[concordDance]

Note that reddit in general, those whose posts rise in particular and posts that rise to the top of that subreddit even more in particular, is extremely unrepresentative of actually common sentiment.

To get an a less biased view you can chat to people on public transport (in Europe) or talk to your neighbours (in the USA).

[Eisenstein]

> Note that reddit in general, those whose posts rise in particular and posts that rise to the top of that subreddit even more in particular, is extremely unrepresentative of actually common sentiment.

Why?

[concordDance]

A whole bunch of different effects, present on most forms of social media:

Evaporative cooling (if an environment appeals to people they'll join and if an environment gets more extreme those who least like that direction will leave). The presence of visible up votes and downvotes magnifies this effect.

Founder effects. Reddit in general and any given sub in particular was initially populated with people who are a bit unusual in some fashion. E.g. the initial reddit population was very techy. This effect also applies to any Internet forum (both in that Internet forums are used by somewhat odd people like us and that an Internet forum on Thing will pull people interested in Thing and interest in Thing very likely correlates with many other factors, such as socioeconomic status, culture, gender, subculture)

General interest in going online to talk about things. The vast majority of people do not go online to talk and argue with strangers, those who do are different along a number of axes (such as a lack of young kids or higher disagreeableness) which in turn correlate with other traits and beliefs.

In Reddit case there's also an element of active moderation, mostly due to founder effects, but also due to them being the only ones actually caring a lot (being activist) the main subs are policed by a bunch of supermoderators (who are mods in hundreds of subs) with similar views on issues such as trans rights and as a moral duty will actively attempt to remove people who express other viewpoints to keep the place tidy (without the viewpoints that are offensive and wrong).

[Eisenstein]

> the main subs are policed by a bunch of supermoderators (who are mods in hundreds of subs)

This is easily evidenced and is not true. You can check for yourself. Parroting this talking point shows that you do not check your facts.

Top 100 subreddit moderators and number of subs moderated:

* https://gist.github.com/bspammer/d6059d2bfa222a0f340353ae0be...

[concordDance]

Your list seems incorrect. Merari01, for example, moderates 243 subs[1]: https://www.reddit.com/user/Merari01/

For example, r/GetMotivated and r/ContagiousLaughter which are not in that gist.

I picked a couple of other users on the list at random such as Sunkisty, TreKs and Blank-Cheque and they're also all over 100.

Where did you get the gist from?

[1] https://imgur.io/a/8KoGyGv

[Eisenstein]

> the main subs

The list is the top 100 subs.

Anyone can create a sub to moderate, so one person having 200+ is going to be mostly squatting -- almost all of those subs are going to be empty.

I got the list from someone who made a script to get the info and posted the results in the github I linked to.

[concordDance]

Ah, so you interpreted my statement about "supermoderators (who are mods in hundreds of subs)" to be saying that they are mods of hundreds of the top hundred subs?

Not sure how relevant that list is tbh...

I'm also perplexed as to what criteria is used for "top sub" given that r/ContagiousLaughter (which has 6.7 million subs) and isn't on the list while r/EldenRing (which only has 1.9m) is.

Anyway, are you satisfied that I was not just parroting talking points and had checked myself?

[giantrobot]

Reddit has a severe astroturfing problem. Any subreddit that gets any attention (or ends up in /r/all) gets hammered with socket puppets and astroturf campaigns. Groups can very cheaply buy upvotes for pretty much anything.

Reddit has shown little appetite for combating this issue because their value is the number of eyeball-seconds they receive every day. They want to report huge eyeball numbers you investors and advertisers.

[JohnFen]

Because the population of Reddit users is not representative of the population in general. This is true for all such places (including HN).