Comment by blindriver
6 days ago
This isn't true. It leans extremely heavily left-wing so you won't get an accurate crowd-source opinion that disagrees with left-wing politics. There are pockets of conservative views but it's generally heavily left wing and you will get banned from many subreddits if you espouse any views to the opposite.
EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.
There are plenty of non political conversations on Reddit, it's a really big site.
Why on earth would you crowd-source your political views?
If by leftwing you mean neoliberal, maybe. The bans ive gotten over the years for posting leftwing views and ideals tells me it isn't leftwing at all.
Reddit is not left-wing. Could you define left-wing?
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You're proving my point. At least in the US half of the country is right wing. If you want an accurate crowd-sourced opinion you need to take that into account, regardless of your own beliefs.
90% of people might believe 2+2=5, but that doesn’t make them correct. Facts aren’t a majority rules scenario.
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It's possible for the majority opinion to be wrong and contradict hard facts that are grounded in reality. For a couple thousand of years the opinion was that the universe was composed of 4-5 elements (earth, water, air, fire, and maybe ether).
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That is not true. Labels aren’t for normies. There’s a reason a lot of center-right people love Bernie. And it’s not because of your incorrect use of political labels.
If I need an accurate crowd sourced opinion about the Dyson v14 Portable Vacuum I need to take politics into account?
Reddit is far from left wing, liberal maybe, but not left wing.
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Your comment was balanced and respectful and yet the reply was denigrating. "All right wing, or simply non-left wing opinions are conspiracies" is the implication. This site is very left wing also.
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>EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.
I personally found it off topic, the conversation was about using Reddit as a source of truth for product opinions/reviews and it’s unlikely that the absence of a right wing majority is relevant when purchasing a dishwasher.
It wasn't off-topic. His response was to this statement: "the most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion on the internet" - on which his statement was perfectly correct if he just sticks to Western forums.
Ok: "any forum where there isn't a direct motive for product/service recommendation or ideological bias (and absent the moderator having a bias or strong opinion on that topic)".
Yes, in a larger context of conversation about bootcamps opinions being manipulated.
The issue you're gesturing at is that "left" positions tend to be in touch with reality and coherent with each other. Whereas conservative positions tend to be out of touch with reality and often contradict each other.
This gives the appearance to people that hold positions that are out of touch with reality that the coherent narratives are an all-encompassing hegemonic echo chamber that covers the whole site. The incoherent conservative narratives fail to take root among a wider audience since they fall apart when scrutinized. The karma system om reddit's encourages this behavior among neutral subreddit to dunk on people when they say things that are nonsense.
So that's why you only see them being held in specific ideological echo chambers like /r/Conservative where you have mods that censor discussion that debunks or merely calls into doubt the narrative asserted by the moderation team.
Regardless of the positions held, I think that moderators and admins have a lot of control over the discussion on reddit, and a lot of subreddits and users just get banned for no good reason. There is a selection bias at play.
Just because an opinion seems to be popular there does not nessisarially mean it won the "marketplace of ideas". It's more like the "warzone of powermods". I think a lot of social media sites go through a phase of controlling discussion to suit powerusers, but this comes at the cost of losing long-term social capital.
I mean we are in the second term of a trump presidency. The climate on reddit is very left wing but in the real world, people are voting right wing (or more likely not at all). Reddit itself is now an echo chamber, and r/Conservative is just the echo chamber within the echo chamber.