I discovered the same recently and have abandoned it. It's unfortunate because the potential is there for a real city wide or nation wide group discussion platform. But who moderates the moderators?
I don’t have too much issue with Reddits politics at the moment, but I do think it’s odd that such a powerful platform in society is managed by volunteer (mostly) anonymous moderators.
I will be explicit in that I am not condoning doxxing Reddit mods. I just don’t think we’d be fine with this in normal day to day life.
Do you know the editors at your local TV stations? The local radio stations? The people who curate the datasets that train the YouTube recommendation model?
Slightly off-topic: Do you know if Spotify (and other music streaming services) are allowed to accept payment to play/recommend songs for users? I am unsure if payola rules in the United States are strictly for radio stations.
They openly allow you to pay to put your songs in playlists, but they're marked as sponsored songs and users can opt out. Supposedly that's them following the rules; there are rumours of shadier deals going on as well, but there always are in the music industry.
Nah, what we are seeing is that they just leave the site, and the site becomes more radicalized overall.
Banning the_donald was the beginning of the end for Reddit, at least as far as balanced discourse went. At that time, the r/all was relatively balanced and you'd see major news stories from both POVs.
Now it's a hysterical echo chamber full of thinly veiled death threats towards the sitting president.
Oh please. Posts from /r/conservative show up in /r/popular all the time, and it remains a hotbed of conspiracy theorists, grifters, and old fashioned racists.
The ratio is what matters. Easily 95%+ of r/all is far-left content, typically with "rage-bait" headlines that fail to expose the nuance of the situation.
This can't be healthy, for two reasons:
(1) The health of the company. As an investor in RDDT, I am not a fan of the site's landing page alienating 50% of Americans right off the bat.
(2) The health of public discourse. We should all be against the creation of echo chambers and weaponization of headlines.
What’s odd is when you read popular Reddit comments, you find the userbase believes that the site is full of pro-Trump bots and shills.
My politics are to the left of the American left, but I’d be crazy to believe that the mountains of the anti-Trump posts are organic & the spoonfuls of pro-Trump posts are paid, especially after an election where Trump won the popular vote.
The English speaking world outside of the US is left of Democrats and generally hates Trump, and not everyone on Reddit is USAmerican. Reddit is going to be left of the US and also not representative of the US.
