It's part of a system of things that we sought to oppose in /r/hailcorporate which helped to turn the site into a corporate mainstream hellhole from what was originally a rather niche techie site for high quality techie things and bizarre creator-led communities.

As any form of social media expands mainstream content creeps in and takes over... In part because mods, especially in volunteer-only communities, do not understand the lifespan and changing conditions of online communities as they grow.

If you want a community to stay cutting-edge it MUST be creator-led. As soon as it stops being creator-led the creators go somewhere else because they need an audience. What you're left with is whatever people are able to find which is typically going to lean towards the mainstream just based on discoverability.

Honestly Reddit is just a digitised version of bourgeois democracy. It appears democratic, but through a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, crowds out everything except bourgeois messaging.

The best example is the handling of ‘politics’. In almost every major sub, there’s a ‘no politics’ rule, with politics interpreted widely to include everything from voting to protests to ideology. In contrast, in the politics subs, ‘politics’ is interpreted so narrowly as to only include matters involving elected officials.

Similarly, editorialising titles is typically forbidden, and the only acceptable things to post are articles from mainstream hegemonic media. So what could be a really interesting platform becomes just an aggregator of corporate messaging.