There's tons of subreddits, and the author seems to be conflating the software with individual communities.
what the author of the article ignores however is that the 2008 reddit he was initially exposed to was mostly accessed by people using personal computers, instead of people using smartphones. I'm always surprised whenever anyone overlooks this basic fact and its implications when assessing "how the internet has gotten worse" since 2008 or before.
There was an /r/obama before users could make subreddits. It was certainly this way in the past, but more porn.
You admittedly didn't know that, and had to post a source you Googled in a panic, which says:
> There may have been a few more subreddits created by other employees as well but I’m not sure. Basically they would all have been things of personal interest to us.
Which supports that idea.
I can't find anything that says r/obama was an early Reddit-created subreddit, but if it was, then they would have done it to have less Obama content on the homepage rather than to celebrate Obama.
Source: https://www.quora.com/What-were-the-first-subreddits-and-how...
Digg was not the exact same way; reddit in contrast had a huge Ron Paul audience (pretty much everything but mainstream republicans), I was surprised he didn't have a subreddit.
now reddit hates Rand Paul saying and doing the same things his father did, because they've bought into the Democratic Party line so hard that anything "right of" whoever the current (D) main characters are, is basically an evil Russian nazi bigot just like the rest of the Republicans (and Tulsi Gabbard, apparently, judging by the #1 story today).
the front page of reddit was never like some truly open marketplace of ideas where every political opinion was given equal treatment and consideration or anything but it was a lot more genuine and a lot less blatantly following party propaganda lines, that's for damn sure.
Rand Paul was one of Trump's top supporters in the senate during and after his presidency. His ideals are very different than his father's.
would you care to elaborate on this point? I don't see it and instead it seems that the sentence before this one, along with the general "if he's not a Democrat and he opposes Democrat talking points then we hate him" reddit consensus better explains the current reddit attitude toward Rand Paul than a supposed generational change in ideals between the Pauls. I don't see reddit eagerly claiming to support Ron Paul anymore, anyway.
I think many just discuss this as if it's some inevitable human trends or feature of the internet, but I disagree. If platforms did better to reward higher quality discussion and a variety of viewpoints, then maybe there never would've been a /r/the_donald in the extreme form there was.
And how is HN not exactly the same in that regard? Any system that distills approval or disapproval down to an upvote and a downvote (like/dislike, thumbs up/thumbs down, love/hate, etc.) is going to inherently generate polarization for any topic. The difference is that you don't come to HN for political takes but it's just as bad as reddit for people spouting incorrect technical information and techno-political opinions.
Even in this comments section, the most insightful top-level comment reply I've gotten as I write this is literally at the bottom: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30674104 , while the second-highest comment is "This is just an article by a guy with bad opinions upset others don't agree with his bad opinions."