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Reddit matters, unfortunately.
When reddit came out in 2006, I was instantly enthralled. I loved the branched conversation style over single-threaded forums like PHPBB that dominated the web before. It was a new architecture for conversation, a better one. Plus, it had a smart, techie community that was fun to discuss things with.
Fast forward to today, and the world loves reddit. It's ranked as a top-10 website by traffic. Reddit is the default place to find an intelligent discussion on any niche topic. Whenever I have a medical issue, or I want to explore a new piece of technology, I go to Reddit. When I want product reviews for a pair of leather boots, I go to Google search and type "Best men's leather boots reddit". The cutting edge LLMs are being trained on reddit content. It's an important piece of the foundation of web content.
Which is unfortunate that it's moderated so poorly, and that policy comes from the top down. You know what I mean. themotte.org is one of several diaspora communities that fled reddit due to its heavy-handed, leftist moderation.
It's incredibly frustrating to use. My politics are somewhat esoteric but definitely of the right. On an occasion I'm baited into a conversation with political valence and I'll state a right-wing argument, and more often than not my account gets banned. On X, I saw screenshots of an /r/askReddit post "Republicans, why are you voting for Kamala this time?" and it had had thousands of upvotes and comments. The equivalent self-post "Democrats, why are you voting for Trump?" was banned with zero comments. If a thread is allowed to live for a few hours that draws popular heterodox views, it results in the inevitable thread lock and thousands of deleted comments to prevent "hate"
From my memory, the leftward drift of reddit seems to have occurred over the last 10 years. It hit an inflection point with the election of Trump and the ban of /r/TheDonald. It accelerated again since 2020 with BLM. That was the year that the TERFs were banned en masse (a community that mattered to me, as it helped me get over my own trans-dreaming and be happy with my gender).
Reddit's politics reflect the fact that the company is based in San Francisco. But it is left of center for San Francisco, which puts it far, far to the left of the nation.
And it's a shame! I'd love a higher-quality general purpose discussion forum. The world needs it. When Elon liberated X, that provided an important venue for free speech. But X optimizes for a high-addiction feed of quick information bites. It doesn't allow for as in-depth discussion and community building.
What would such a forum look like? I have some ideas:
It would maintain the threaded format beloved by so many
It would be seeded by a high quality community, such as that found here or on LessWrong
It would have some sort of governance body that would maintain high quality of moderation for the main subs
The easiest, but not cheapest way to liberate Reddit would be to find a billionaire backer to buy it. It's a public company and its marketcap is a hair under $10 billion. The other alternative would be to try to get an alternative off the ground, perhaps building on active and healthy diaspora communities. It would be possible, for example, to give new users credit for karma they have earned on themotte or LessWrong. Selfishly, I would love a forum where I could ask questions to the high-functioning on-the-spectrum folks that populate these places. Reddit without the bottom half of its IQ spectrum would be a superior place for discussing nootropics, health, AI, and similar topics.
I'm a computer programmer. I care about providing community discussion forums. I've spent a good chunk of my life on them. I'm kinda bored at my day job and looking for a new adventure. What do you think?
Why is "the nation" relevant? It's not too far to the left of the subset of Americans that are very online.
Another way to think about is that if you look at the crosstabs the last election by age and compare with the average demographic of Reddit's readership you'll get the idea.
Not just "the nation", the world. It's a global website.
After they've banned everyone that disagreed, they've found that everyone agrees... Not particularly surprising.
What makes you think you've got the direction of the causality right here?
Well, I was confining myself to the anglosphere. I have no idea what the Chinese zoomers are doing on their social media (which isn't reddit anyway).
If you think there's a causal relationship here, millennials born in 85 were already 20 by the time Reddit launched. It seems much more parsimonious to explain their moderation policies as approximately reflecting the population-as-weighted-by-online-time than to claim that the moderation policies moved millions of people 1SD politically.
EDIT: I should add, the population-as-weighted-by-online time is not a uniform sample. The more well-adjusted aren't spending hours and hours online, especially not volunteering to moderate. It's a bit like Trace's wikipedia bit -- the platform belongs in a large sense to those willing to put in the work/effort.
The world consists of a bit more than the anglosphere and China, and even the anglosphere is not a monolithic blob.
I don't see how. Reddit literally bullied one of it's CEOs away from their position, for being too censorious, and even though the CEO left, the vibe shift she represented was still being cranked up. I've seen no evidence that their decisions were driven by popular demand of their userbase, and like I said the causality is just as likely (or more!) to be going in the opposite direction.
Putting in the work/effort to become moderators and ban all opposition is not the same thing as being representative of population-as-weighted-by-online time.
I think you’re mixing up two things. I agree there wasn’t a lot of pro-moderation demand or sentiment. But most of the users were still left of the median Democrat and were mostly ok that the weird maga crowd got booted.
I never said anything about a pro-moderation sentiment, and I don't think I'm mixing up anything, one is just the explanatory mechanism for the other. The majority of Twitter was also left of the median Democrats, and were mostly ok with the weird maga crowd getting booted, until Musk unbooted them. The booting is how they become a majority.
The left-of-median-democrats were already a majority on Reddit/Twitter before the bookings.
That's kind of why the user base as a whole shrugged -- even though they wouldn't have agitated for ejecting anyone, they weren't going to get riled up over this particular instance.
That doesn't make them left-of-median-democrats, that makes them apathetic, and yeah, this is exactly how it works, and it only proves my point.
And the point about Twitter is that isn't it funny how it doesn't feel so majority-left, the moment people got unbooted.
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