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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?
I thought about linking this Richard Hanania article in the above comment. Basically, it's because liberals, and progressive activists in particular, care more about politics than conservatives do. Therefore, they will disproportionately be attracted to positions where they can wield power. Curtis Yarvin would likely make the argument that causality runs the other way, and desire for power attracts one to progressive politics. This doesn't matter for my specific example, since as long as there is a correlation between progressive politics and desire for arbitrary power, internet moderators will tend to skew progressive.
Hanania's article fails at some level because his examples involve Trump. Trump was uniquely bad and galvanized many people (including some who weren't even left-wing), and that's not going away even after he ultimately fades from the spotlight. He's hardly the standard for making this kind of judgment, unless he sets the norm for every conservative nominee going forward. I'd like to see the same analysis performed on sentiment of, say, Obama and Romney.
Even if I grant this to be true, it's step 2. Step 1 is demonstrating that moderators are largely progressive activists.
I think we should stop pretending that we here on this page agree on Trump being uniquely bad.
I hope we can agree that Trump is uniquely bad from a mainstream centre-left perspective, given the behaviour of the mainstream centre left. Scott Alexander defended Trump against the charge of being uniquely racist here, but not against the charge of being unusually bad, even by Republican standards, for other reasons. Trump is uniquely bad (from a mainstream centre-left perspective) or good (from a burn-it-down right-populist perspective) because of his willingness to violate norms, and because he doesn't believe in American democracy as it currently exists.
I poasted that the scary thing about Trump is that he treats elections as kayfabe - and nobody disagreed, because post-Jan 6th it is obvious.
No. The mainstream center-left will find "uniquely bad" whoever is currently the standard-bearer of the other side. At one time it was Bush -- both of them, though especially W. Before that Reagan. At one time it was Mitt Romney for crying out loud. And somewhere in there was Newt Gingrich. Right now it looks like Ron DeSantis is being set up for that position, though Trump is still around making that harder.
My memory of the Democrats' response to Bush II was that it was a lot more co-operative than to Trump.
The Bush tax cuts got 13 D votes in the house and 12 in the Senate, the Trump tax cuts passed on a pure party line vote.
That centrist Congressional Democrats were willing to carry water for the Bush administration on Iraq (as was the Deep State, which I think we both agree counts as part of the mainstream centre-left) has been the cause of much Democratic infighting after the Iraq war turned out to be a mistake - Trump didn't try to fight a war of choice, but the idea that he would get the level of bipartisan support that Bush did over Iraq seems far-fetched.
Pelosi didn't impeach Bush after the Dems took control of Congress in 2006 - despite widespread calls for impeachment from the left, the media, and from a noisy minority of former conservatives driven into shrill unholy madness by the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, or simple disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration. Pelosi impeached Trump the first time on semi-bullshit charges - the left wanted her to pull the trigger as soon as the Dems took the House in 2018, but she held off until the Deep State were annoyed as well.
She then impeached him again - although I am comfortable he deserved it the second time, it was in practice pure partisan theatre given there wasn't time for the process to complete before his term expired.
Congressional Democrats shut the government down twice in order to force concessions from Trump on immigration policy. There were no shutdowns under Bush II.
IF you go back to Reagan, he got broad bipartisan support for his tax reforms, and he wasn't impeached for Iran-Contra even though he should have been. There were a lot of budget battles between Reagan and Congressional Democrats with multiple government shutdowns, but I think they were all about the budget, rather than the Congressional Democrats shutting down the government to extract concessions over something else.
You are conflating the overheated partisan hatred that the Very Online progressive left has had for every Republican president since Reagan with the overheated partisan hatred that the mainstream centre-left (Dem Congressional leadership, the NYT, the Deep State etc.) has for Trump.
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