[khawkins]

>But the main, core "Reddit experience" as algorithmically produced by r/Popular is a complete dumpster fire. It's the noise of the entire internet, jam packed into a webpage. So many low quality posts and comments that encapsulate all the negatives about "internet culture". There's no room for thoughtful discussion and discourse on the majority of the site, just shitposting and low rung commentary.

Just jumped onto the front page and found most of the posts to be politically charged, including posts from ostensibly apolitical subs like /r/science. Of course there's a market there, but they're certainly not going to grow when they're immediately alienating such a wide potential user base.

Reddit generally works for these small subs, but even those will eventually become cancerous. I don't know if it's something reddit can fix, outside of adult hobby-oriented subs, nearly every community went from something of quality to worthless after a few years.

[Applejinx]

Of course. People here automatically think 'corporations and products' when they think of marketing, but it's WAY more interesting to doctor and manipulate the literal state of the world through political propaganda, and there's a number of actors including some real big ones putting huge effort into exactly this.

Marketing cameras and boner pills pales in comparison to what can be done if you're trying to get your enemy's citizens to literally murder each other in the streets and get your geopolitical rival to fall over dead. The power of essentially mass marketing through brigading, seeding propaganda, and controlling the discourse is enormous.

That's what you're seeing: this new form of warfare, and the aftereffects of it as ordinary Redditors react to what's being put out there.

Selling products just isn't as important.

[honkdaddy]

/r/science is particularly insane these days. The majority of the front page is often dominated by posts from one user, /u/mvea. Mvea is a mod and a power user with 28m karma amassed over the years.

Mvea has some pretty strong political opinions. A good chunk of the "republican=bad"-finding studies on /r/science are posted by him, as are a good chunk of the "cannabis/psychadelics=good"-finding studies. Checking out his user page today, 6 of his last 10 posts are related to Trump, conservatives, or psychoactive drugs.

If you point this out, you get banned. If you link to /u/mvea's page, you get banned. If you comment anything that's not another peer reviewed journal, including any kind of anecdote or hypothetical, your comment is deleted and you're given a "warning". I do think the rules were originally put in place with good intentions, but like many subreddits with strict rules, draconian mods end up taking it a bit too seriously and it entirely drives away the laymen.