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Comment by camus2 | Hacker News Reader

> Yeah, I don't experience a lot of obvious shilling on Reddit

When the same talking points are repeated over and over again on large subs and dissident opinions are automatically downvoted to hell, it's obvious there are organized efforts to push specific narratives or point of view. r/politics, r/news, r/worldnews are full of these, with sometimes the moderation itself in bed with the political astro-turfers, banning users that don't fall in line.

Regarding the article, the news that was astro-turfed wasn't clashing with r/politics narrative. And since journalists and bloggers themselves now source their news and stories from Reddit, it helped spread that news all over the internet.

Reddit is an extremely efficient viral marketing tool, both brands and politicians understand it now. When journalists start quoting reddit in their news that then get posed on reddit as news, we've come full circle.

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One of the most blatant examples is /r/bitcoin. Some context:

https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...

A sibling to this comment mentions/r/Bitcoin, which I agree has biased moderators. But I don't see such blatant bias in the large political subreddits.

What views can't be expressed on /r/politics?

Anything remotely right leaning. /r/politics could more accurately be named /r/The_Left. Often the top comments of any thread are just whining about Trump in the same way that /r/T_D is just whining about MSM and Hillary. While there boy still posts that they won't tolerate useless comments I've seen nothing but useless comments there these days.

If you just look at the front page of each sub as a link aggregate, it's a remarkably stark difference in absurdity between the two though.

The users control both comments and links. Yours is not a fair comparison.

> The users control both comments and links.

That's just wrong. The moderators on both subs are actively curating the front stories and removing 'duplicates'. I don't care about TheDonald as they are not a pre-set sub nor proclaiming neutrality. But you can't be seriously claiming that the 16 out of 25 front page stories of some variation of 'DT colluded with Russia' on /r/politics are unique newsworthy stories.

> That's just wrong. The moderators on both subs are actively curating the front stories and removing 'duplicates'. I don't care about TheDonald as they are not a pre-set sub nor proclaiming neutrality.

I'm unsure what neutrality means at this point. I don't expect anyone to be "neutral", but I make a distinction between debatable news and troll memes.

> But you can't be seriously claiming that the 16 out of 25 front page stories of some variation of 'DT colluded with Russia' on /r/politics are unique newsworthy stories.

No, I'm certainly not, and while moderators remove some obvious duplicates (query string differences etc), the same story from different outlets are still left and often upvoted. I don't think that's a grand conspiracy but merely user habit.

Whatever you think of this is up to you, and I think there are a lot of issues worth discussing that gets drowned out by the clown in chief-stories, but I've seen no evidence of this being anything other than crowd selection.

And it's news (insignificant, duplicate or big) on one sub, and 80% memes on the other. That's the contrast I was commenting on.

I don't even care about their political leanings if they were just a tiny bit more diverse. But when the whole first page is filled with exactly the same story just posted from different newsoutlets, you know that the moderators are activley promoting an agenda and don't care about news.

The main thing about /r/politics that I have only recently noticed (since the 2016 election) is that they have become extremely orthodox democrats. Before that election, a lot of the time they were a mixture of libertarian and farther left leaning (but certainly not orthodox) people. Now they focus all of their time on Trump bashing, which isn't bad per se, but is extremely annoying since it's pretty much the only thing the sub is about these days. Thing is, there are a lot more political things going on than Trump, and outrage culture has resulted in at least two WaPo posts over each and every one of his tweets.

And then in the comments, you'll be crucified by the posters for anything other than the pro corporatist democratic views that the posters espouse. Move on from bashing Trump to say, bashing Hillary because she was an utterly unlikable candidate and arguably the biggest political failure in modern history, and you draw the ire of dozens of toe-the-liners who see the world just as black-and-white as the idiot /r/the_donald posters.

There's also an excessive amount of hyperbole that just gets annoying as time goes on. Clearly Trump will be around for quite a while longer (until and unless Mueller finds a smoking gun or in the event of a massive Democrat success in 2018), but reading /r/politics you would think he'll be impeached by next week. Adding fuel to the flames are websites like WaPo and the Independent who publish articles with these terribly misleading and hyperbolic headlines that make it seem like Trump is going down, and you get a massive echo chamber fueled and funded by shitty media websites.

I would say world_news isn't as bad as politics. Specifically, world_news seems to be full of more the_donald people jumping on any and every thread.

They are still there in politics as well, but they are usually way at the bottom of the thread. It is sad though, even if you assume that it isn't as "controlled" as it is -- pretty much the front page is all anti donald trump / republican stuff these days. While some of that is fair and is news, what is worse is that at least in the old days, there would be nice constructive discussion/counter points, usually as the top voted post in the comments. Now its mostly just circle jerking there.

Yeah, I think to summarize what I most dislike about what reddit has become is that it's too partisan. Places like /r/conspiracy have become very pro-republican/trump, ridiculous considering the purpose of the sub, and there are also now like 25 different anti-trump subreddits that constantly get to the front page (and I believe many of these, especially the ones that spring up seemingly out of nowhere to front-page status in weeks, are the toys of astroturfing marketing campaigns).

It's a pretty toxic environment and by constantly focusing on Trump they're crowding out a lot of content that could actually make users happier.

Just the nature of a growing community. Generally the larger the population gets, the lower the average discourse gets, where reddit in many places is no better then a Facebook comment thread. It is a bi-partisan issue for sure.

> it's obvious there are organized efforts to push specific narratives or point of view.

It's not obvious to me, at least, that these are organized.

I always get a little chuckle out of the AutoModerator on r/politics

"As a reminder, this subreddit is for civil discussion"

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