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Banning users with moderate opinions is not normal in everyday life, but is routine in many subreddits. Including users sharing opinions held by moderate democrats.
Reddit is not a community, it's a collection of communities. Each may be an echo chamber, but it's an echo chamber in its own way.
These days, all the default subs are left leaning, most are far-left leaning, which means most users have a partisan experience. This then impacts the overall makeup of the site’s userbase which cascades this bias through every other subreddit.
Sure, there are a small number of relatively low traffic communities that have held out, but they are now an insignificant proportion of the content on the site.
It’s a natural artefact of the voting systems it uses for recommending content. These tend to result in echo chambers because political extremism results in more engagement, and thus more extreme users vote more and have a larger influence on what is shown.
This is then amplified by the echo chamber effect, which distills the user base into ever more extreme positions as the moderate users find their opinions outside the evolving fringe of acceptable opinion.
The reason I class it as far-left now, even though I wouldn’t in the past, is two things:
Firstly, it is now plagued with extremist content, including calls to violence, which are tolerated by users and moderates alike.
Secondly, the opinions expressed have a left bias relative to other members of the left. There are plenty of moderate democrats, including people like Obama, who would quickly find themselves banned from many default subreddits for their more moderate tolerant opinions.
It's a very odd time. The USA is emerging into a combination of a Kleptocracy, a Kakistocracy, Autarky and Technocracy. It's like somebody's dream pivot fractured into every ocracy under the sun.
I don't have to subscribe to a belief in a conspiracy to advantage Russia, to beleive the SITUATION will advantage people who benefit from an unstable US polity.
I also don't have to subscribe to a belief it was "the plan" to believe the super-rich will ride over this wave, and pick the cream off as it floats upward. Thats what they do, all the time. This is just a particularly active milk churn and there's going to be a LOT of cream.
I myself do not find left-right divide that much useful, at least to describe this melting pot of our time.
I'm just glad we have social networks which are left-wing to bring balance to the system.
It’s a nonstop barrage of nazi labels, overblown news, and comments that “hint” at more direct involvement and violence.
It's so weird that I've even started to doubt whether most of those comments are from real people.
Now you have a huge trade war going on, he keeps threatening the soveriegnty of multiple long time allies, a billionaire has extensive access to government data (the same one that did that nazi salute), along with ICE being ramped up all in the first couple weeks of his term. Our president also ran a crypto scam that made him billions right before his term started. He also keeps joking about running for a third term and is challenging a 150 year constitutional law on birthright citizenship with an executive order. Even you have to admit that this is a lot going on compared to anything we've seen before.
Here is one example of an overblown piece of news: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1ib9csy/donald_trum...
A lot of comments and energy were expended there. Everyone talked as if it were the end of NATO and that the U.S. was abandoning Europe. In reality, it was just a 20% reduction in force (which was the first sentence in the linked article).
On the flip side, the trade war with Canada deserved heavy criticism—and luckily, it was well covered (I count that as a win).
From the list you just shared, I don't really have a good sense of the relative severity of each and I think it's because there is no place where these topics could be discussed (even HN isn't immune as you can see from one of the comments below)
What makes it far-left are the calls for violence all over the place, and the rejection of opinions from more moderate democrats.
When even the hyper sensitive ADL can admit that musk did not do a Nazi salute, but your users cannot, you’ve become a far-left echo chamber.
I personally tried to follow all the news for a week. I tried to read the articles and research what was shared on reddit. Oftentimes my interpretation of these news wasn't nearly as dramatic as what reddit was aligning on. At the end, I figured it's too much work to double check every single piece of news, so I just stopped using reddit for some time.
Well, remaining uninformed is certainly one way to prevent hysteria.
Not getting every single detail of a story as it develops isn't really a big deal to me and, I'd also argue that following these news on reddit won't really make you more informed (I already shared one example where the news was discussed but the conversation was entirely off from the reality). Reddit only makes you feel more informed, but that doesn't mean that you actually are.
So partly orthogonal to the main left-right axis.
That’s like a frog saying the water isn’t getting warmer.
Today it is a far-left echo chamber in most large subreddits.
The process of change was gradual. Like all echo chambers it is a result of distillation, with marginal moderate users progressively leaving in response to seeing the shrinking frontier of acceptable discourse.
Writing this made me realize not just how different Reddit was, but also the issues of the time and the ways they were thought of and talked about. It's almost hard to map onto contemporary parties, policies or issues.