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The problem with Reddit's business model is that it relies on massive amounts of volunteer labor (subreddit moderators). Moderators are unpaid, so these positions will be filled by people who value power and status over money, i.e. progressive activists.
In theory, this is solved by people who don't like the mods of one subreddit making their own subreddit with their own mods. In practice, mods of the largest subreddits, being progressive activists, will demand that site ownership take down dissenting subreddits. Site ownership can't afford to piss off the moderator class too much, because then they lose their massive source of unpaid labor, as very nearly happened before. This inevitably degenerates into the situation we find ourselves in now, where major subreddits simply lock any potentially controversial thread and ban anyone who complains about it.
How exactly do you know their political alignment and level of engagement?
It's an old canard, but I always thought it had unimpeachable logic:
The more time a person can spend powermodding on Reddit, the less likely it is that they have a job, and the less likely it is that they have a job, the more likely they are to be poor, and the more likely they are to be poor, the more likely they are to be leftist.
TL;DR: conservatives have less time for Internet drama because conservatives go to work for 8 hours a day.
It's not a PROOF of their ideological bent, but it's a constraining of their probability density in a leftwards direction.
t. Monarchist neoreactionary phoneposting from his directly taxpayer funded job
You're ignoring a big factor - age. Young people have time to moderate, older people don't. Young people tend to lean more progressive than older people, so age replicates the claimed political dominance of the left without relying on claims of progressive activists going after moderation positions on Reddit.
Well this is somewhat contained within the Venn diagram of joblessness. Why do the yoof have more time? Because they don't have careers.
Right, but the canard loses some of its power then. It's a put-down against leftists by saying they're jobless leeches with no constructive addition to society. If we say instead that "youth don't add anything to society while old people do", the obvious answer to anyone should be that it's absolutely not the norm for kids to be making careers at their age.
The canard here is being used to support the proposition that "mods are leftists", not that "mods are losers". If your counterargument is "Ah-ha, but mods might have a lot of time on their hands because they're young, not because they're jobless adults", then this is no counterargument at all, because young people are also reliably leftist; probably MORE reliably leftist than the unemployed.
It's typically not considered a neutral statement to say that some group of people don't have time for drama because they go work.
The point I'm getting at, anyways, is that there's a plausible alternative to the "conservatives work, progressives are welfare leeches", and that's the age of those involved. "Older people work, and younger people don't, so the latter do volunteer work and get involved in drama" punches far less hard.
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