Hacker News Reader

Comment by Levitz | Hacker News Reader

Reddit enforces echo chambers mainly on two levels, the user level and the mod level.

Nobody respects etiquette anymore, and rather than upvoting valuable content they upvote whatever they like. As an extreme example, you can make the best, most honest, rational argumentation of a political issue, if the users don't agree with your stance it's going to be downvotted and hidden. Similarly, they will tolerate content that might be against the rules or the spirit of the subreddit if it's something they agree with.

On top of that, the vast majority of the time moderators enforce echo chambers themselves through bias, with a few of them going as far as banning every single user that posts in communities they disagree with, even if they have never engaged with the community they themselves moderate.

View on HN

The corners of Reddit I inhabit do not suffer from these issues.

I spent a lot of time on usenet in the 1990s discussing politics there (mostly talk.politics.theory which was riven with libertarians). Given that I've lived another 40 years since then, I would simply not bother to do this anymore. Mass discussion of political issues is, in my eyes, mostly a dead end.

By contrast, locale-based subreddits, equipment-based subreddits, how-to-based subreddits remain, in my experience, relative gold mines.

Locale-based subreddits are some of the worst sub-reddits available.

You mean places like /r/korea, /r/australia, /r/melbourne etc. right?

They are the bottom of the barrel and the biggest wasted spaces due to moderator power trips and propaganda. Seriously, the moderators at these places are absolute shut-ins that subscribe to very extreme ideas and ban anything slightly away from what they believe in.

For example, Australia day is a day that celebrates Australia the country. You can be banned on Australian sub-reddits for saying "Happy Australia day" (something most Australians do). This is due to some insane, extremist ideas about Australia day.

Another example, /r/korea will silence anyone who does not agree with the US constant overwriting of Korean culture and Korean social mores. To speak on topics such as whether Korea should legalise drugs (it would be a disaster to do so, but Americans going to America) is a bannable offence.

It seems that a common thread is that Reddit (and Redditlikes) fail when the topic is too big.

I generally use Reddit for small topics. My home town is 80,000 people embedded in a county with a total of 150,000. Our locale-based subreddit works fine (admittedly with a lot of predictable and repeated whining from certain demographics). Our moderators are rarely in sight or even detectable.

Agreed, but locale sub-reddits are usually the fastest sustained growth forums on there and the power of the mods is exceptionally realistic.

Love how he used locale based smaller subreddits as some gotcha when those are some of the most heavily propagandized and censored subreddits. He comes off as one of those "I'm too smart to be propagandized" types, won't believe the narrative has been shaped in his small subreddits even when proof is staring at him right in his face.

I don't know what you read, but it wasn't anything that I wrote.

I've written only about my specific experience. I am not too smart to be propagandized.

Big subreddits clearly have major issues, and I acknowledged that. Presumably some small ones too. The ones I tend to hang out in ... I don't see any of the issues discussed here. There are no overarching mods, there is no groupspeak (to speak of), there is little to no banning/blocking.

So sure, maybe you have experience of smaller locale based subreddit that does. That's fine, no argument from me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com