Totally agree, I used to mod on a couple of the default subs and it made me hate reddit and view the open forum aspect of social media differently. I think I fully realized this when Glenn Greenwald did an AMA and said a mod team I was on (worldnews) was all paid Obama shills, because the sub had a rule against opinion columns which is what a lot of his content at the time was. So I got a bunch of hate mail about that, and sometimes journalists would even contact us individually for whatever reason, which I mostly ignored but occasionally would lead them on them ghost them. I had to make new accounts to deal with wanting to use the site just for the smaller niche interest subreddits.

Another thing I saw is how the most quickly digestible garbage content has such an advantage on the larger subs, and how the hivemind manipulates itself, by selecting out of a huge pool the very few posts that get to be on the front page. I blame this sort of echo chamber for some of what’s happening with politics now, or at least accelerating what was already happening.