Widespread defamatory allegations and calls for violence aren’t common everyday life but they are routine on reddit.

Banning users with moderate opinions is not normal in everyday life, but is routine in many subreddits. Including users sharing opinions held by moderate democrats.

Have you tried posting a moderate opinion on /r/conservative?

Reddit is not a community, it's a collection of communities. Each may be an echo chamber, but it's an echo chamber in its own way.

It used to be that way, with high diversity of opinions between subreddits.

These days, all the default subs are left leaning, most are far-left leaning, which means most users have a partisan experience. This then impacts the overall makeup of the site’s userbase which cascades this bias through every other subreddit.

Sure, there are a small number of relatively low traffic communities that have held out, but they are now an insignificant proportion of the content on the site.

Fortunately, you still have communities like Twitter/X where neo-Nazis can feel at home.

you did not answer the question. did reddit change? or is it you? what’s “moderate”? would you describe yourself “moderate”?

Reddit changed.

It’s a natural artefact of the voting systems it uses for recommending content. These tend to result in echo chambers because political extremism results in more engagement, and thus more extreme users vote more and have a larger influence on what is shown.

This is then amplified by the echo chamber effect, which distills the user base into ever more extreme positions as the moderate users find their opinions outside the evolving fringe of acceptable opinion.

The reason I class it as far-left now, even though I wouldn’t in the past, is two things:

Firstly, it is now plagued with extremist content, including calls to violence, which are tolerated by users and moderates alike.

Secondly, the opinions expressed have a left bias relative to other members of the left. There are plenty of moderate democrats, including people like Obama, who would quickly find themselves banned from many default subreddits for their more moderate tolerant opinions.

and also moderate Republicans, so don't think the Republicans are all "Holy, Truthful, Angels" of people, because they AREN'T!

So what are your thoughts on Trump banning transgender individuals from the military?

There is no arbiter for the median set point, as you know. I think the problem latent in both the point you respond to, and your response is the lack of desire amongst us all to agree the position of the left-right needle. It's just much more useful to be able to fling the terms/directions around as a pejorative, than to be particularly factual.

It's a very odd time. The USA is emerging into a combination of a Kleptocracy, a Kakistocracy, Autarky and Technocracy. It's like somebody's dream pivot fractured into every ocracy under the sun.

I don't have to subscribe to a belief in a conspiracy to advantage Russia, to beleive the SITUATION will advantage people who benefit from an unstable US polity.

I also don't have to subscribe to a belief it was "the plan" to believe the super-rich will ride over this wave, and pick the cream off as it floats upward. Thats what they do, all the time. This is just a particularly active milk churn and there's going to be a LOT of cream.

I agree on most parts of your respnse, but I was aiming at precisely at how the commenter I responded to tends to make absolute claims for what, it seems to me, are relative to their position and attempt to instate as more common and common-sense than it really is, and betrays a certain blindness to a simple psychological fact that people usually react more strongly to things that pressure them more (a relative phenomenon) and ascribes to this reaction some political valuation (an absolute).

I myself do not find left-right divide that much useful, at least to describe this melting pot of our time.

I enjoyed the question you posed immensely because it goes so strongly to the perceptual bias we bring to the table. I know I look with outrage at how strongly my left wing government has swung right, not for a minute believing I might have got more left wing as I got richer, older, and less exposed to the risks. "Of course I've always been left" I mutter, putting decent french butter on my croissant.