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Comment by EscapeFromNY | Hacker News Reader

Reddit's valuation has been tanking even before this drama.

https://www.businessinsider.com/fidelity-marks-down-stripe-r...

They're so eager to screw over their users, they couldn't even wait until after the IPO payday to torpedo their own business

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that applies to basically every company, Stripe is mentioned in the article you posted as well. Rising interest rates do that to high growth companies, Reddit actually declined slightly less than Stripe in comparison

I wouldn't be surprised if Elon Musk bought Reddit at this point. He would be capable of it.

Please don't give that man ideas.

I don't think he would; it's not anywhere near the echo chamber Twitter was when he bought it. He had a huge army of supporters cheering him driving the company into the ground...Reddit in the last year or two has pretty collectively come to despite the hell out of him and his "fans."

I can't remember the last time I saw an /r/all comment thread where Musk was spoken of in anything approaching a positive way. /r/programmerhumor absolutely eviscerated the man almost several times a day, in threads that saw wide visibility, where programmers explained to non-programmer redditors just how dumb the stuff he was doing was.

>it's not anywhere near the echo chamber Twitter was when he bought it

Are you really implying that the fact that Twitter (as opposed to Reddit) actually had a visible diversity of opinion on Musk as evidence that it's an echo chamber? The seething, petty hostility to Musk that is routinely on the front page of Reddit is so objectively correct to you that dissent from it must reflect echo chamber dynamics? Incredible.

There is genuinely a difference.

If Reddit slightly disprefers Musk over preferring him, the entirety of the top of the comments will be anti-Musk. (And depending on sub, it's more than slightly.) Comparatively, tweets are more selectively filtered.

The fixed sorting of Reddit comments gives much less chance to come across comments you'll like if you're in a minority opinion.

Yeah, ultimately I think Reddit is structurally much more likely to lend itself to echo chambers because its community-based nature (organized around subreddits) gives it centralized targets of partisan attack: You can effectively disrupt speech not by actioning individual users at the account level but by just banning or heavily censoring subreddits where the disfavored speech is taking place.

This is of course largely what has happened, where subs with substantial right-of-center populations have been either banned (usually under the pretext of not being aggressive enough about policing for ever-evolving standards of "hate speech") or just co-opted by moderators who punish right-of-center speech in various ways (often indirectly, such as simply banning users who upset others by expressing disfavored views for the sake of community harmony.) Twitter cannot be co-opted in this way, really.

That said, it hadn't occurred to me that some people are so hostile to right-of-center perspectives that they would consider this censorship to result in a net reduction in "echo chambers", because presumably these perspectives are all so horrible that surely they can only exist in toxic, tightly-controlled spaces such as a Flat Earther community, etc.

Moderators punishing the wrong speech is precisely how I'd describe r/conservative.

/r/conservative is an odd example because I'm pretty sure everyone knows that the subreddit would be completely overrun by left-wing voices if they didn't enforce guardrails on this. At some point when tribal hatred becomes become sufficiently hot and lopsided in power, then the minority has no choice but to either leave or establish echo chambers. That describes the /r/conservative case imo.

In any case, I'm fully open to the idea that there are still right-wing echo chambers on Reddit. But the whataboutism is a weak distraction. The number of neutral spaces where people are allowed to effectively and openly disagree on hot-button policy issues has declined precipitously since the mid-2010s. Prominent powermods openly dictate what sort of opinions are "allowed" on various issues, and of course these boundaries are far to the left of the actual Overton Window of the populations whose democratic processes actually create policies.

What alternative reality have you been living in?

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