Reddit's descent into madness

A previously ideologically diverse community has been subverted by crazed activists

I’ve been a Redditor since February 2008, joining as an ex-Digg user looking for a better hangout when the site became something we didn’t want. For many years, it was a lot of fun. But slowly, then all at once, the peculiar alchemy that made Reddit unique has been broken by an ideological monoculture that functions less as a forum for diverse thought and more as an echo chamber. The site has become sterile, predictable and essentially lacking fun. The moderators on popular subreddits (which most of them didn’t personally grow, the site grew them) are slowly driving reasonable people and discourse away.

In its heyday Reddit was a chaotic neutral entity: part cat memes, conspiracy theories, obscure hobbies, and existential musings. It was the internet distilled: messy, contradictory, often idiotic, but vibrant in its authenticity. You could stumble from r/AskHistorians' deep dives of past cultures straight into impressive hobbyist cichlid tanks in r/Aquariums without feeling cognitive dissonance. This juxtaposition was the point. It was a vibe, and fun. Something throwback to the early forum days, where I was a heavy contributor, there was almost no self-promotion, no politics outside explicit political forums, and communities were well-organized by interest and reasonably moderated. I’d even gone to some meetups to connect with subreddit communities in real life. Everyone was remarkably normal, geeky and fun.

But somewhere along the way, Reddit became political-brained. Not political in the classic sense of civic discourse and debate, but political in the way a teenager discovers socialism and won’t stop talking about it. Nearly every meme on r/adviceanimals, a 9.9M subscriber community of whimsy - which used to be about many topics and rarely politics - is now all political, all the time (and frequently quite deranged). Same with r/pics, a 31M subscriber community (#12 ranked by size). The community is about, and I quote “a place for photographs, pictures, and other images” but really it might as well now be relabeled political pics.

Opened r/pics this morning to get a screen grab, and predictably most everything is political (except for an ad) and most threads are locked. Scrolling down you see a few normal things, but the whole community is clearly taken over by people who want to push politics. This is across many communities site-wide.

This quietly happened to many of the larger subreddits around the same time over the last few years, for reasons you are free to speculate on. There's become an obsessive need to filter every topic through a specific political lens, and view certain users and commentary inherently suspect unless prefaced by ideological disclaimers. The default assumption on the site is anyone with dissenting thoughts should be downvoted or banned and purity tests passed by all. The threads are all quite bad, and discussion is welcome …by one side of the political party, not the other. You’ll be banned for milquetoast comments if they aren’t ideologically aligned even if you are left leaning (the far left eats themselves). It’s felt ever less like an internet forum and more a digital internment camp. And remember, many of these are the default subreddits everyone subscribes to when joining. Basically, if you join Reddit the assumption is you want mostly posts from leftist operatives. This is all an odd way to run a publicly traded social media company.

There’s an X account, Reddit_Lies that documents the derangement and mods gone mad. It’s worse than you think. Others have noted similarly...

This shift isn’t unique to Reddit, as I shared recently Wikipedia has suffered a similar fate and become a deeply unserious (read: biased) source of information. More managed reality, similar to cable news yet far more insidious due to scale. Small, connected groups are actively pushing certain narratives, many of which contain anti-western values.

The web has become increasingly balkanized along ideological lines. Reddit's structure amplifies this effect and has made the site particularly bad. Upvotes reward conformity, not curiosity. Downvotes and bans shut dissent. The hivemind self-replicates, each thread a fractal of the last, until opposing ideas are not just unwelcome they simply don’t exist. Also, all of it feels astroturfed with one side of the conversation suppressed, so it’s hard to tell what’s actually organic. The site has optimized itself for moral consensus, biased to one political party (and the most extreme people within it). Nuance is unwelcome because anyone who disagrees with the borg is of course evil.

The tragedy isn’t just that Reddit leans left. It’s even worse than this: it’s that it leans predictably. The joy of Reddit for me was the unpredictability and diverse, interesting ideas. Today, scrolling through popular subreddits feels like you’re walking through an insane asylum, and a deeply unfun one at that.

What’s lost in this political ossification is the space for genuine weirdness, passions and interests that honestly shouldn’t be political. The bizarre and fun DIY projects, niche subcultures, dumb-but-brilliant shower thoughts. These were Reddit's soul and what made the site special. Now they feel like relics of a brighter internet, buried under layers of performative wokeness or reactionary backlash, both equally tedious.

Reddit used to be a place where you could be wrong, spectacularly so, and still be part of the conversation and community. Now, being wrong or simply disagreeing carries the risk of digital exile. This doesn’t make people better thinkers, it makes them better self-censors.

The current generation of social internet companies promised us a marketplace of ideas. Reddit delivered on that, for a time. But social networks thrive on diversity of thought, on the unexpected, on the clash and fusion of competing ideas. When every subreddit sells the same ideology pushed through different interests and categories, it stops being an interesting destination for me. Safe spaces are boring. I hope they wake up one day, but given they’re printing money with ads and AI right now, perhaps they just don’t care.