Admins do nothing to prevent extreme moderation as occurs on there from deleting any comment with an alternative viewpoint. Yet it appears quite consistently on the front page with only agreement in its comments section.
right, because the rules of the subreddit indicate that. The subreddit has its own mods that follow its own rules. And the Admins of reddit do not get involved unless they're peventing a lawsuit. Which is kind of how the internet should be run. Free and safe from mass control, but communities controlling themselves.
Which would be fine, if the community had a way to control themselves. But moderators are literally chosen by being the first person to squat on a particular subreddit name. There is an incredible amount of inertia to controlling a popular "domain name" (eg popular brand names), and no recourse if the person who squatted it first turns out to be a huge shithead.
There have been plenty of instances where someone just turns off a subreddit, now nobody gets to use it, have a nice day. Let alone the more subtle problem of a toxic person who should not be moderating a sub in the first place.
Maybe one should be able to put a subreddit in 'unmoderated' view and see what's getting moderated out so the community has a little more transparency. Yeah, you'll have to wade through some sewage, but at least you can opt-in on occasion to make sure you're not being unwittingly moderated into an echo chamber.
I think this hits on the underlying problem I see with Reddit and similar forums, though. Look at the evolution of subs like /r/LateStageCapitalism or /r/FatPeopleHate or /r/Incels or T_D or TRP or Flat Earth or Broneyism or whatever. I don't think in all cases the communities started out as extreme as they eventually became.
I'm not defending their original charters by any means, I just think there's some kind of sociological reality or formula these subs are tapping into that allows them to purposefully moderate/evolve into echo chambers and bring a community of followers along with them, to a point where the community even starts to self-moderate to the extreme -- but they don't just start out that way.
It's almost like you can take some ridiculous idea or some interesting but archaic belief system, build some interest in it using humor or shock value, then once you have an audience with critical mass slowly turn it into a cult without anyone noticing, like the boiling frog analogy (hmm, the irony of that comparison just now struck me). I almost want to try this myself with something absurd just to prove the theory.
And I'm sure this isn't a new concept in sociology or anthropology and there are people researching how it works at Internet scale. Can anyone point me to what it's called?
I agree wholeheartedly, but I also think it should be called into question if something like that belongs on the front page. Admins have added specific rules banning right leaning subreddits from appearing, but not even the most extreme left leaning subreddits get that treatment. And if nothing else it makes for a toxic default view.
What right leaning subreddits have been banned in contrast to extreme left? Inciting hate and violence is a reason to be banned, and that seems a common thread in those subreddits.
It's not as if there aren't meme-heavy right-wing subreddits who do something similar. r/the_donald was all over the front page for a long while, and has a notoriously strict moderation policy. It's just that the right wing subs just don't happen to be as popular right now - or they get banned for lack of moderation and for having their members advocating extreme violence (like r/physicalremoval).
latestagecapitalism's output is relatively tame, and given that they have a politically contentious subject matter, heavy moderation is necessary in order to keep the subreddit free of people from any part of the spectrum who'd turn it into a monkey-flinging shitfest.
Also, it's nowhere near the front page today; it's nothing on what r/The_Donald used to be like.
Reddit has special code to discriminate against /r/The_Donald. Without that special code, /r/The_Donald would still be all over the front page.
Sometimes the truth leaks out, for example in the interface that advertisers use. The number of subscribers listed there was over 6 million, far in excess of what a normal reddit user would see. In various ways, inconsistencies reveal that all the numbers are being manipulated to suppress /r/The_Donald.
Wrong. TD is made up from both genders and many races who are conservatives and support the president. Its style is glossy trolly. They are anti political correctness, against sjws and groups that oppose others free speech. Reddit has site wide rules against racism, and those subs that don't remove it are banned. TD mods remove anything racist quickly - almost exclusively posted by few day old accounts .
Also, have a nice day.
It's not like it's the only subreddit with this kind of moderation. See r/thedonald for a right wing example or r/spacex for a not-really-political example. The things that end up on the front page reflect the userbase, not the admins.
They're a straight up communist sub. Why wouldn't they? You seem to be complaining that a board game site bans you when you repeatedly post "board games are stupid, you should play video games."
Board games aren't an abstract concept greatly up for debate and they don't influence the minds of thousands of young kids and adults who will and do vote.
Yes, I'll admit to that to some extent, but it's a toxic environment when a subreddit like that regularly appears on the front page yet disallows any sort of significant discussion. For similar toxicity reasons they hid The_Donald from the front page, which I'd say is about equally as toxic. So why's the treatment different here?
Toxic and hate speech are recently invented terms to curtail free speech. If I said anyone who wanted communism were hateful (they hate capitalists) and supporting a historically violent ideology, I'd be as right/wrong as people on the left doing the same.
Anti free speech are a means to an end really, power.
I generally agree with you here actually, I wouldn't want any of this to be used to completely suppress speech, but I don't think it's unreasonable to hide by default communities which are higher friction to some degree.
I can definitely see a completely open alternative viewpoint, but reddit has already gone in a very different direction.
