Thread

1. nomilk · 1790655652 · focus · HN ↗

   The biggest problem I have with reddit is mods can slowly but systematically ban users who express unfavourable opinions, and over time, anyone casually browsing could mistakenly believe those views are unpopular, whereas in reality everyone with that view (everyone who spoke it, anyway) was banned.

   To give a simple example, one video game franchise subreddit bans any negative discussion on the most recent title. Over 5-10 years, this shielded them from negative feedback. But the franchise has tanked because core users weren't listened to, and they ended up making something nobody wanted.

   1. dminik · 1790679198 · focus · HN ↗

      Yeah. I don't want to be conspiratorial, but there is some heavy censorship happening in certain (or maybe most) subreddits.

      A good example is worldnews. For a long time I thought it was a pretty good source of, well, news. But at some point I started noticing that certain topics (cough Negativity about Israel cough) which got a decent amount of discussion were deleted as duplicates of posts that came in later and had 0 comments and could not be seen on hot/top/whatever.

      Back to your topic, I think this is in large part due to the death of multiple forums and personal websites and the aggregation of everyone to like 4 platforms.

      In the past, if you were banned or didn't like one forum, you could find another. Or maybe just post your thoughts on your own website/blog. But now nobody will see it unless it's on reddit, discord or YouTube.

      I don't think we can get that back, but maybe a bluesky(-ish) forum/reddit alternative where you can chose who you interact/see posts and comments from would work well. It would take another collosal fuckup to get people to move and even then... Lemmy was alive during the API/third party apps thing and nobody really moved.

      1. someonebaggy · 1790682768 · focus · HN ↗

         worldnews is a really egregious example of what you're talking about. If you say one negative thing about Israel it gets deleted, you get banned from the sub and sometimes even banned from Reddit. Of course other subs do this on other topics too.
      2. odiroot · 1790687043 · focus · HN ↗

         And worldnews is still quite tame with it. Other news subs are much harsher in their moderation, especially the EU local ones.

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