Hacker News Reader

Comment by qiskit | Hacker News Reader

Reddit didn't turn into an echo chamber due to time and algorithm. It became one as a result of company policy and censorship. For much of reddit's history, every form of viewpoint, opinions and speech were allowed. Everything changed once Trump got elected and the company reached for the ban hammer and decided to take sides on all cultural/political issues. Now, it's a ridiculously botted political propaganda outlet for the establishment. The 2012 reddit is unrecognizable compared to 2022 reddit.

View on HN

You’re acting as if the_donald and their sister subs didn’t make their own bed with gaming the system and brigading every other day. They blatantly and regularly violated Reddit’s ToS, but Reddit lingered on that decision to ban for years over some vague notion of being a “free speech site,” which they never really were and don’t have to be, as well as to pretend they were “even-handed,” which they don’t have to be when your community exists to disrupt any and all perceived “enemies.”

One group were gaming the upvote system to ruin r/all. I remember it at the time, it was awful for the majority of people there. The ban made things much better.

You seem to be mistaking correlation with causation.

More likely is that the uptick in bot/propaganda activity coincided with Trump becoming president, requiring an uptick in moderation.

Have you visited reddit lately? It's all bot/propaganda activity. It's just one sided today. At least in the past, you had bot propaganda from all sides which prevented it from being an echo chamber.

>At least in the past, you had bot propaganda from all sides which prevented it for being an echo chamber

Source?

There used to be a popular trump subreddit. That should be source enough, no? You literally had bernie bros bots, obama bots, trump bots, etc. Then the media pressured reddit and forced it to choose sides and start banning. Now it's a exclusively one sided propaganda platform.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com