I still am very upset about /r/politics becoming super partisan. Reddit as a whole has always had biases, but there was a time when /r/politics was fairly centrist and genuinely useful as an aggregator with intelligent commentary. It's now a reposting of vox/buzzfeed more or less.

I don't remember this time at all. But I've never found much value in the big subreddits because of the incentives to game them for karma and traffic. The most interesting communities have always seemed like the small ones since there are more people interested in a conversation vs. a popularity contest.

agreed. I have voted Democrat for a long time, but I can't stand how partisan it's become. The comments are always so low-effort too. The top voted comment in almost any thread will be something like, "fuck trump".

Some people mistake catharsis for activism. It burns a lot of energy while not leading to any progress, or even to building a foundation for making progress.

It almost gives me an uncanny valley feeling. There's a certain pattern to every comments thread that makes me feel like I'm watching a 'conversation' between lazy teenagers, vote-manipulation bots and a handful of (paid?) adult political activists. (I know that sounds paranoid, but fwiw if I were an American I would vote Democrat, and if you applied a hundred randomly-chosen negative adjectives to Trump I would strongly agree with most of them. So this isn't a shocked reaction to seeing an echo chamber populated by the wrong team.)

I wouldn't necessarily mind it being partisan, if not for the extremely low quality commenting standard. I'm sure there's a causal link: most of us are less likely to call out bullshit from our own team, and when there's nobody to call you out on your bullshit (so long as it's directed at the correct targets), it's tempting to go ever cheaper and ever dumber in search of easy approval. But it would at least be possible to have a forum where people had a lot of opinions in common, but still cared about truth and intellectual integrity and basic logic.

> at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content

While hyper active moderation and power mods pushing their agendas on Reddit is a major issue, a fair amount of moderation is key to maintaining the quality of content. r/MurderedByWords is an example when the mods bend a bit too backwards in allowing content, it delved from legitimate smackdowns to childish name calling on Twitter. The sub's a disgrace lately.

Striking that balance is important, forcing your own views of what the sub should be will antogonize people but at the same time maintaining a bare minimum is also important. Even more so for subs that regularly hit r/all and r/popular. A lot of niche subs hit r/all with a thread or two causing a massive influx of users and the rules are relaxed to accommodate the lowest common denominator. The end result of doing that is usually the older regular content creators lose interest and leave the community.

The moderators are just users though, oftentimes ones who just got there first. If you don't like the vision for any given subreddit you can create your own with more lax moderation. There's plenty of stories where subs split off because of moderation differences and ended up becoming bigger than their parent. See /r/gameofthrones vs /r/freefolk for an example.

Personally I find that the more strictly a subreddit is moderated, the better it tends to be.

I think /r/PoliticalDiscussion is a great example of this. Up until 2016 there was a lot of active debate and ~50k subscribers. Now there are ~750k subscribers and only ~2 posts allowed per day. Must be exhausting for the mods.