About a year ago, we had a discussion about reddit at work and tried this experiment. Three of us went to a city subreddit, /r/mycity, and looked for controvers

About a year ago, we had a discussion about reddit at work and tried this experiment. Three of us went to a city subreddit, /r/mycity, and looked for controversial posts about things like local politics, things involving police, and so on. One of us would make posts agreeing with others in the thread. Another would ask questions, feigning lack of knowledge but generally disagreeing, while a third intentionally took an opposing view. In all cases, we were careful not to attack anyone or use curse words or other disparaging remarks. Interestingly, the first city we tried didn't upvote or downvote very often but the posts that disagreed with the view of the thread quickly, within a day or two, found their posts banned or shadow banned--that is, their posts appeared to us as going through but, in reality, did not appear to anyone else. Some of the city subs, where the person slightly disagreed with the thread but mostly said they didn't understand the points, always found their posts either listed at the bottom, were downvoted, or got themselves banned but it took longer--perhaps a week or two. No person agreeing with the thread was downvoted or ever banned which is to be expected. However, the whole point of our doing this was to prove our expectation that reddit is a biased culture that only lets those in who will agree with the crowd and won't let opposing views in. At least in the /r/city threads we chose but we noticed the same behavior in many technical subs, too. I wish we kept the data but none of us visit or use reddit in any way, for these reasons and a few others, and we only scribbled the notes on paper somewhere.