[taurath]

Its been relatively rare that unpopular opinions offered in good faith are punished with anything other than downvotes on reddit. People don't post opinions with the intent to convince, they post with the intent to deceive or create a reaction, IE trolling. That has been the big wave that has taken over, its just taken the conservative political sphere over far quicker.

The other wave is the circle-jerk - a relentless and all-encompassing embrace of confirmation bias, institutionalized to keep a fundamentalist purity of thought. This is beyond a normal echo chamber, these are high powered ideology amplifiers.

We've never had the concept of unlimited freedom of speech, and most of the time that its been curtailed, it has been to protect against those who use it in bad faith (fire in a crowded theater, etc). That is the toxicity - IMO Reddit is going to learn this lesson far too late, and allow a group that doesn't want to be there anyway take down the whole site when they leave.

[skrowl]

It's not at all rare, and it's endorsed by the admins. They LITERALLY changed their algorithm to keep the Donald Trump fan subreddit from appearing in the /all filter and their posts from ever reaching the front page.

When you change your searching and indexing algorithms to suppress fans of a specific politician but not fans of other politicians, that's not really good faith.