now they have in sight the IPO so they are doing great cleaning, even of the past, they are rewriting it to be more attractive to sponsors and investors; a monstrous number of posts and subs are deleted every hour every day with the excuse that they apply [new] rules not specified anywhere and even often contrary to the well-established customs
they have gone from total administrative absenteeism to be a Kafkaesque nightmare, primarily for moderators (volunteers)
as a European I did not understand the concept of the word "cancel culture" but now that I'm seeing it with my own eyes I hope reddit fail very soon because now has become a spite to everything that Aaron wanted
so no, they have not become chinese/russian/"destiny manifest" propaganda machines, they are just a horrible horrible horrible place (with 10mb of javascript per connection as cherry on top)
Many people ITT are saying that they're even worse than that right now. At least the Digg big redesign was halfway usable.
On the flip side, there's now a decent chance that the next "big" discussion platform might be a properly federated system, allowing for some longer-term resilience against this sort of deterioration. Much like E-mail/Usenet vs. centralized Compuserve or AOL.
[0] ( https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/reddit-300-million/ ) Indeed it was,once again, Tencent, the company famous for destroying MMOs, infiltrate the western gaming markets and pollute it with micro-transactions, cosmetics, etc.We're on the edge of touching politics and geostrategy here and I don't want certain people to jump telling me i'm a conspiracy nutjob.At this point the record is there, go look at it.
I'd honestly always assumed /r/pyonyang was very clever anti-NK propaganda. The role it occupies as Reddit in-joke aligns with western agendas.
/r/nknews skews closer to actual North Korean propaganda, but I think (or maybe just hope) the general vibe there is the readership understands that ANYTHING you read online about North Korea is potentially propagandized in one way or the other.
It reminds me of an American study someone once commented here on HN where they looked into this and whilst they found Russian "shilling" substantial they there were surprised to find actually more anti china bots (mainly posting in simple chinese) across platforms like twitter than pro china ones. Pro-china propaganda efforts were found and measured but were largely amateurish, quickly banned and ineffective.