I’ll admit, I’ve been using Reddit some recently for certain things. Some experiences got me thinking. Over the years I’ve noticed that any actually honest discussion about certain things seems to either get your posts or comments deleted, or you banned. Things that tend to be counter to the myth of the virtuous 1% or of say the Trump myth, etc. seem to generally almost always end in this result. I’ve seen many examples. You can’t post a vodcast calling out Trump pocketing $230 million of our money from the US Treasury based a bogus lawsuit to r/Politics of all things, and there’s not much media coverage on it. You can’t post anything about issues with the business model of many optometrists in the US to the optometrists subreddit even if someone asks a question about it. You can’t even have a side discussion about economic and social policy when discussing the ACA. This is not recent either. I used to use Reddit a lot before the big exodus, and some of these are from years ago.

It got me thinking. People say that social media is bad because people don’t actually discuss things except maybe in their own silo. It seems to be that even if people wanted to, it is banned on at least Reddit. Is this common on most platforms, or is this just a Reddit thing.

I love lemmy and Beehaw, but there are a few issues here too. In particular, scale, and the other is it tends to be a silo. So it is not actually usable for some things.

Thoughts?

  • Powderhorn@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    Scale is a double-edged sword. When there’s more to moderate, it tends to get worse.

    I’ve not been on any of the tentpole subs in years because it just wasn’t a fun place to hang out. Hell, I was banned from /r/startrek in like Season 3 of Discovery under their rule of “any criticism of writing, pacing, CGI or acting means you’re a racist transphobe bigot and not welcome here.” (well, maybe if they were writing Trek for adults, we’d not have these complaints?)

    So, local sub and hobby/van-related is all I’m there for. That’s still a relatively lively feed, but also manageable. Finding news there is a signal:noise problem unless somewhere specialized, and I swear any given topic that very into politics has like four answers that are just cycled through and argued almost at if there’s a script people will bring out as many times a day as they need to.