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> What started as a bastion of independent thought, Reddit has slowly devolved into a den of groupthink, censorship, and corporate greed. This is revisionist r
by root_axis 4y ago
> What started as a bastion of independent thought, Reddit has slowly devolved into a den of groupthink, censorship, and corporate greed.
This is revisionist romanticism. Reddit is just a collection of forums like the many hundreds of thousands that came before it, and continue to exist alongside it. Reddit is also so incredibly massive that making sweeping statements about its quality or composition is meaningless, what one consumes on reddit is really more a reflection of the individual rather than the site itself.
- tux2bsd 4y ago
- thinkingemote 4y agoI agree with you kind of. But it was a loose collection of forums initially and still is if you look at it that way. The Reddit admins forced the idea of communities as a reason to start banning. You can see this over time. Subreddits were not called "communities" until the admins started banning subs. It's classic group dynamics. You can't ban a group that isn't a group. So the site grouped loose collections of people into what they called communities. And it became self fulfilling as groups define themselves by what they are not as well as what they are.
- richbell 4y ago> The Reddit admins forced the idea of communities as a reason to start banning. The admins also started actively policing subreddits, and shuffling uncooperative mod teams. Perhaps Reddit was never a bastion of 'independent thought', but in the beginning (after subreddits came into being) there was an understanding that communities were independent. But eventually they started getting bad press (e.g. /r/jailbait) and the 'jannies' started refusing to work for free (e.g. blackouts), so they decided to quash anyone causing them grief.