Doesn't surprise me the slightest, Reddit is not like it used to be. It used to be the underdog where free speech flourished and today it's a chineese-owned propaganda machine. A few users controls the biggest subreddits and most deviating views get themselves either banned or restricted.
the day reddit will end up like digg is always a day too late
now they have in sight the IPO so they are doing great cleaning, even of the past, they are rewriting it to be more attractive to sponsors and investors; a monstrous number of posts and subs are deleted every hour every day with the excuse that they apply [new] rules not specified anywhere and even often contrary to the well-established customs
they have gone from total administrative absenteeism to be a Kafkaesque nightmare, primarily for moderators (volunteers)
as a European I did not understand the concept of the word "cancel culture" but now that I'm seeing it with my own eyes I hope reddit fail very soon because now has become a spite to everything that Aaron wanted
so no, they have not become chinese/russian/"destiny manifest" propaganda machines, they are just a horrible horrible horrible place (with 10mb of javascript per connection as cherry on top)
> the day reddit will end up like digg is always a day too late
Many people ITT are saying that they're even worse than that right now. At least the Digg big redesign was halfway usable.
On the flip side, there's now a decent chance that the next "big" discussion platform might be a properly federated system, allowing for some longer-term resilience against this sort of deterioration. Much like E-mail/Usenet vs. centralized Compuserve or AOL.
I'm pretty sure a certain chinese company invested ~300M$ couple of years ago[0] if i recall correctly.However the platform became totally unusable and a sh*tfest way before that,think ~2014+, mainly because it was the turning point where no transparency was maintained or provided anymore, especially when it comes to moderation of users & their posts and management of subreddits.By early 2016 this was almost 'proved', but at that point this tactic resulted in creating echo-chambers, which drove up users and made it the "successful" platform it is today.Turns out nobody really cares about transparency and doing the proper job when the users and numbers are constantly exploding due to the forementioned created echo-chambers.
By the way my guess why reddit was never russian-oriented or 'aligned' is because most russophile subreddits were actively targeted and shut down(for good reasons many times), whilst chinese subreddits, the 'official' north-korean (propaganda) subreddit, and many others, were kept up and almost treated as separate platforms from the mainstream website.
[0] ( https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/reddit-300-million/ ) Indeed it was,once again, Tencent, the company famous for destroying MMOs, infiltrate the western gaming markets and pollute it with micro-transactions, cosmetics, etc.We're on the edge of touching politics and geostrategy here and I don't want certain people to jump telling me i'm a conspiracy nutjob.At this point the record is there, go look at it.
If propaganda was the purpose of that investment then it would have been a terrible one. Major subreddits are very often plastered with anti china stuff. It doesn't even have to be factual.
Meanwhile back when i modded a major subreddit with somewhat of a politics focus around the time when the whole situation in Ukraine kicked of russian propaganda accounts were very obvious and common. (relatively new accounts with certain formats of usernames posting short stuff that was found verbatim on similar accounts, etc)
It reminds me of an American study someone once commented here on HN where they looked into this and whilst they found Russian "shilling" substantial they there were surprised to find actually more anti china bots (mainly posting in simple chinese) across platforms like twitter than pro china ones. Pro-china propaganda efforts were found and measured but were largely amateurish, quickly banned and ineffective.
I'd honestly always assumed /r/pyonyang was very clever anti-NK propaganda. The role it occupies as Reddit in-joke aligns with western agendas.
/r/nknews skews closer to actual North Korean propaganda, but I think (or maybe just hope) the general vibe there is the readership understands that ANYTHING you read online about North Korea is potentially propagandized in one way or the other.
