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by coldseattle 2948 days ago
But there is a lot of groupthink on Reddit, too. Some popular forms you just have to stay out of if you have a different opinion.
4 comments

Sure, but so there is in FB. On Reddit you can have multiple accounts (all pseudonymous) and you can participate on whichever subreddits you like. If there's some sub that isn't too welcoming of your views, chances are there is another that is -- an echo chamber if you want it thus, sure, but no worse than FB.
You can also have multiple accounts and pseudonymous accounts on FB. Sure, I think it's against their TOS (unlike Reddit) but I see people doing it.
It's a pain, so few do it.
There are also spaces which are extremely tolerant to difference of opinion. You can choose those.

r/changemyview is one favorite example for excellent rational discourse on often very controversial topics.

I'll add r/NeutralPolitics to this list.
r/poltics is awful.

Its a Trump hate thread with very little objectivity.

And then there are those which require objectivity which can be cited and followed up upon. /r/AskHistorians is perhaps the best example of this.
There's nothing wrong with stating an opinion that is unpopular and being downvoted. It usually still contributes to the discussion.

But I agree that aggregate comment vote is not an indicator of correctness - more of whatever way the wind is blowing at a particular time in a particular community.

Why? The worst that will happen is you get downvoted.
You will get rate limited more severely the more downvotes you get.

I've also run into subreddits run by very biased moderators who will mark any stories as spam they disagree or competes with their friends. And due to the shadowban system, many people never realize it.

That's why I stopped submitting comments and stories on reddit. I only browse it now.

Yeah, I don't get the idea of shadowbanning. It seems like a particularly capricious feature.
shadow-banning is handy for spammers and bad-posters because, to them, it looks like their posts are public. Its not hard to find out if you're shadowbanned (use incognito mode), but it often does the trick.

In the subs I mod I have a long list of awful contributors on an auto-remove list executed by automoderator. I've got people who have been saying awful thing to people for years, but those posts are never seen. Banning them will only lead them to create a new account.