[jasonkolb]

Reddit is a worse echo chamber than Twitter ever was.

I gave up on it when I got banned from certain subreddits for posting quotes from congressional testimony. If you post anything that deviates in the slightest from the moderator's viewpoint, you get banned.

The end result is an echo chamber that's getting tighter and smaller, excluding any diversity of opinion. It's no way to run a business.

[thechao]

Reddit's business is to house all of the echo-chambers, though, isn't it? That seems like a great business to be in, during this Heyday of Echo Chamber Construction™.

[BitwiseFool]

>"all of the echo-chambers"

All of the like-minded echo-chambers. They seem to have no appetite for certain heresies and have walked back Aaron Swartz' original emphasis on free speech as a virtue.

[richbell]

> All of the like-minded echo-chambers. They seem to have no appetite for certain heresies and have walked back Aaron Swartz' original emphasis on free speech as a virtue.

Reddit is ultimately amoral, despite the sensibilities of its moderators, imo. They want to sell ads and IPO, thus they've been increasingly purging communities, posts, and individuals that are either not advertiser-friendly or create trouble.

Even as a casual user of the site, I have noticed a sharp increase in the number of submissions and comments that get Removed by Reddit (i.e., administrators) for no reason. I think they just went completely 'mask-off' after the debacle with Aimee Challenor.

[kypro]

It's not just the mods, the users on Reddit are equally awful and contribute more to the echo chamber imo.

The UK politics subreddit used to be one of my favourite subreddits back in the early 2010s. Back then it was quite a small community and while we had differences of opinions I think it's fair to say we enjoyed each other's company. But around the time of the Brexit vote, then Trump shortly after that, the subreddit started getting flooded with reactionary, low-effort comments and anyone who tried to provide a nuanced opinion or alternative view point was typically downvoted and insulted.

I along with a few other long-time commenters were mostly in favour of Brexit at the time so we would constantly be downvoted and insulted whenever we wrote anything in favour of Brexit. And the worst was when a post made it to /r/all because then you'd an even larger flood of low-effort commenters just downvoting and insulting everyone with a different opinion.

And this wasn't even just minor insults, this was people telling me to kill myself and that I'm a horrible person literally everyday. I'm not sure how much this was a political subreddit thing vs Reddit generally, but it was honestly ridiculous the stuff people would say to me there.

Needless to say, I obviously left the community shortly after 2016, but I've seen similar things play across the site since. There seems to be no room for a difference of opinion there anymore. The mods if anything are just an amalgamation of the average Redditor.

[93po]

The users being a horrible part of the echo chamber stems from echo-chamber-promoting moderation. Mods instaban (shadow ban) anyone and everyone in an extremely automated fashion based on a long list of rules and filters. You're only left with people that perfectly toe the line.