforms, which are private entities, are choosing not to allow him to post on their platforms. So you seem to be complaining about private entities choosing what and what not to host on their platforms.
And the bigger point, Donald Trump is free to go out into the public square and voice whatever viewpoint he has. Some networks, social media companies, etc. will cover it (in fact, a lot of them will). No one is stopping him from doing this. Just because he can't tweet it doesn't mean his speech is being suppressed.
Freedom of association is a deeply American concept. Within certain parameters, I can ban anyone I want from my business.
The problem here is that certain entitled people feel entitled to use other peoples' property as their own.
Also... just noting that many of those same users went on to do arguably the most unAmerican thing in American history - they attempted to end it.
You can spit and puff all you like, but I won't be listening to a word you have to say about who is and isn't acting in the American tradition.
Try it. You'll be censored, down voted (real votes or not), shadow banned and actually banned.
> To my knowledge that is not at all the case. There's even one subreddit dedicated to asking Trump supporters questions, although posts have to be approved by the moderators.
I doubt there are any left given that they can't post anywhere.
"It is well known the admins wanted TD banned" is a direct lie. I doubt you have better insight than anyone else about what was going on inside Reddit.
But regardless, as concerning as these policing decisions are, it's not clear how any of this stuff affects a reader of only apolitical, non-default subreddits.
I appreciate the attempted correction despite it being wrong.
Edit: Sigh, HN being HN. I’m rate limited and can’t respond to persistent, sustained miscorrection over a single word choice in a much broader point, because I spent all my thought tokens defending the word choice, which matters approximately zero, instead of the point.
Being unaware of something is orthogonal to being affected by it.
Edit: The parent has edited their comment since my reply to be more specific. I'm not sure I agree, but it's now not as obviously wrong as I outlined here.
I can only speak to what I experience and I can't pretend my experience is something it's not. If that is unintentionally distracting from some greater purpose, too bad I guess. I'm not about to get on board with a perspective I have not experienced and do not understand.
I used to say the same thing you have here to say pretty much the same thing about Reddit. That’s why I cited my experience in response, as you say you’re sharing yours, to point out that beyond what you’ve experienced there’s some nuance you may not have considered (and learning it was valuable to me).
That's one of the foundational causes to all the violence and ignorance in the world if we say "get on board" means "can tolerant and respect"
Maybe there are some more niche more secluded "better" subreddits. But as far as unpopular goes DermatogoyQuestions is pretty niche, and is oriented towards doctors and patients. And yet the worst parts of reddit still get here, and are upvoted straight to the top.
The issue for me is I don't know of other good places for long-form discussion and good link aggregation in general. Most of the time in smaller subreddits there aren't really any issues.
What alternative is there to /r/AskHistorians? Etc.
The absolute rank doesn't really tell you where the next closest competitor is.
Digg was pretty big for the time. The competitor I used the most back then was slashdot and I'd say digg was considerably bigger.
I have an idea that the future will not be in content silos and volunteer moderation by power hungry people... but I certainly don’t know how to get there so I’ll wait. I suspect the future will be “subscription lists” you join that block things people you generally agree with flagged, but this may bubble issue like we have now.
I mean, their tagline "the front page of the Internet" screams arrogance to me, in the face of what Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the Internet to be, and yet it's probably not wrong at this point.
There is no popular alternative now, but something could appear eventually.
Yet, there's no proportional response in this case.
How things were sorted on the main page, obstensively to stop from getting botted, was a secondary concern as most people just read and don't comment.
In fact even moderate liberals on reddit often complain of being attacked and banned for expressing even a slightly different opinion on supposedly politically neutral subs.
it would be fine if it only came from users, one can just ignore nasty DMs and such, the problem is admins and mods are heavily censoring opinions and ban all dissent, so echo-chamber effects are extremely strong.
And it's not only political sub-reddits, the entire site is promoting a particular political ideology in a most "soviet" way possible.
No, that is not an overstatement.
Which does have a more classic feel.
Is there any popular link aggregator on the internet that this doesn't apply to?
I was a part of a few subs where sub moderators chose to participate in some reddit protest and go private.
The response to closing the sub temporarily, by the users you see in the sub was nearly 100% negative and a series of moderators who nobody ever sees came out to defend their choice simply demonstrated how disconnected from the sub they were (some didn't even seem to know the sub rules...).
There's a weird multi level stratification on reddit with admins, mods and users and I'm not convinced any of the 3 see eye to eye / understand each other.
It is only useful to me for very, very small subs that act like enthusiast forums of old.
This is probably because I'm focusing my participation on subs where the users are unified by a similar interest in an area of creative expression and participation.
Follow controversy, anger or FUD and you'll just get sucked into it in a sort of meta way. Anger because of the anger, controversy because of the controversy, FUD because of the FUD.
https://twitter.com/mcopelov/status/1374544227300999169
(At one point a Nordic politician asked Bernie to stop calling them socialist.)
The refrain of "just create your own subreddit" is not practical to combat the indoctrination being manipulated to the top by these orgs. IIRC commondreams.org is behind the /r/AOC and /r/MurderedByAOC subreddits entirely.
Do you have evidence of that?
The mod of those subs is /u/IrlOurPresident, and the submissions are restricted to pretty much only that account. That is where to start to trace down the claim.
Not much.
| That is where to start to trace down the claim.
I can't find any link between that user and commondreams.
And look at the submissions, and the vote count of submissions. I do not have the comments I read several weeks ago available, but in my many years on reddit, I have no doubt there is clear vote manipulation occurring.
inb4 "those are different things", I know.
That's what I looked for. You should have better evidence than a highly active user in a restricted access subreddit before making an assertion like that. Especially considering how wildly popular AOC is, I don't see any evidence of manipulation.
haven't been around reddit for long then, have you
The Donald wasn't a white supremacist subreddit.