Being banned from Reddit is not being banned from the internet. You can setup PHPforum and run your own community. Reddit is a community of people, and a subset is making it worse for almost everyone else.

Places like Something Awful r Digg will ban people for being shitty and bad for the community. The community being, circularly, the set of people willing to use the website with such rules.

What's so special about Reddit that it doesn't need to cultivate the community?

If a group of friends get together all the time and then one of them is being a jerk all the time, that person stops getting invited. It's not censorship, it's unfriending.

reddit has subreddits so conflicting communities can form. if you want a sense of community, dont browse /r/all, and subscribe to the bubble you want.

reddit was founded as a platform that promoted free speech, not a limited subset of liberal speech.

I'm aware of the origins, but this is a prime example of the CAP theorem for communities:

Pick 2:

- little moderation

- low amount of drama (for lack of a better word)

- high diversity of topics

Reddit wants to be all 3 (just like Twitter), but there are reasons even 4chan has a huge amount of "janitors". It's pretty impossible to not have to deal with crap when you've decided white nationalists need a place to talk, and it should be on your site.

i disagree. reddit is a great balance because they have editorial control of the front page, and then they have all. subs have moderators that can choose varying levels of moderation, sort of a "let the states decide" style compromise. high moderation leads to great subs like /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians. reddit can have both high intersubmoderation and low standardization of what ideas are moderated. you can ban subs that have mods who refuse to enforce site rules. but once you start removing subs because their political beliefs dont match consensus, you get an echo chamber.

reddit should take every opportunity to work on the algorithm and make it so the front pages surfaces the best content possible. they can make sure posts they dont like never reach the front. but once they inject editorial control of all, their ideals are compromised.

the drama is caused by mods who want all the other mods to have the same beliefs, so they dont have as much crap to clean up. if you dont want to be a janitor, dont volunteer. alternatively reddit could pay for janitors? reddit could drastically reduce drama if it had better moderation tools, and better community tools. they could take their metareddits so much further. if you read the chat logs, the default mods dont like other people on 'their' site, who think different, and act differently.

I think you'd have to defend an anti-censorship stance pretty much anywhere that's somewhat "liberal" these days. Never before in my life have I seen so much fussing 24/7 over the availability of other people's words. (Note this is subtly different from fussing over the content of other people's words, which is fine.)

But it's not censorship when the "good" guys do it!