7 ms·

Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.

ty6853 1y ago
The most glaring example of this was how reddit did a total 180 before/after the election. Before the election questioning putting a candidate in without a primary was sacrilege. Afterwards it was a popularly supported reason for the loss. It was like watching an inflated balloon of propaganda deflate.
- cmdli 1y ago
  In the few days following the election, there was a flood of conservative posters all over the place. After about a week, they all disappeared and Reddit returned to its usual politics. I think the difference you are seeing is an atypical amount of conservatism, not the other way around. Most people who voted for Harris still do not think that the lack of a primary was the issue.
  - ty6853 1y ago
    Probably not, but as someone who didn't vote for either major party, nor am I a conservative, it was glaringly obvious that ramming through without lube someone who totally dive-bombed the prior primary might have avoided a sanity check to filter primary issues.
    - krapp 1y ago
      The strongest candidate for either party to field would be an incumbent President, especially one who has already beaten the other party's frontrunner. They have the advantage of celebrity, a record and the bully pulpit. The second strongest candidate would logically be an incumbent Vice President. The Democratic Party may have been a shitshow but Harris was the best possible option once Biden was no longer in contention. And the margin between her and Trump turned out to be slim, so a Harris win wouldn't have been impossible.
      - cogman10 1y ago
        Harris was pretty much the only option. The primary was already over and there were real questions on who could spend campaign funds with Biden's step down. That said, I really blame her lose on her and the biden campaign more than anything. They chased hard for disaffected republican voters at the expense of the base. They failed to win those voters and lost some of their base voters.
  - ethagknight 1y ago
    Ive noticed very clearly a material change even on this site, where a comment with a conservative viewpoint would get downvoted into oblivion, and now I seem to see far more diversified opinions. Which is great, I want that.
  - like_any_other 1y ago
    'Disappeared' of course means that they were banned.
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  That's bizarre. Putting her at the top of the ticket was very clearly the better of two bad options (it was too late for the better options, by the time the call was made). There exist people who think Biden had a better shot and replacing him with Harris was a mistake? Did they not look at his approval ratings earlier that year, then look up what that's historically meant for presidential re-elections? Dude was gonna lose, and by the time of the replacement he was likely gonna get crushed. The replacement probably helped down-ballot races, given how badly Bien was likely to perform, so was a good idea even though she lost. Like, yes, it was per se bad but people blaming that for the defeat is... confusing to me.
  - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
    No I don't think people are saying Biden was the better option. At first, as I recall, people were fairly outraged that they were left with two bad options. The general tone very quickly shifted to Kamala's brat summer, Kamala is bae type shit. Even after the fact nobody was questioning Kamala's qualifications. Why, at the 11th hour, were we left with demented grandpa and someone that couldn't win a primary the first time? Whose fault was this? What consequence did they suffer? The dialogue was mostly around trying to figure out who to blame for people not voting for Kamala. Men? Black dudes? Mexicans? Misogynists? Anyone but whoever was actually responsible for the situation? Idk what it's like now though, I haven't used Reddit in months.
  - agensaequivocum 1y ago
    Yes parts of the older working class Midwest would have supported him but didn't support Harris.
- meroes 1y ago
  After the election, the amount of [Removed by Reddit] went from very little, to EVERYWHERE. That's what did it for me, zero Reddit unless I can't find the information anywhere else, and even then it's for viewing a single post and then I'm gone.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- dmonitor 1y ago
  That's just hindsight being 20:20
- Klonoar 1y ago
  This slightly speaks to what subreddits a person reads, because I can tell you I had the exact opposite experience. People seemed still very pissed off about it.
richwater 1y ago
> The worst by far is Reddit The website is truly unusable unless you directly go to small niche subreddits and even then you roll the dice with unpaid mods with a power complex.
- RankingMember 1y ago
  It's great for web searches for answers to very specific questions. "search term" + "reddit" typically gives me a good starting point if not the answer itself to the odd question I have.
- adeeds 1y ago
  The smaller niche subreddits dedicated to a hobby or type of product are actually some of the worst for astroturfing from what I've seen. It only takes a few shills to start building consensus. There's a really interesting pattern where you'll see one person start a thread asking "Hey, any recs for durable travel pants?" Then a second comment chimes in "No specific brands, just make sure you get ones that have qualities x, y, and z". Then a third user says "Oh my Ketl Mountain™ travel pants have those exact traits!" Taken on their own the threads look fairly legit and get a lot of engagement and upvotes from organic users (maybe after some bot upvoted to prime the pump) Then if you dump the comments of those users and track what subreddits they've interacted on, they've had convos following the same patterns about boots in BuyItForLife, Bidets in r/Bidets, GaN USB chargers in USBCHardware, face wash in r/30PlusSkincare, headphones, etc. You can build a whole graph of shilling accounts pushing a handful of products.
  - tengbretson 1y ago
    The worst part is that in a lot of niche communities knowing the "best" brand for a given activity then becomes a shibboleth, so it really only takes a few strategic instances of planting these seed crystals for the group opinion to be completely captured, and reinforced with minimal intervention.
  - thmsths 1y ago
    How is that not treated as fraud? As you pointed out, with a little bit of detective work (which is well beyond the means and motivation of a casual internet user, but well within reach of a consumer protection agency) it's fairly easy to expose these manipulative tactics. Commercial communication ought to be clearly labelled as such.
ethagknight 1y ago
Manufactured consensus is literally the name of the game for the big news networks. News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story. That is Manufactured Consensus. Some countries do a better job making the news seem like a separate arm from the government. The entire point is to direct the populace. That is not the core focus of X, even though it is entirely susceptible to it, and will be encountered on any such platform. yes Reddit is horrible, but I would say Wikipedia is even more dangerous because it presents as basic facts. Reddit at least you know it's some obscene username giving geopolitical strategy rants. Important to note, I first saw this specific chart and claim of Musk's heavy handed influence via X. Also, I see plenty of dissenting opinions (in a general sense on Trump, Tariffs, Musk, DOGE, etc) on X. Alternative views definitely have reach. Also important to note, my posts, where I am very knowledgeable in my domain and will spend an unreasonable amount of time authoring posts to make various points, will garner mere double digit views, so when someone cries about no longer have millions of views for their uneducated hot takes... spare the tears.
- seadan83 1y ago
  Outside of PBS, do you have evidence for this claim: "News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story"? > Alternative views definitely have reach. Yes, but are we in a 1984 situation where that reach is managed behind the scenes. Reach, but perhaps not too much reach. With respect to the chart, how do we know that Twitter users are not largely partitioned? How representative is the fact you saw something compared to other "communities" on X? All the while, even if you saw a 'dissenting' chart, the fact the chart exists is direct evidence to the power of a subtle shadow-ban effect. It's not about tears and whining, it's that a single act by 'powerful' accounts can control who gets visibility, and who does not. The point is that it is not you, the community that controls what is popular, but it is the powerful accounts that do. That is the issue.
  - alabastervlog 1y ago
    > Outside of PBS, do you have evidence for this claim: "News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story"? Yeah, they wouldn't have to rely so much on Madison Avenue if they were just paying the news agencies to report whatever they want. Incidentally, I'm not sure I'd characterize even PBS' government funding as "vast sums", either absolutely or relatively (to the rest of their funding).
guywithahat 1y ago
For all the negative things one can say about X, their fact checking (community notes) has actually gotten pretty good, which is something Reddit has yet to implement. Pew has also been ranking them more politically center than most social media sites, although I suppose that's subjective
- tough 1y ago
  tik tok recently added Footnotes
  - kridsdale3 1y ago
    And Mark pushed it through for FB and IG, at the same time he wound down the Fact Check system (which only hit like 0.0001% of contentious posts). Liberals reacted very negatively to this change.
- jimbob45 1y ago
  Reddit has stickied posts at the top of each thread. Well-moderated subreddits use them to great effect. Badly moderated subreddits just shadowban everything that doesn’t match with the mods’ politics.
- jandrese 1y ago
  I like the community notes as a concept, but they're often a day late and a dollar short. By the time the community note appears the post has been squeezed of all of its juice and was already on the way out. It's better than nothing, but the entire mechanism runs slower than the speed of propaganda.
  - PaulKeeble 1y ago
    They also don't seem to last. I don't know quite how it happens but you see a lot of these community notes disappear 24 hours after they appeared. They act on the tail end of the posts exposure and then are removed for the long term for when the news comes along and uses it as a reference. But all the people who spotted the misinformation see the post and the community note and so everyone walks away "happy".
jampa 1y ago
I've been using Reddit for 12 years. After the API fiasco, the quality dropped a lot. Most popular subreddits are now astroturfed, where every week there is a crusade against something (First it was for banning Twitter, now it is against banning AI Art). Even in regular posts, Reddit has been a hive mind lately. If you scroll through the comments, most of them will have the same opinion over and over, with comments that add nothing to the discussion, like "I agree," getting hundreds of upvotes.
- kridsdale3 1y ago
  I've been there for 17 (!) years, and I could have written pretty much the same message as you since around 2012. Dennis Kucinich was a huge campaign! But I agree, since the API thing, it has sucked HARD.
  - polynomial 1y ago
    Missing the Kucinich connection here, what's the lore?
    - kridsdale3 1y ago
      First major presidential campaign astroturfing on a social media site. If you looked at Reddit (I dont remember what year it was, 2008? 2012?) you'd think 60% of America was dead set on the guy. It was less than 1%.
  - lynndotpy 1y ago
    I agree, the API change was the last nail in the coffin, honestly. Reddit was always bad for several reasons, but it always had some availability of smart people that placed it alongside StackExchange and Hacker News. But 2022 and 2023 really saw a mass exodus of expertise from Reddit (and Twitter, etc.) Lots of smart people left to Mastodons, at least.
    - seanw444 1y ago
      I like how you both responded to GP's roast of "I agree" comments by saying "I agree". Maybe that was intentional. Anyway, I agree. I used Reddit fairly regularly before the API change, though I was already starting to get disenfranchised by the political hive mind by that point. The death of FOSS third party clients that made the platform bearable to use was the straw that broke the camel's back, for me. I've completely left it behind since.
viccis 1y ago
Reddit is SO MUCH WORSE than most people understand. Ignoring for a moment that peoples frontpage Best sort uses engagement metrics rather than upvote/downvotes since 2021, the moderators there have an iron grip over what is allowed. r/redditminusmods used to track this. Every 12 hours they'd take a snapshot of the top 50 posts and then check ones from the previous 12 hour snapshot to see what percentage had been deleted. When it started, it was averaging 20% or so. By the end, it was at 50/50 or 49/50 deleted almost every single 12 hour period. Of course, reddit couldn't allow this level of scrutiny, so they banned that subreddit for unstated reasons, and now the only good google result for it actually leads back here. See for yourself how bad it was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040282 That only goes to two years ago. It feels like it's gotten even worse since then. That's not even going into some subreddits (worldnews, politics, etc.) creating the illusion of consensus by banning anyone with an opinion outside of a narrow range of allowed ones.
- omneity 1y ago
  This would be such an interesting experiment to perform on other social platforms as well alongside some rough semantic analysis to understand which topics are being silenced. I already got quite a lot of the data pipeline setup for this, so if anyone wants to collab hit me up!
  - viccis 1y ago
    >alongside some rough semantic analysis to understand which topics are being silenced You'd have to find somewhere on reddit that wasn't 100% deleted haha
- jandrese 1y ago
  > r/redditminusmods used to track this. Every 12 hours they'd take a snapshot of the top 50 posts and then check ones from the previous 12 hour snapshot to see what percentage had been deleted. When it started, it was averaging 20% or so. By the end, it was at 50/50 or 49/50 deleted almost every single 12 hour period. Is this "mods run amok" or is it the bots gaming the algorithm more effectively and now account for nearly half of all new popular content? In general my advice to anyone considering Reddit is to start with the default list of subreddits that you get when not logged in. Delete all of those from your list, and track down the small subreddits that interest you. The defaults are all owned by professional influence peddlers now, and what little actual content seeps through is not worth the effort to filter out.
raffraffraff 1y ago
Was just gonna say this. Reddit is dreadful. Anything remotely contentious has a single narrative, and if people try to present any alternative perspective, comments get locked. Disagreement = "hate".
austin-cheney 1y ago
I deleted my Reddit account years ago because of echo chamber effect and other people intentionally using that to direct opinion. In all fairness though there is an inherent narcissistic incentive to influence popular opinion irrespective of evidence or consequences. This will continue to be true so long as people rely upon social acceptance as a form of currency.

ty6853 1y ago

The most glaring example of this was how reddit did a total 180 before/after the election. Before the election questioning putting a candidate in without a primary was sacrilege. Afterwards it was a popularly supported reason for the loss. It was like watching an inflated balloon of propaganda deflate.

cmdli 1y ago
In the few days following the election, there was a flood of conservative posters all over the place. After about a week, they all disappeared and Reddit returned to its usual politics. I think the difference you are seeing is an atypical amount of conservatism, not the other way around. Most people who voted for Harris still do not think that the lack of a primary was the issue.
- ty6853 1y ago
  Probably not, but as someone who didn't vote for either major party, nor am I a conservative, it was glaringly obvious that ramming through without lube someone who totally dive-bombed the prior primary might have avoided a sanity check to filter primary issues.
  - krapp 1y ago
    The strongest candidate for either party to field would be an incumbent President, especially one who has already beaten the other party's frontrunner. They have the advantage of celebrity, a record and the bully pulpit. The second strongest candidate would logically be an incumbent Vice President. The Democratic Party may have been a shitshow but Harris was the best possible option once Biden was no longer in contention. And the margin between her and Trump turned out to be slim, so a Harris win wouldn't have been impossible.
    - cogman10 1y ago
      Harris was pretty much the only option. The primary was already over and there were real questions on who could spend campaign funds with Biden's step down. That said, I really blame her lose on her and the biden campaign more than anything. They chased hard for disaffected republican voters at the expense of the base. They failed to win those voters and lost some of their base voters.
- ethagknight 1y ago
  Ive noticed very clearly a material change even on this site, where a comment with a conservative viewpoint would get downvoted into oblivion, and now I seem to see far more diversified opinions. Which is great, I want that.
- like_any_other 1y ago
  'Disappeared' of course means that they were banned.
alabastervlog 1y ago
That's bizarre. Putting her at the top of the ticket was very clearly the better of two bad options (it was too late for the better options, by the time the call was made). There exist people who think Biden had a better shot and replacing him with Harris was a mistake? Did they not look at his approval ratings earlier that year, then look up what that's historically meant for presidential re-elections? Dude was gonna lose, and by the time of the replacement he was likely gonna get crushed. The replacement probably helped down-ballot races, given how badly Bien was likely to perform, so was a good idea even though she lost. Like, yes, it was per se bad but people blaming that for the defeat is... confusing to me.
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
  No I don't think people are saying Biden was the better option. At first, as I recall, people were fairly outraged that they were left with two bad options. The general tone very quickly shifted to Kamala's brat summer, Kamala is bae type shit. Even after the fact nobody was questioning Kamala's qualifications. Why, at the 11th hour, were we left with demented grandpa and someone that couldn't win a primary the first time? Whose fault was this? What consequence did they suffer? The dialogue was mostly around trying to figure out who to blame for people not voting for Kamala. Men? Black dudes? Mexicans? Misogynists? Anyone but whoever was actually responsible for the situation? Idk what it's like now though, I haven't used Reddit in months.
- agensaequivocum 1y ago
  Yes parts of the older working class Midwest would have supported him but didn't support Harris.
meroes 1y ago
After the election, the amount of [Removed by Reddit] went from very little, to EVERYWHERE. That's what did it for me, zero Reddit unless I can't find the information anywhere else, and even then it's for viewing a single post and then I'm gone.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
dmonitor 1y ago
That's just hindsight being 20:20
Klonoar 1y ago
This slightly speaks to what subreddits a person reads, because I can tell you I had the exact opposite experience. People seemed still very pissed off about it.

richwater 1y ago

> The worst by far is Reddit The website is truly unusable unless you directly go to small niche subreddits and even then you roll the dice with unpaid mods with a power complex.

RankingMember 1y ago
It's great for web searches for answers to very specific questions. "search term" + "reddit" typically gives me a good starting point if not the answer itself to the odd question I have.
adeeds 1y ago
The smaller niche subreddits dedicated to a hobby or type of product are actually some of the worst for astroturfing from what I've seen. It only takes a few shills to start building consensus. There's a really interesting pattern where you'll see one person start a thread asking "Hey, any recs for durable travel pants?" Then a second comment chimes in "No specific brands, just make sure you get ones that have qualities x, y, and z". Then a third user says "Oh my Ketl Mountain™ travel pants have those exact traits!" Taken on their own the threads look fairly legit and get a lot of engagement and upvotes from organic users (maybe after some bot upvoted to prime the pump) Then if you dump the comments of those users and track what subreddits they've interacted on, they've had convos following the same patterns about boots in BuyItForLife, Bidets in r/Bidets, GaN USB chargers in USBCHardware, face wash in r/30PlusSkincare, headphones, etc. You can build a whole graph of shilling accounts pushing a handful of products.
- tengbretson 1y ago
  The worst part is that in a lot of niche communities knowing the "best" brand for a given activity then becomes a shibboleth, so it really only takes a few strategic instances of planting these seed crystals for the group opinion to be completely captured, and reinforced with minimal intervention.
- thmsths 1y ago
  How is that not treated as fraud? As you pointed out, with a little bit of detective work (which is well beyond the means and motivation of a casual internet user, but well within reach of a consumer protection agency) it's fairly easy to expose these manipulative tactics. Commercial communication ought to be clearly labelled as such.

ethagknight 1y ago

Manufactured consensus is literally the name of the game for the big news networks. News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story. That is Manufactured Consensus. Some countries do a better job making the news seem like a separate arm from the government. The entire point is to direct the populace. That is not the core focus of X, even though it is entirely susceptible to it, and will be encountered on any such platform. yes Reddit is horrible, but I would say Wikipedia is even more dangerous because it presents as basic facts. Reddit at least you know it's some obscene username giving geopolitical strategy rants. Important to note, I first saw this specific chart and claim of Musk's heavy handed influence via X. Also, I see plenty of dissenting opinions (in a general sense on Trump, Tariffs, Musk, DOGE, etc) on X. Alternative views definitely have reach. Also important to note, my posts, where I am very knowledgeable in my domain and will spend an unreasonable amount of time authoring posts to make various points, will garner mere double digit views, so when someone cries about no longer have millions of views for their uneducated hot takes... spare the tears.

seadan83 1y ago
Outside of PBS, do you have evidence for this claim: "News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story"? > Alternative views definitely have reach. Yes, but are we in a 1984 situation where that reach is managed behind the scenes. Reach, but perhaps not too much reach. With respect to the chart, how do we know that Twitter users are not largely partitioned? How representative is the fact you saw something compared to other "communities" on X? All the while, even if you saw a 'dissenting' chart, the fact the chart exists is direct evidence to the power of a subtle shadow-ban effect. It's not about tears and whining, it's that a single act by 'powerful' accounts can control who gets visibility, and who does not. The point is that it is not you, the community that controls what is popular, but it is the powerful accounts that do. That is the issue.
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  > Outside of PBS, do you have evidence for this claim: "News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story"? Yeah, they wouldn't have to rely so much on Madison Avenue if they were just paying the news agencies to report whatever they want. Incidentally, I'm not sure I'd characterize even PBS' government funding as "vast sums", either absolutely or relatively (to the rest of their funding).

guywithahat 1y ago

For all the negative things one can say about X, their fact checking (community notes) has actually gotten pretty good, which is something Reddit has yet to implement. Pew has also been ranking them more politically center than most social media sites, although I suppose that's subjective

tough 1y ago
tik tok recently added Footnotes
- kridsdale3 1y ago
  And Mark pushed it through for FB and IG, at the same time he wound down the Fact Check system (which only hit like 0.0001% of contentious posts). Liberals reacted very negatively to this change.
jimbob45 1y ago
Reddit has stickied posts at the top of each thread. Well-moderated subreddits use them to great effect. Badly moderated subreddits just shadowban everything that doesn’t match with the mods’ politics.
jandrese 1y ago
I like the community notes as a concept, but they're often a day late and a dollar short. By the time the community note appears the post has been squeezed of all of its juice and was already on the way out. It's better than nothing, but the entire mechanism runs slower than the speed of propaganda.
- PaulKeeble 1y ago
  They also don't seem to last. I don't know quite how it happens but you see a lot of these community notes disappear 24 hours after they appeared. They act on the tail end of the posts exposure and then are removed for the long term for when the news comes along and uses it as a reference. But all the people who spotted the misinformation see the post and the community note and so everyone walks away "happy".

jampa 1y ago

I've been using Reddit for 12 years. After the API fiasco, the quality dropped a lot. Most popular subreddits are now astroturfed, where every week there is a crusade against something (First it was for banning Twitter, now it is against banning AI Art). Even in regular posts, Reddit has been a hive mind lately. If you scroll through the comments, most of them will have the same opinion over and over, with comments that add nothing to the discussion, like "I agree," getting hundreds of upvotes.

kridsdale3 1y ago
I've been there for 17 (!) years, and I could have written pretty much the same message as you since around 2012. Dennis Kucinich was a huge campaign! But I agree, since the API thing, it has sucked HARD.
- polynomial 1y ago
  Missing the Kucinich connection here, what's the lore?
  - kridsdale3 1y ago
    First major presidential campaign astroturfing on a social media site. If you looked at Reddit (I dont remember what year it was, 2008? 2012?) you'd think 60% of America was dead set on the guy. It was less than 1%.
- lynndotpy 1y ago
  I agree, the API change was the last nail in the coffin, honestly. Reddit was always bad for several reasons, but it always had some availability of smart people that placed it alongside StackExchange and Hacker News. But 2022 and 2023 really saw a mass exodus of expertise from Reddit (and Twitter, etc.) Lots of smart people left to Mastodons, at least.
  - seanw444 1y ago
    I like how you both responded to GP's roast of "I agree" comments by saying "I agree". Maybe that was intentional. Anyway, I agree. I used Reddit fairly regularly before the API change, though I was already starting to get disenfranchised by the political hive mind by that point. The death of FOSS third party clients that made the platform bearable to use was the straw that broke the camel's back, for me. I've completely left it behind since.

viccis 1y ago

Reddit is SO MUCH WORSE than most people understand. Ignoring for a moment that peoples frontpage Best sort uses engagement metrics rather than upvote/downvotes since 2021, the moderators there have an iron grip over what is allowed. r/redditminusmods used to track this. Every 12 hours they'd take a snapshot of the top 50 posts and then check ones from the previous 12 hour snapshot to see what percentage had been deleted. When it started, it was averaging 20% or so. By the end, it was at 50/50 or 49/50 deleted almost every single 12 hour period. Of course, reddit couldn't allow this level of scrutiny, so they banned that subreddit for unstated reasons, and now the only good google result for it actually leads back here. See for yourself how bad it was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040282 That only goes to two years ago. It feels like it's gotten even worse since then. That's not even going into some subreddits (worldnews, politics, etc.) creating the illusion of consensus by banning anyone with an opinion outside of a narrow range of allowed ones.

omneity 1y ago
This would be such an interesting experiment to perform on other social platforms as well alongside some rough semantic analysis to understand which topics are being silenced. I already got quite a lot of the data pipeline setup for this, so if anyone wants to collab hit me up!
- viccis 1y ago
  >alongside some rough semantic analysis to understand which topics are being silenced You'd have to find somewhere on reddit that wasn't 100% deleted haha
jandrese 1y ago
> r/redditminusmods used to track this. Every 12 hours they'd take a snapshot of the top 50 posts and then check ones from the previous 12 hour snapshot to see what percentage had been deleted. When it started, it was averaging 20% or so. By the end, it was at 50/50 or 49/50 deleted almost every single 12 hour period. Is this "mods run amok" or is it the bots gaming the algorithm more effectively and now account for nearly half of all new popular content? In general my advice to anyone considering Reddit is to start with the default list of subreddits that you get when not logged in. Delete all of those from your list, and track down the small subreddits that interest you. The defaults are all owned by professional influence peddlers now, and what little actual content seeps through is not worth the effort to filter out.

raffraffraff 1y ago

Was just gonna say this. Reddit is dreadful. Anything remotely contentious has a single narrative, and if people try to present any alternative perspective, comments get locked. Disagreement = "hate".

austin-cheney 1y ago

I deleted my Reddit account years ago because of echo chamber effect and other people intentionally using that to direct opinion. In all fairness though there is an inherent narcissistic incentive to influence popular opinion irrespective of evidence or consequences. This will continue to be true so long as people rely upon social acceptance as a form of currency.