Fidelity Cuts Reddit Valuation By 41% (techcrunch.com) 177
Fidelity, the lead investor in Reddit's most recent funding round in 2021, has slashed the estimated worth of its equity stake in the popular social media platform by 41% since the investment. From a report: Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund's stake in Reddit was valued at $16.6 million as of April 28, according to the fund's monthly disclosure released over the weekend. That's down 41.1% cumulatively since August 2021 when the asset manager spent $28.2 million to acquire the Reddit shares, according to disclosures the firm has made in its annual and semi-annual reports. Reddit was valued at $10 billion when the social media giant attracted funds in August 2021.
Wait, Reddit had value? (Score:2)
49% of $0 is how much again? (Score:2, Troll)
Reddit Mod Depicted (Score:2)
Reddit failure is in moderation (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'd never tried Reddit until recently. The different groups have arbitrarily different moderation and rules (and they expect you to do everything exactly their way, even if not really documented). Some groups are okay, but some feel highly unwelcome to anybody new.
I tried to post a question in one group, followed all the listed rules about flair and details, and it was automod-rejected because my karma wasn't high enough (unsaid what level is "enough"). The "helpful suggestion" was to comment on other posts
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Stackoverflow has a better model. As a new member you can ask questions and veterans are encouraged and allowed to edit/clarify such posts. As you get more established you are given more powers, including down-voting and so on. New members are also not penalized for asking off-topic questions that can get moved or flagged as redundant but established members are penalized for RTFMing responses to these.
It’s possible to simplify this issue further. Authoritarianism is the main problem because when you have a supreme dictator (or small group) that can perm ban on a whim, and the site is about as functional as those countries are. It’s a direct result of ordering a social service under the authoritarian structure that is corporate capitalism which stripped citizens of basic rights. What these sites could use is a little democracy and oversight.
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"I think /. is the only site that show some resilience to that problem due to its unique moderation system."
In the same way a Model T is basically immune to EMP! /snark
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What happens in controversial topics is that you might have a 55/45 split on a particular issue, but if there's 10k users throwing votes around then the 45%ers end up at a score of -500 and the thread looks like a one-sided echo chamber. Eventually the 45%ers stop sharing altogether. They might create their own echo chamber in a different subreddit with their own moderators.
Reddit works fine for discussing gaming, hobbies, and other non-controversial stuff. What kills it is when users abuse the downvote bu
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I agree. There's too much arbitrary censorship and filtering there. They should learn from Slashdot* and just use moderation levels to "soft hide" but not delete, except in extreme cases (like goatse).
If someone wants to rant that transgenders will BBQ in Hell for eternity or Fauci's nano-chips turned their teeth into a Chinese radio station, let them. Showing the existence of such hate and craziness is an education in itself.
* And in turn, Slashdot can borrow their correction features. At least allow a one
Still not as bad as Twitter (Score:2, Flamebait)
And it's not going to get any better. Companies, such as Ben & Jerry's [benjerry.com], are no longer advertising on the site due to the massive amount of bots and hate speech.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Charging for API? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know if the timing is truly related, but it's quite a coincidence that this comes just a couple days after Reddit's recent announcement.
It's like they carefully looked at the overall situation and said "Hey, Elon was able to destroy two thirds of Twitter's value. I don't know if we're quite up to his level of incompetence so we might not be able to achieve a full 70% reduction, but what if we killed off the API? Might that be the magic bullet we're looking for, to drive users away? Even if it only reduces our value by half as much, it's an easy change so it's probably worth trying."
Re:Charging for API? (Score:4, Insightful)
Reddit's turn to monetization will surely make the site worse, but will just as surely increase revenue (at least for some time), which really is the bottom line for the share price.
Dont mess with reddit (Score:3)
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Remember when Slashdot was the hot spot?
*checks uid* oh no, you don't.
What's changed about Slashdot? Not bloody much.
Why is Reddit dominant? Because it sucks least.
Re:Reddit is the new Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is the hotspot!
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Re: Reddit is the new Wikipedia (Score:2)
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Shut up and get off my lawn!
Eh What? Speak up youngin'
Re: Reddit is the new Wikipedia (Score:3)
Lol
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Gen-X upgraded that joke from the boomers: /s
Get off my LAN.
Re:Reddit is the new Wikipedia (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, well, you should see my ICQ number...
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Re:Reddit is the new Wikipedia (Score:5, Funny)
Eh, what's going on? What just woke me from my grandpa nap?
Re:Reddit is the new Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
Anybody with two digits?
Re:Reddit is the new Wikipedia (Score:5, Funny)
There's probably one hanging out in a machine shop somewhere, wishing he still had the other eight.
Oh wait, wrong digits.
Re:Reddit is the new Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot use to be where you would hear intelligent people making cogent arguments, where even if you disagreed vehemently; you'd have a moment of pause.
Slashdot has since lost its sense of humor, and more importantly, I am no longer challenged by the arguments here.
Not quite echo chamber, but it has all been said before.
Re: Reddit is the new Wikipedia (Score:3)
So says the user who couldn't weave a joke into three lines of text.
In Soviet Russia valuation cuts YOU!
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It ain't what it used to be, but it's still far better than most other discussion boards I know. You can actually have a mostly sensible discussion here with someone who doesn't share your opinion without them accusing you of the hate crime of disagreeing with them.
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(for example, abuse of moderation in attempts to cancel people, by the same people who cry about people trying to cancel them)
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Why is Reddit dominant? Because it sucks least.
Reddit is a good place for people not interested in getting their existing opinions questioned. Just find a suitable subreddit and you can continue practicing your contradictory value system without triggering cognitive dissonance.
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Checking a UID means nothing...nothing at all.
Some ppl may have read /. for years but never bothered or wanted to have a /. account until years later.
So checking UID is a red herring argument in this case.
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/. hadn't been around for long when I created my account. People signed up quickly in that first year.
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Reddit is dominant because they used bot accounts to make the site look "alive", and have a TOS that allows and encourages bots to post on the site.
It also doesn't hurt that they allow and encourage porn.
Reddit is dominant because of porn (Score:3)
Why is Reddit dominant? Because it sucks least.
Sorry, Reddit is dominant because when I send my dick pics there, I get compliments from gay guys with low self esteem. When I do it at slashdot, people just tell me I need to see a dermatologist!!!
Re:Reddit is the new Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
What does your user id actually have to do with jack shit? I've been around for ages but have had multiple throwaway accounts
Tell us you're a troll without telling us you're a troll.
If I can tough it out with one account, anyone can.
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There are still userspace mods? I haven't had modpoints in years now.
Not that I'd miss them too much, frankly. Either a topic is interesting to me, then I participate in the discussion (and hence cannot mod) or a topic is not interesting enough for me to read it, then I guess modding there ain't too sensible either.
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Different AC also posting because I don't want to burn previous moderations. I went for a VERY long time without mod points even though I had excellent karma and was drinking from the Firehose and Metamodding. I mostly gave up on those because I hadn't had points in so long.
Now, all of a sudden, I've had a string of mod points as though there's a surplus or something - so I'm back to Metamods and the Firehose as well.
I enjoy moderating and do my best to be honest and impartial. I also specifically look for
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I always browse at -1 modding or not, because at any given moment, the active mods include people with poor judgment and no sense of humor. There's not much point to reading the comments if you're going to trust people who are random mods for three days to decide which ones you're going to see.
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I should start doing that. Lately, when I dip into -1, there's a lot of interesting things. Sure, lots of copy-paste crap and ASCII swastikas, but also some contrarian gems.
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The only poster I ever saw banned from Slashdot was that crazy dude who, apart from his crazy ass spamming, was promoting his host file tool that was some sort of alternative to DNS. I remember just clicking on the link once and seeing a Windows NT/95/98 era picture of a GUI app. I don't know how /. did it, but they must have thrown every IP he was posting from in a tar pit.
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He got around those bans. What they did was disable true AC posting. That drove him off the site. You're talking about APK. He's a legend. Apparently he was well-known on some other forums for doing the same thing.
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And it will be adding even less with AI bots manufacturing fake majority opinions, not just with upvotes, but with thousands upon thousands of posts that look like they belong to regular users.
The old internet is dead.
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The old internet is dead.
No, the very old Internet, where you know people in your community is not dead. It will carry on. The new Internet where everyone is a dog is dead, because now everyone will actually be a dog.
Re:Reddit is the new Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
The old internet is alive, but is now "niche" as a whole lot more new internet grew in around it.
In the late 90s, there were about 150 million people on the internet, representing the most tech enthusiast slice of the population.
Now there are 5.3 billion internet users. So a niche 3% odd corner of the internet today is comparable to the whole of the internet back then.
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That already is the case, only today with hundreds of fake accounts being run by people who get paid doing so, who often don't even know what they copy/paste all over.
All that changes is that there will be a lot of people in low-wage countries looking for new jobs. Other than that, no difference.
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I think social will have to adapt to the commoditization/automation of writing in some major way. Maybe the client will have some much more powerful form of summarization. It would be boring to only see a summarization, but you could be shown the minimum number of posts such that each salient point is made once. So
The old internet is dead? (Score:5, Insightful)
The old internet is dead.
Huh, I guess that phrase is heavily dependant on what one considers the "old internet". I still lament the loss of the way the internet was in the 90's. Sure it was less useful in some ways with no wikipedia and the like yet but it was so much more wide open as opposed to today where it's dominated by a few players. Really this is part of the problem with Reddit, they're so big they don't have to improve on their model because who's competing with them? Nobody in any big and meaningful way.
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Actually, from what I understand, it the same moderator(s) for hundreds of the most popular channels. And they delete any post that reveals this on Reddit. So, it's less of hundreds of little Mussolinis and instead a single Mussolini controlling hundreds of little fiefdoms and they ban anyone that tries to reveal this.
Re:Reddit is the new Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, from what I understand, it the same moderator(s) for hundreds of the most popular channels. And they delete any post that reveals this on Reddit.
If that's the case, I hardly blame the 800-pound behemoth named "Moderation". I blame the community feeding it.
If Reddit moderation was an HOA, homeowners would have chosen to burn the entire subdivision to the ground by now.
Re:Reddit is the new Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
"-1 Disagree" is all they can do here, letting them ban people from the site gives these angry morons way too much power.
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Erm, volunteer mods on Reddit have no capability to ban an account from all Reddit.
Only company paid admins have tools to do that.
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Couldn't agree more. Getting trolled with abusive comments by the moderators with the active collusion of the Admins. Then they dig-up a months old post as a pretext to ban the account.
Re:Reddit is the new Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
It's so weird. Everyone is complaining about this and I've not experienced this once on Reddit. My experience has been mods are basically inactive and do nothing about obvious rule violations (like explicit porn on the StableDiffusion reddit, which nominally bans NSFW). I moderate a sub with 5,6k members and I've only ever banned a single user, because it was an unambiguous obvious spambot. I've only shut down one discussion thread (when it turned into an angry political rant) and deleted one or two posts for porn. Each time I apologized to the users and offered suggestions for the future. People in general seem quite happy with the moderation.
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It's worse than that, for everyone involved.
Reddit channels are "private" run. In other words, someone opened up a channel as his own little fiefdom of the internet. And of course they can do as they please ... erh ... well, no, they cannot.
Reddit has rules. Mostly unwritten ones. Constantly changing unwritten ones. You know how a lot of judges judge porn on the "I know it when I see it" rule? Yeah, like that. If Reddit considers something
going on in your channel "bad", your channel is on the line. They can
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The same is true of any privately operated service, IRC was exactly the same back in the days - each channel was a privately run fiefdom and the server itself would be run by someone else who can decide to seize or close channels at will.
The beauty of the Internet is that you can create your own service and run it however you see fit, you are not beholden to using other people's services.
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Reddit, which has raised over $1 billion to date, counts Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz among its backers.
A billion dollars??? And where exactly has that billion dollars gone??? Seriously, who invests money in fucking Reddit???
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Musk bought Twitter at a $44B valuation, so that's peanuts.
It's insane to think about what could be done with all that money. For example, the entire Starship program, from its inception (back when they were building it out of composites and testing composite tanks), to estimated costs through the end of this year, is $5B.
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The real saving grace of reddit is that you can deeply customize you experience by only subscribing to specific subreddit. If you avoid anything about politics or religion you'll likely have a pretty good experience. Certain gaming related subs can get pretty salty, but others are positively wholesome (Kerbal Space Program comes to mind). You will occasionally come across a sub where the head mod has a strong opinion about something related to their topic, but that's uncommon and there is likely another sub
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This is any self-selected group on the internet. Look in the mirror.
Slashdot would be an echo chamber if it was not also a troll factory.
probably not fascists but could be (Score:5, Interesting)
What you are describing is authoritarianism or in the extreme totalitarianism(but that is probably going too far to describe not letting someone have their say on Reddit).
This can be from the far right(in which case it may be fascism), from the far left(in which case it may be communism) or it may come from some other ideology.
The opposite of an authoritarian is a libertarian or perhaps in the extreme an anarchist.
My point is determining which direction censorship is coming from can be difficult but it is important, you should not always assume it is from the far right.
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Somebody asks you not to shit on the living room carpet when you visit, is that a fascist? Just curious.
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Yeah the valuation of reddit isn't because of the moderators are deleting your racist troll posts, it's because it's not making enough money. Ads don't sell as well and people aren't paying for premium features.
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No, you can never make a good discussion *site*. It's like asking for amphibious elephant - once it's an amphibian it's no longer an elephant.
What we can get to is a good discussion protocol. There are several contenders but none are quite there yet.
Still, with Reddit killing off clients with illegal anti-competitive API pricing, the demand should grow rapidly which ultimately increases focus on alternatives.
Apollo et al should contribute to multi-protocol efforts.
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You'd first of all need better discussion participants. As long as people learn debate from afternoon talkshows, this isn't going to improve.
A debate should not about being right but about learning a different position and confronting your own position with that new position so you can arrive at better arguments for your position that encompass or account for that other position, or abandon your position if you cannot defend it anymore.
But this exactly is anathema for most such "discussion" sites, you MUST
human nature (Score:3)
This sounds awfully much like what I got told in program, learning about codependence and not people pleasing addicts. Their term is "no one likes their inventory being taken", which translates out to not telling people they are wrong. An example is telling an alcoholic they are, in fact, an alcoholic. People need to discover they are wrong at their own moment, usually coupled with the realization that their way of life is not working out and they need to do something different (translates to: hitting r
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Nobody likes being told that they're wrong. This is why bullshit peddlers and con artists work. To con someone, all you have to do is overcome their intelligence. To get someone to understand that they have been conned, you have to overcome their pride.
I really have no idea why it's so difficult for people to accept when they are wrong. I'd rather have been wrong and find out about it than being wrong forever. It only makes the discovery at the end that you are wrong worse. The sunk cost is much higher.
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The problem is that politics has gotten a wind-chill factor. Nobody cares anymore what is, everyone just reacts to how it feels.
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You'd first of all need better discussion participants. As long as people learn debate from afternoon talkshows, this isn't going to improve.
This expectation does not scale up. Instead, the discussion protocol has to encourage better discussion, this in turn leads to average participants improving over time. This is very difficult to design, but we now know a lot of what not to do (e.g., likes encourage attention whoring, post counts encourage spam, up votes encourage edgelording). From what I have seen, only friends/followers based systems encourage better posting (i.e., you need to produce consistent level of output to satisfy your followers).
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No, that just produces "play for your audience" posts with people spouting bullshit that their idiot followers want to hear to validate their own position, independent of validity.
You cannot "enforce" this. All you can do is keep the people out who don't want to participate. Eliminate people who are trying to brigand or who just pile on something, who try to push an agenda, who don't engage in an actual exchange of positions but only drone on their own spiel in the hope that constant repetition wears down t
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Eliminate people who are trying to brigand or who just pile on something, who try to push an agenda, who don't engage in an actual exchange of positions but only drone on their own spiel in the hope that constant repetition wears down the adversary.
Do you always live up to such standard? /. friend. However, even you had bad days and concern-trolled on a numerous occasions. So if you can't live up to this standard (in my opinion), then who can?
This is not intended to be a put-down, I consider you a high-quality poster and for a long time flagged you as a
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I try to. It sure ain't perfect, though.
What matters in my opinion is less the ability than the willingness to actually engage in a sensible debate and trying to accept an opposing point of view as valid enough to be debated instead of just dismissing any diverging opinion outright, no matter the validity of the point.
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How do you "discuss" car repair or 3d printing? There is nothing to be discussed. You can convey and exchange information but facts are not up for debate. The only thing you actually can debate are things that depend on someone's opinion.
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Go look at one of these forums, people do it all the time. There is a reason why people in polite society did not discuss religion or politics, because it is pointless and leads to shit.
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I think it's safe to say that "make people become better" is outside the scope of any rational project. If you have a mind-control beam, go for it! But don't expect anyone else to have one too, so this is all up to you.
The great potential of protocols (e.g. NNTP) rather than leaving it to a single site to fully control the UI, is that different people can filter it different ways. If you want moderation (and someone is willing to spend their time moderating for you), you can have that. If 90% of people want
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What we can get to is a good discussion protocol. There are several contenders but none are quite there yet.
On one extreme you have no moderation, which quickly devolves into spam and garbage everywhere reducing the signal to noise and on the other it’s just an echo chamber where the slightest deviation from groupthink gets a permaban. Neither is a good system, somewhere in between lies a more optimal solution. I actually think the moderation system on slashdot, while far from perfect, is better than most other social media sites. No one gets their posts or accounts deleted (except in rare circumstances),
Re: Surely *someone* can make a better discussion (Score:3)
After decades on the Internet, I actually sincerely believe that /.-style moderation is the best system yet implemented. Randomly-selected temporary moderators eliminate both the "psychotic tinpot tyrant" failure mode of Reddit admins and old-school forums AND the runaway groupthink of democratized upvote/down votes that plague Reddit on a "pre-mod" level. The best comment ever gets five upvotes. The worst gets two downvotes. Seven degrees of separation, enough to incentivize good comments and hide bad comm
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It's a good system, and I give it 6 months to live before someone(s) has completely destroyed with with ai chatbots.
We need a single-sign-in per HUMAN system, and we need it now. Lets get copying South Korea before the signal to noise goes off the chart.
Sure, I’d agree, my comment wasn’t meant to encompass everything. I’d take it a step further and suggest the government (in america anyhow) create social media alternatives. You would be required to prove you’re a resident to get an account and because the government hosts it, constitutional protections we have now around speech and rights would be baked right in. Better still, there would be no need to tune the algorithms to maximize outrage engagement, and the inner workings wou
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Reddit needs heavy handed site wide moderators who IP/cookie ban people if it will survive at this point. They were way too tolerant and now there is a whole industry built around shitting up the site and chatGPT is about to usenet the whole site into the dirt and there are tons of people who have been making their living ofd the site who will make it happen.
It might be amusing to watch this bad news triggering panicked action as they try to save a sinking ship but there is not a single thing they can do.
But the world needs a good discussion site.
I
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I think the days of open discussion among commoners is slowly disappearing, being ground underfoot whether by design or by luck, by the corporatocracy that's taken over the new frontier. The money wants the internet controlled, sanitary, safe for everybody, and that can't happen if you have dissidents and trolls saying things that the big money don't want said. I wouldn't doubt a lot of troll farms are established by some of the bigger businesses involved in the tech world specifically *TO* discredit discus
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Oh one objective of the troll farms is definitely an assault on free speech, to confuse the population, etc. One thing I find interesting about your typical wide-eyed burned out conspiracy nut who "does his own research" is that they often throw up their hands and say there's no way to know and no way to tell right from wrong or even if it's the opposite of left in any given context.
They could in fact find highly probable conspiracies easily, new ones every single day by cross referencing data they find in
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Re:Surely *someone* can make a better discussion s (Score:5, Informative)
So I do not think ( i.e. I am not sure ) that there is any systemic woke or right-wing bias at Reddit.
Like you said, depends on the sub. For example, there are many subs on the Russo-Ukrainian war. Some are rabidly pro-Ukrainian, some are rabidly pro-Russian and some try to be balanced. The balanced ones have basically no users as the issue is basically two toxic for the two sides to have any real discussion. As for the politics subs, those are all biased to the left as any that are biased to the right get banned. That's where the Reddit bias stereotype, not from all of reddit, but from the political subs which are no better than Fark's political section. The rest of reddit usually has no real bias as subs about tools or trucks or whatever rarely get political.
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As for the politics subs, those are all biased to the left as any that are biased to the right get banned.
This sounds just like all those conservative claims that pre-Musk Twitter favored the Left, never mind the fact that all the data showed that conservative posts were more likely to float to the top.
A quick search on Google shows plenty of active conservative spaces on Reddit.
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I havent seen any actual data supporting the fact that conservatives are excessively censored but I've seen plenty showing that they arent.
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