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Comment by miffy900 | Hacker News Reader

So I'm someone who's lurked /r/politics on Reddit since its early days (2008), I'm convinced the reason it is so left leaning is because right wingers in general took too long to start using the internet. If you were young in the 2000's and up to mid 2010's you were more likely to use the internet, and be left leaning. Even just 10 years ago, conservatives/right wingers seemed to have a minority presence on the internet in general, let alone social media or a site like Reddit. In fact I think it was social media like Facebook etc, that helped conservatives realise this internet thing wasn't going away.

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I disagree with your premise, considering that the first people to really use the internet were old-style hackers like those found on HN, and those usually lean conservative.

There was a lot of pro-Ron Paul content on reddit early on. Then there was a large and very active Donald Trump subreddit that reddit outright banned.

I think one of the key reasons subreddits lean left is the very active use of banning. Despite having a doctorate in political science, I was banned from /r/scotus because at least one mod didn't like my politics. During one discussion in /r/AskSocialScience, I had my flair stripped from me by the mods because they didn't like my answers, even though I was the only person in the conversation citing sources.

I moderate a large subreddit myself (300k+ subs) and I am well aware of how important the banhammer is to keep discussions civil, trolls out, and brigading held at bay. But for most subreddits that even remotely touch politics, bans really only seem to skew one way, ensuring that non-liberal viewpoints are scarce at best.

I frequented a ton of forums in the mid 00s and most of them were right leaning. The left leaning slant of the internet is fairly new, I think that came with larger advertisers and their demands on sites to clean out all the extreme right wing opinions and when they did that they also banned a all adjacent opinions as well to be sure.

But before then it was mostly meritocracy, individualism, you get what you work for, drugs is the individuals responsibility, criminals deserves to be punished etc everywhere. There was always a smaller number of voices against that in discussions, but the liberal atheist right wing dominated every forum I saw.

Nonsense. Reddit was full of right wing conspiracy theorists in the beginning. They went away when a user 911_was_an_inside_job and others started trolling the truthers and the admins and mods started to ban and shadow-ban anything right of center.

And then, years later, there was the mod cabal hijacking of all the large subreddits and admins shutting down all subs they could not control.

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