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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

It's not just 'companies', it's people. Reddit has become beyond frustrating because of how siloed subreddits have become. I have to visit a mix of politics, news, and yes, the_donald, to even begin to get a breadth of happenings and news. This was never more apparent than this whole Smollet case. After it was found that it was a hoax, not only were all threads pointing out it was a hoax removed, but also all previous accusatory threads that had been allowed to stay prior. Conversely, you'll never see any negative news about the Trump administration on the_donald.

I'm a person who likes to read, and rarely comment. This experience is completely broken for me, as there no longer seems to exist 'neutral' places for discussion. Is it that people value 'samethink' above all else? People getting more easily offended? I honestly have no idea, but it wasn't always this way...

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I had the opposite experience with the Smollet case. I actually never heard or cared about Smollet till it started popping up as the #1 and #2 stories in r/news. As someone who is on the left of political spectrum and politically fairly active, I don't of know anyone who really thought Smollet was some representation of the political left. The fact that he was actively "brigaded" and "upvoted" in r/news and r/conservative and r/t_d tells you a lot about political discourse and "comments" section. It has been taken over for trolls and professional trolls at that to score cheap online points, but also to game search engine rankings. There is no space for neutral conversation anymore.

A whole bunch of prominent Democrats - I think possibly even the entire slate of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, but certainly close to it - publicly and loudly stood behind Smollet's claim of being attacked. Most of the news covered it too. Even here in the UK, both his original claims and him calling accusations he faked the attack racist and homophobic made the front page of the BBC and probably a bunch of other sites. If you only saw it on r/news that probably says more about where you get your news from than anything.

Eh, I have literally no stake in the US political landscape/culture wars (non-American, largely apolitical, don't actively seek out US current affairs).

I was made aware of the Smollet case via reddit frontpage. I recall the majority of comments from the get-go were very skeptical of the story.

Make of that what you will.

Downvotes? Seriously? This was possibly the most benign comment anyone could ever make in regards to the subject matter.

There are neutral spaces (on Reddit) but they are not popular because they don't make people feel good by confirming their biases. Most prefer attacking feckless strawmen over having substantive arguments.

There is no problem with the_donald or politics or whatever other group think subs, as you mentioned yourself you can just read all of them to get the whole picture. The problem starts when reddit itself think they should censor some stuff because they don't like it, then you don't even have this option to hear all the opinions and make up your mind. It is even worst when all the big tech companies subscribe to the same type of politics and point of view.

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