Reddit has always leaned incredibly liberal, that's not new. But some of the most active subs sport borderline extremism for conservatives as well - and that viewpoint would be shared and upvoted plenty, just like ACAB or sympathizing with Chris Dorner will rise to the top of /r/politics.
Online communities without moderation exist, and they're usually cesspools. I don't think they'll catch on like reddit did.
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.
Reddit did a huge purge of conservatives in the past couple years (2020 especially). You will have to go somewhere else if you truly want a conservative viewpoint.
Reddit has been accelerating censorship recently (so many shut down subs...), becoming increasingly left wing and echo-chambery, so I'm not sure that's a good example.
No. Reddit's user base is extremely liberal and hostile to conservative candidates and values as evident by the echo-chamber that is /r/politics, which fails to meaningfully support pro-conservative news. There are literally no pro-conservative and no anti-liberal top posts from the past month[1], only libertarian, liberal and anti-conservative. The paradigm or technology platform dramatically favors a very specific demographic, and is ultimately a disservice to democracy by disproportionately favoring that demographic's POV. If you fall into that demographic, I imagine it would be very difficult to resist the potential power play to further your own views.
EDIT #1: Okay, /r/politics is a US-only forum. Supporting facts updated.
EDIT #2: As a final point, being global in nature, Reddit will always encourage an english-speaking non-US-centric world-oriented political-view. This is precisely, as a nation, what we don't want, to provide a global avenue for anti-US political subversion masquerading as populace rhetoric.
I really don't think you can say Reddit is a strict leftist community with a straight face. There are plenty of places on Reddit where hard right and alt right views are openly welcome and encouraged.
I speak as someone whose largely the sites demographic (20-35, liberal leaning male), so I'm looking at this from a place where I don't feel threatened or marginalized, so bear with me.
What's to stop other groups from starting more focused subreddits? I understand what you're saying /r/Politics has a clearly left lean to it, but /r/Conservative seems to be relatively healthy (from my occasional peek in).
Even something like The_Donald still survives, and I'd dare to say it's not the content, but its constant attempt at stunts and controversy that's causing the most ill will towards it. I know we've seen hate subreddit's deleted, but I feel that's largely understandable when the very goal of the subreddit is toxicity toward a particular group.
I guess the fun with this is that the biggest items on Reddit are going to be the ones that have the biggest population interested in them, but I don't know if it's necessarily hard to create a sub group, it just won't make it to the front page. I'm subbed to a ton of subreddits that meet that criteria.
Reddit once was a good place to engage in things like politics, but now it is a cesspool of left leaning people. /r/politics turning into a largely left platform has helped to give rise to the more extreme groups that feel ostracized. It is my opinion that effectively banning views that can at times be extreme (though non-violent and not inherently bigoted) only draws more people to them.
I don't blame Reddit for being too hands off, if anything I often blame them for being too hands on. That may not be a popular opinion; but I have in my any years in active online forums/newsgroups/message boards from the early 2000s, to now, seen this happen so many times.
A overactive admin/mod group always has a blowback, which generally ends in another community forming with more extreme views than what was originally the cause of the bans.
It's the community moderation that's a problem on Reddit, because any kind of dissenting opinion is immediately wiped out, when it goes against the group think. And the group think is leaning very heavily to the left on Reddit.
The most prominent example is supporters of Donald Trump being forced off-site, but any kind of conservative or right-leaning community or politically incorrect community is being forced out.
I was there for about 10 years, and a few months ago my account got temp-banned because I said a naughty word. So I deleted my account and left the place for good. Some people on the extreme right have congregated elsewhere, but I'm not sure where right-leaning centrists are supposed to go.
These sites rely on network effect, which become prominent after a certain threshold of users join the site. If they reach critical mass, they will suck in the rest of the extreme-right, then the republicans then slowly everyone, because people like controversy and will seek to go where they can have it.
Reddit is clearly a leftwing site now in ways that it wasnt when it started (when libertarian was the dominant ethos). All their "common word" reddits, such as news, politics, technology science are purely leftist echo chambers by now. The few rightwing corners left are already isolated and ready to make the move. In fact they may even decide they should jump ship. What better time for /r/t_d to go somewhere else than now, when people's interest is intensely focused in elections and they can easily rally all their users to follow them. Wherever they go, more people of other persuasions will follow, because people love telling other people that they are wrong on the internet.
The question is if those other competitors can stand the traffic and whether they give the features to moderators that reddit does.
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 has lots of politics on the default front page, even on subs that aren't explicitly political. But my point was that a reddit replacement needs to have all the fun stuff that attracted reddit's userbase. It can't just be the political extremists who have been permabanned.
I've been on Reddit approximately that long, and I disagree. It's always been made up of people who like to think of themselves as liberal, in a group-solidarity, shared-identity sort of sense. But the conservative/reactionary undercurrents have been around for quite a while and have been growing with every passing year.
No, websites have different cultures, so each one isn't a proportionate sample of all internet users.
Reddit leaned a lot more right/libertarian before nearly all coservative subreddits were systematically banned under spez and Pao. Spez also enacted more subtle censorship like algorithmic tweaks to keep t_d out off the front page and eventually the creation of /r/popular to keep similarly "undesirable" subreddits from the front page.
I've been on reddit for 8 years, and lurked before that. The top submissions and comments have always, and consistently, been standard-issue PC/liberal in their overall view.
Online communities without moderation exist, and they're usually cesspools. I don't think they'll catch on like reddit did.
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