/r/politics used to be more balanced. Especially if you sorted by controversial. But reddit as a whole has become very unfriendly to conservative viewpoints and so it has driven the moderate conservatives either off the platform or into /r/conservative.
You can post the same comment on /r/politics and /r/conservative and one will be highly upvoted and one will be mercilessly downvoted.
But that is the system working as intended. The whole point of reddit is that each subreddit is a community of likeminded individuals. It was never really set up for debate of opposing viewpoints. One main way it differs from HN, which makes a huge difference, is that on HN you cannot downvote without some karma, and you can never downvote people who reply to you.
It would be cool if reddit added those as options for a subreddit moderator, actually.
The hard part is that reddit is majority liberal, so it's very very hard to find a good balance.
Any random non-political subreddit is going to be liberal slanted. In order to find a conservative slant you have to go specifically to a political conservative subreddit.
To be fair, the stuff going across r/conservative is quite a bit worse than r/politics. Which I expected, of course, because r/politics is a generic discussion subreddit and not intentionally one-sided. But Reddit leaves both alone.
I mean, a quick search of /r/politics, which is liberal, suggests to me that you're over-stating the case. Conservative posts are often unpopular and people expressing conservative views get a lot of downvotes, but it was simple to find posts that go against the culture of the subreddit[1][2]. I wouldn't recommend /r/politics as a place to discuss politics - I agree it isn't representative of the median US voters' view.
I think it's one thing to say reddit is mostly people'd be leftists, which I agree with, and another to say that conservative opinions are explicitly banned. I think conservative opinions are unpopular and the imbalance makes reddit a poor place to understand the politics of the median person in the US, but non-leftists are allowed.
/r/moderatepolitics on reddit is halfway decent. It's definitely liberal, but the way people discuss things is moderate, if that makes sense. It's not complete partisanship, and occasionally beliefs get questioned.
Reddit and Hacker News both solve the problem of "how do you host a site to allow for political discussion?"
To get good debate, you have to curate a social community by effective moderation. You see it on reddit all the time -- some communities are utter trash, and some are much better. It's a social problem, not a technological one.
Up until 2016ish, discussions on reddit used to be very balanced politically. You could find the top voted comment leaning extreme left, and the second top voted comment leaning to the right. Now you all the top comments are left and any right leaning comment is highly down voted to the negatives. Either the country suddenly shifted far left or reddit is getting highly moderated to make it look like that.
Part of my point is that Reddit's platform leads to intense polarization, which could be alleviated by improving their platform. The default subreddits are hyper-Democrat (eg. to the point where dissent of COVID-19 restrictions was outright banned last year in many subreddits), and the conservative subreddits are hyper polarized in the same way in the opposite direction.
I think many just discuss this as if it's some inevitable human trends or feature of the internet, but I disagree. If platforms did better to reward higher quality discussion and a variety of viewpoints, then maybe there never would've been a /r/the_donald in the extreme form there was.
It's just objectively impossible to have neutral politics discussion in reddit because of the upvote system. Not to mention mods in almost every subreddit are (naturally) biased and heavy handed.
I left reddit years ago (and found HN) because although I agree with mostly liberal views it became too much of an echo-chamber for liberal views the frontpage is the extreme example of that.
There are many great sub-reddits of course but it's not a place for politicial discussions (in fact I am still looking for a good place to have political discussions)
Edit: Why does my personal experience get downvoted?
Reddit political discussion is heavily biased towards the left and people who come from other standpoints are often ridiculed and dismissed. /r/politicialdiscussion is more moderate than let's say /r/politics, but still not a place I would go to discuss political issues.
I find this to be a bit of a bad comparison. /r/politics downvotes opposing viewpoints - they aren’t banned. And there are many, many other subreddits where you will find opinions completely different from those of the /r/politics orthodoxy.
Not only is Reddit's moderation system designed to prevent users from seeing content, the upvote system itself does the same. You'd expect a generic sub such as /r/politics to be somewhat neutral, meaning you'd find opinions from right wingers, left wingers, and centrists alike. Instead, you see nothing but anti-Trump and pro-Bernie posts because a larger part of the user base is left leaning. You could describe Reddit as a form of true democracy, in the sense that everyone gets one vote that determines the success of a post or comment. When dealing with a true democracy, you quickly run into tyranny of the majority, which is a big reason why right wing opinions are quickly suppressed on what's supposed to be a neutral sub.
This is why Reddit sucks as a political forum. Along with more open and honest moderation, you would likely have to do some serious changes to the upvote system, or do away with it all together.
There are both right and left leaning subs on reddit and it works ok.
Reddit occasionally bans subreddits for various reasons (see r/fatpeplehate and the predecessor to r/hydrohomies). True, r/thedonald was banned, but not because of political leaning (r/conservative is running just fine), but because of how it was spreading misinformation and calling for violence.
Reddit is not even pretending to be fair and balanced. They lean far to the left (or pander to them) and the front page is often filled with anti-Trump, pro-Democrat propaganda.
Free and fair discussion is a lost cause on that platform, 45 has made anyone with conservative values an enemy.
Reddit is not one place, there are subreddits, there are good ones with good moderation , but I do not participate in politics or heated topics.
As an example you could compare r/starttrek vs r/DaystromInstitute , in the first you will find tons of low effort content and comments (memes, bad jokes,personal attacks, off topic stuff) int he second one only on topic and medium effor comments are allowed.
The isolation of particular viewpoints into their own subreddit is precisely the problem imo.
There are political undertones in nearly every subreddit. But depending on which sub you are visiting, you can be downvoted or even banned for not having the "accepted" viewpoint. There's no place to have balanced discussion anymore, and that's one of the things that used to make reddit enjoyable.
Creating more siloed echo chambers isn't a fix, it's the problem.
You can post the same comment on /r/politics and /r/conservative and one will be highly upvoted and one will be mercilessly downvoted.
But that is the system working as intended. The whole point of reddit is that each subreddit is a community of likeminded individuals. It was never really set up for debate of opposing viewpoints. One main way it differs from HN, which makes a huge difference, is that on HN you cannot downvote without some karma, and you can never downvote people who reply to you.
It would be cool if reddit added those as options for a subreddit moderator, actually.
reply