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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.
The front page of Reddit is not representative of any group within the United States, even the extremely online.
It's evaporative distillation at its finest. Reddit leaned left from the beginning. Conservative views were downvoted. The conservatives left. Then centrist views got downvoted. The centrists left. Etc...
This is not just "young people". It's people who are at the tail end of a long selection process. It's actually similar to how the views of academics are so insane.
The entire internet leaned left from the beginning.
I think you’re right that in the decades hence, self-selection has narrowed and polarized it much further .
Erm, pardon me for quibbling, but my sense of the early internet was that it more consistently leaned libertarian, which is to say, pro-freedom, rather than straight left. The rise of social media in general and Facebook in particular is what made the move leftwards inevitable in my view, compounded by smartphones and the accompanying push notifications designed by the literal Devil himself.
It was libertarian and anti-authoritarian back when being pro-liberty was pro-left and back when the right had some semblance of power. Back then naughty song lyrics and books with gay themes were sticking it to the man, now the man twerks to it in the corporate gay pride parade.
You can pardon me then for being cynical, but it seems pretty clear that it wasn't the kind of principled David Frenchism. Or at least that the real internet libertarians were a small fraction of the populace.
that.dune.quote.jpg
The Ron Paul fanaticism on the internet of 15 years ago was real, not calculated.
Sure was. Just wasn't the majority or even plurality.
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