Yes, it was somewhat good in the past but an alternative is sorely needed. Most popular subs (at least the one I frequent) are moderated to the point that censored would be the more appropriate word to describe the situation. Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink.
For instance /r/AskHistorians has a very high bar for posting and threads are commonly removed. As a result (and because they still have posters that meet that bar), the sub is considered very high trust. Some other subs anybody can say anything and I go so far as to filter the entire sub out so I never see it again.
I would not characterise a community moulded according to the whims of a few anonymous individuals as high in trust.
Channels with higher quality selection (Financial Times) now have more of my time because I trust them more based on previous decisions they have made (to show me fewer low quality articles under click bait headlines).
YOU MUTED is the key here.
"Majority of subreddit didn't like it so it got downvoted" is somewhat democratic will of community.
You muted a user coz you don't want their content is personal choice.
Moderator choosing to do so on a whim is neither of those. You do need moderators coz some people won't behave but many times rules of subreddit are basically there so moderator can point to excuse on banning or removing whatever they don't like, not to ban something people don't want there.
For example, on an r/news post a few years ago about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I replied to another comment where my content was basically the following: "If someone threatened to bomb your house, and they had a history of bombing houses, would you respond? What about after they destroyed your house?". That's almost exactly the wording I used (wish the comment hadn't been deleted so I could repost it exactly). This not only got me permanently banned from r/news, but also reported to the admins who censored the account. I suspect I pissed off a reddit admin or power user who followed me around reporting me, as shortly afterwards in a niche sub, I made another post discussing the continuum of force when it came to violent crime, quickly received several reports, and my account was permabanned from reddit. Note that both the content and tone of my posts there were similar to how I post on HN, which I think is generally appropriate.
This sequence of events bothered me a lot, because I think discussion of the use of force continuum and the ethics of preemptive or retributive force are highly relevant to today's world, and that the places where I continued (didn't start) discussion of them were the appropriate places for them. If this conversation can't happen on reddit, which it appears it can't, then we need another forum. It is clear to me today that reddit has hit it's eternal september. I can't bring myself to respond to the multitude of low effort posts that typically bombard you when you post something other than memeing.
They suppress subs or influence mods to suppress them for them.
There's a myriad of ways in which censorship to shape a narrative happens, and that narrative is as true as the narrative a few twitter users can set, if highlighted as "the majority opinion/the people have spoken" by mainstream media.
There's intervention via subterfuge, not an open contract you either adhere or not.
That's implying that there is a single one-dimensional quality metric. The problem is when moderators of popular subreddits (for a particular niche) or those with the most obvious names for a particular topic start to enforcing their own personal biases in the discussion rather than sticking to keeping the discussion on-topic.
I've found hidden gems in free for all, no-karma, no-upvote forums such as 4chan. And you pay attention there, because people are not trying to sound smart.
I don't really like defending Reddit, because I don't like them as a company, but I don't think this is correct. There's a financial incentive for them to not ban subreddits, so groups have to behave quite obnoxiously or blatantly break Reddit's rules to get banned. Just having a certain political disagreement is not nearly enough.
And if you disagree, please post some examples.
As an aside, I was curious about the use of the word "wrongthink". It sounds like something Orwell would have come up with, but a search suggests that it's actually a neologism that is used mainly by the alt-right.
No idea as to what you're referring to, but you must know many more examples throughout the world and history, no?
Which certain people are you being unfairly restrained from saying what certain things to?
Themes in that sub were that “the cure is worse than the disease” (it was) and that “we shouldn’t throw away our way of life for Covid” (we chose not to in hindsight).
If you are a member of subs like r/lockdownskepticism even today then you frequently get banned from other subs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/pfyqqn/covi...
Quote:
Claims of “brigading” are common and often hard to quantify. However, in this case, we found very clear signals indicating that r/NoNewNormal was the source of around 80 brigades in the last 30 days (largely directed at communities with more mainstream views on COVID or location-based communities that have been discussing COVID restrictions). This behavior continued even after a warning was issued from our team to the Mods.The Donald
It really didn't fetishise persecuting anyone. The warnings were arbitrary and capricious
You're not going to get banned from a hobby sub for asking a question on something related to a product in that hobby.
Still haven't got a coherent answer out of anyone I asked, just insults
As a moderator of online communities I'd do the same in a heartbeat. Take that to Twitter or somewhere.