I would argue this is precisely the impression they’re trying to manufacture. There’s a vast and stark difference between the Reddit of today and the Reddit of 2016. The viewpoints of tens or hundreds of millions of people have been systematically removed from the site in the last 4 or so years in one of the most aggressive and vast campaigns of censorship and manipulation I’ve ever personally seen on the internet.

Maybe the reddit of 2016 was more manipulated? How would you tell the difference between new manipulation and change of manipulation?

That's really simple in this case. The space of expressible opinions has been strictly contracted. If it had shifted in some other more complex way then I think you could have a point. In this case though the contraction was very clear, rapid, and enforced through a variety of visible and prominent site-level changes (e.g., introducing extreme quarantines or bans of many subreddits or re-engineering the frontpage to hide content [like introducing r/popular, which selectively only shows certain political content]).

>The overwhelming majority of young people (and people overall, though not by nearly the same margin) are left leaning or very left

for some reason that phenomena only manifests itself on heavily moderated platforms.

on unmoderated (chans) or barely moderated (youtube) platforms, you get a much more diversity of thought.

It's not more diverse on unmoderated platform it's the opposite. Unmoderated platform (like chans) mostly attract those who despise any censorship, that's far from everybody.

It would depend on what you would define as a diverse opinion, problem is who should define that and whether they took their own biases into account.

It's impossible to have a diverse opinion when the range of acceptable opinions is enforced from on high on threat of banishment. At least the worst that will happen on an average chan is that people will yell at you.

And you get a whole lot of people leaving for moderated platforms because they're tired of arguing with white supremacists.

I have never heard of anyone doing this.

I used 4chan a lot and got to know a lot of people of a subcommunity that started there nearly a decade ago, and "4chan has become an alt-right hellhole and I don't go back because of that" became a common enough position among them over the last few years. I get the impression from a few of the progressive online communities I've dipped into that there's a number of ex-4channers that got sick of the culture shift at 4chan, but it's hard to quantify. A lot of people on Mastodon use it specifically because it has more protective rules than Twitter.

I don't think people like to talk too much about why they leave online hangouts, because it's like admitting defeat, because people still at the place won't sympathize with you because they either disagree with your criticisms or think you're slandering the place (or else they'd have already left too), and because outsiders who agree with your criticisms of the place may have other criticisms of the place and judge you for being associated with or expecting differently of the place.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories but if I'm told to watch my unconscious biases in check then maybe social media sites, their admins, and their moderators should do the same in regards to conservative thought on their sites.

>but if I'm told to watch my unconscious biases in check

Assuming this phrase is about biases about race, then this is a dumb comparison. Biases about race and minorities are different than biases about political positions and opinions. Political positions aren't a protected class.

Sure, bans such as the board dedicated to support the current US president is "due to demographic".

It is due to systematic rule breaking even after multiple warnings. If you break the rules of HN you get banned after a while. And if there were sub-HNs here and one would take almost all the moderation time it wouldn't exist for long.

Also, if it is about a board usually called "TD" that one is quarantined, not banned.