I saw a lot of progressives turning into free market libertarians as soon as social media started censoring right wing opinions. Suddenly all I could see was “They’re a private company, they can do what they want!”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. The internet has essentially been in a wild west era since it was created, as the government has pretty much no laws or court decisions saying what information social companies can and can’t regulate. On top of that we’re in an era where the SEC happily rubber stamps every corporate merger under the sun. Now we’re seeing the consequences of that as a majority of information on the internet is controlled by a handful of companies. And on top of that, even if you want to make your “alternative” platform, that’s incredibly hard to do since services like web hosting and payment processing are also controlled by a handful of corporations.

Most major corporations have no business acquiring any other companies, and on top of that they need to be broken up. Just thinking of a few, Amazon owning Amazon shopping, AWS, Twitch, Ring, IMDb, and a fucking satellite internet company is ridiculous. The finance, energy, defense/aerospace, pharmaceutical/healthcare, and so many other industries are all guilty of this. Libertarians couldn’t be more right about one thing, competition benefits consumers, but for some reason the only thing US republicans and democrats can agree on is that we should never enforce anti-trust laws. And internet leftists, the people who you’d figure would be all for corporations being broken up, are silent on the issue. It’s infuriating to watch.

This place is lame because it’s somehow even more obsessed with politics than Reddit. It’s draining to go to a social media site and constantly be subjected to negative headlines.

/r/antiwork, /r/murderedbyAOC, /r/leopardsatemyface, /r/politicalhumor, /r/blackpeopletwitter, etc. I could go on.

What’s the biggest “right wing echo chamber” on Reddit? /r/conservative has just barely over 1M subscribers, which puts it at a fraction of the size of those subs mentioned above.

You can’t actually be serious can you?

Reddit back in the early 2010s was infamous for worshipping Ron Paul. In the early and mid-2010s there were literally subreddits dedicated to racism. It was controversial in the 2010s to ban or censor anything, meanwhile today all of the big subreddits are run by a handful of mods who will ban anyone who says something they don’t like, or even ban people automatically if they comment in a sub they don’t like.

If you think Reddit is somehow more right-leaning today than in the 2010s, I think that might just mean that you became far more left-leaning since then and everything else looks right-leaning in comparison.

I couldn’t disagree more. This is what I hate about the internet in 2023. Everyone is expected to fall into one of two buckets, and if you don’t fall into the correct one, you’re just not welcome on certain sites and expected to make your own site somewhere completely separate. Nobody can handle when people disagree with them, so instead we just get horribly toxic echo chambers.

Back in 2014 you could express a moderately conservative opinion on Reddit without being banned from subs. Hell, back in 2014 you could express far-right opinions and people would just rightfully call you a moron. But today on basically every site, you have 3 options: Agree with the site’s opinion, keep your mouth shut, or get banned.

The internet was better when people were allowed to disagree with each other.