Every few months I go dip my toes back into posting on reddit for some reason. Maybe it's because I'm a bit of an idiot who never learns, but to my credit it's never overtly political stuff or concerning current events. Don't want to give myself an aneurysm, after all. Usually it's just a mix of hobby stuff and a variety of subs for tv shows I'm watching.
Commenting isn't too bad for the most part, but for some reason posting really sucks. Maybe I'm just sharing a thought I had, a cool idea, maybe a theory for an ongoing tv show, posted in a friendly and conversational way that is by no means signalling I'm looking for an argument. Then I hit post and within a few minutes I'm instantly reminded that reddit isn't a shithole just because of its politics, but also because its userbase is full of scumfuck, pedantic assholes.
My posts always gets downvoted to 0, and I suddenly have like three or four users picking apart everything I said in the least generous way possible. Comments don't seem to have this problem, which makes me think the new filter on subreddits is populated disproportionately by the worst of the redditors. It is these people who disproportionately decide which posts blow up and which posts don't.
You forget that r/The_Donald dominated /all day after day after day. The memes were devastating and the corporate media was caught in lie after lie. The establishment was utterly blindsided by the internet. After the election, they got serious about information control. Coincidentally, that's when the censorship push got going in a big way.
<10% of Americans use Reddit on a monthly basis, it's not clear what percent of them were aware of TD, swayed by it, or voted at all. I appreciate the election was close, but to say it's a significant reason seems a bit of an overestimate.
A lot of races are won by a few thousand votes
If it wasn't important, it wouldn't have been censored and broken up after the election. QED.
The FBI goes after 5 person mutual aid groups. Repression does not indicate efficacy.
That's a piece of evidence to consider, but it's definitely not QED. Perhaps more like it was just alienating current users and causing Reddit as a corporation strife, so they stopped it.