Every time I hear this "Reddit is conservative-biased" I wonder if people are living in the same reality as I am. I just checked /r/all, the first political post is related to the Canadian trucker protest of which support is broadly split down the political divide. Top voted posts there slide as I expected, generally on the left-aligned component against the protests. The same, at least in my experience, applies to all political topics on reddit.
Hell, Bernie, and then Biden were both top of reddit during the elections. In what way is that indicative of a "conservative leaning" on reddit. I'll give you young and male, but conservative? You've got to be pulling my leg here.
/r/all is just a spam of new items, not a view of its culture.
It was the largest Donald Trump fan site in the world (/r/thedonald before it was shut down for being so big its brigading tactics were damaging the site) and now /r/conservative takes that role. Before it was the biggest Ron Paul fan site. Its deeply pro-guns in nearly every comment section and any mention of Hillary or AOC is an invitation for angry comments and downvotes. Random subs are full of transphobic content and misogyny is near everywhere. /r/conspiracy is a right-wing paradise catering to right wing views.
You cannot talk about money or finance without being yelled at about how bad fiat and the fed are, which are right-wing talking points. You can't have a covid discussion without an army of covid skeptics yelling at everyone. You can't discuss police brutality without dishonest "but both sides" types full of racist dog whistles.
Its absolutely right leaning and token "liberal" positions like legal pot or better healthcare doesn't really change that. I know GOP voters with those positions but they always vote GOP for culture-war related reasons. Not to mention, being able to do drugs in your home is really neither liberal or conservative, its just in the USA only the liberal party is making any effort to make that happen.
Covid skepticism, which spez defends, is extremely coded right-wing, so even leadership acknowledges who reddit users really are.
The few liberal and feminist spaces that exist on reddit have draconian mod rules because of the constant brigading and some of them just give up and lock discussions because mods are exhausted and tired of fighting it. Just running a liberal or feminist or queer sub is a lot of work because reddit conservatives are constantly bridaging. This is not the sign of a liberal community. I mod a few subs and its just a nightmare out there. Just keeping conservatives from trolling and fighting with everyone is a big job. If you see "liberalism" its because the mods are keeping the everyday redditors away and trying to keep up the values and themes of that specific sub and its relatively tiny audience compared to the conservative majority.
Cherry picking AI spammed Bernie posts doesn't change the culture in the comments or what visitors receive when they post. I'm in a lot of Democratic, liberal, feminist, queer, socialist, etc spaces and I can guarantee you reddit is absolutely nothing like those spaces.
Also you are taking my comment out of context, not only is reddit conservative, but as a hypothetic competitor to google its extremely conservative. I can google for things without being hit with Ron/Rand Paul narratives, Trump worship, pro-gun narratives, covid skepticism, transphobia, or racist dog whistles. So just the idea that Reddit is as welcoming as a Google search is very, very questionable. Google will transparently present you ads. Reddit will drown you in propaganda, culture war politics, and harassment. As the meme says, we are not the same.
/r/all sorted by hot is items roughly sorted by popularity. Only if you sort by new, would it be a flood of contents by time.
We can take a quick survey of /r/all sorted by "hot" as of this moment. The very first post I see with AoC is literally this:
"""AOC tells Joe Biden: Cancel more student loans to have "any chance" in 2022"""
The top posts? All in support. Where is the dominant conservative force that warps conversation around it.
HermanCainAward, literally a subreddit celebrating the deaths of the unvaccinated tops all regularly. How the hell is that "covid skeptic right dominant"?
Is your idea of "reddit is conservative" that reddit hosts conservative communities at all? Even if they're smaller than the left-aligned communities there?
EDIT:
Some other quick statistics:
Size of /r/conservative: 923k
Size of /r/lgbt: 864k
Size of /r/hermancainaward: 500k
The "lol antivaxxers died" community is literally half the size of the largest conservative subreddit. The LGBT subreddit is the same size as OP's bugbear /r/conservative. The very much Dem supporting /r/politics is an order of magnitude larger than either of those, at 8 MILLION subscribers.
Yeah, I was waiting for this comment. The OP you're responding to is way way WAY overexagerating the opinions of the body politic of reddit.
Reddit is so large that having a potent conservative force is an inevitability - and much as we don't want to admit, for all the nastyness that goes on there, it's still a space that forces conservatives to be relatively speaking on "good behavior" (imagine if gab/voat/parler successfully displaced reddit), and more recently also forces their ideology to be heavily moderated (as in, to become more moderate), and watered down.
Also LOL at criticism of the car community for being bad at recommending SUVs. Reddits car enthusiast community is made up of people whose favorite car by and large is the Miata. Is the Miata a good car for a soccer mom? No. Is the Miata the car of dudebro conservatives? Uh, HELL NO!
I hate to say it, but sorry Karen, Reddit is for your son, not you.
My suspicion is that any broadly successful community aggregator will have enough people holding belligerent, incompatible views, that one could never feel truly safe participating there.
Your loathing (for lack of a better term) of the discourse on Reddit has me wondering if the differences I perceive between our political and cultural tolerance stems from being on opposite sides of a few gnostic / agnostic boundaries, or if the difference between our demographic pigeon holes has spared me orders of magnitude of relative grief, allowing me the additional advantage of getting less overwhelmed by ambient asshattery.
I will readily admit that the latter could easily lead to the former; I guess I wonder if the 2 —> 1 causal order holds overwhelmingly in practice, and how to satisfactorily determine that in a way that manages to be honest, systematic, and compassionate.
>My suspicion is that any broadly successful community aggregator will have enough people holding belligerent, incompatible views, that one could never feel truly safe participating there.
I'm of the opinion that this is fine. Rather, the better approach here might be instead gatekeeping and exclusivity. Now, before you tear my head off for that, let me elaborate a bit.
Much of the issues of existing communities, seem to me to stem from an inability to deal with scale. A single heretic isn't a problem, but when the heretics outnumber the believers, they can then proceed to dominate the community. One potential solution I've wondered about is entry-restrictions and finer grained restrictions on permissions for a community. For instance, a community might be public view but member-only for posts/comments, with invite-only membership. Or perhaps memberships have to be approved by N randomly selected members.
The catch of course, is that what I propose is also yet another contributor to the death of the open internet, much like discord is doing.
Reddit as a whole is absolutely a community and the default subs and the comments in them reflect that. Its also one that brigades a lot into other subs, so there's a "real reddit" you see and its absolutely right-leaning.
Hell, Bernie, and then Biden were both top of reddit during the elections. In what way is that indicative of a "conservative leaning" on reddit. I'll give you young and male, but conservative? You've got to be pulling my leg here.