Reddit occasionally bans subreddits for various reasons (see r/fatpeplehate and the predecessor to r/hydrohomies). True, r/thedonald was banned, but not because of political leaning (r/conservative is running just fine), but because of how it was spreading misinformation and calling for violence.
But for any given sub that isn't political, there probably are not right and left-leaning subs. And given that viewpoint-based moderation is overwhelmingly-common on Reddit, this means that on non-politics based subreddits then engaging on any political issue as a right-leaning individual carries a decent risk of getting some sort of wrongthink ban. It's extremely common, sadly, and even though one can avoid politics entirely it's hard to just watch people circlejerk and mock people who hold your views when these issues do arise.
Any community is free to set its own rules for who they consider welcome and you are more than able to join or create an alternative community where you feel more welcome.
That said, claiming that only right-leaning folks are being mocked or told to leave communities is highly disingenuous. Think about being a liberal/left-leaning gun owner and trying to participate in the vast majority of gun forums online. Or hunting forums. Or a lot of survivalist/bushcraft forums. Or militaria forums. Or car forums.
Didn't claim it was.
>That said, claiming that only right-leaning folks are being mocked or told to leave communities is highly disingenuous. Think about being a liberal/left-leaning gun owner and trying to participate in the vast majority of gun forums online.
I didn't claim this either, and quite frankly your eagerness to put words in my mouth is telling. In any case I'd be surprised if most gun forums that aren't on Reddit will just straight-up ban you for being liberal. But Reddit's viewpoint-based moderation goes much deeper than in subreddits that have ancillary ties to politics; for example it's very common for regional-based subreddits to have viewpoint-based discrimination that excises conservatives. If this is egregious enough it can cause schisms where you get left-wing/right-wing versions of the same sub, but usually that doesn't happen.
As an example of you probably leaving out a lot of context, you used the phrasing "wrongthink ban", which almost always goes hand-in-hand with (false) claims of being censored.
You also wrote that engaging in political discussion from a right-leaning viewpoint in non-political subreddits "carries a decent risk of getting some sort of wrongthink ban".
Dragging politics into spaces where they're not welcome is a bad idea, and will quite rightly upset the people in those spaces. It's their space and they get to choose what is welcome in it. Someone trying to forcibly insert themselves or their viewpoints into other people's space, when they are not welcome, is bound to create friction and anger.
Reddit doesn't promise that anyone has any right to participate in whichever subreddit they want to. That is up to the users and moderators of any given subreddit, no matter how arbitrary their rules may seem. You are free to find other subreddits to participate in. If your politics or general attitude is generally so that you find yourself unwelcome in most subreddits, that should be an indicator to perhaps be a little more diplomatic yourself, honestly. Or just disengage from Reddit entirely, you'll be fine without it.
Being of the belief that you should be welcome in all spaces and greeted on friendly terms by everyone is a really privileged position to hold. Not everyone is welcome everywhere.
Sometimes it will and oftentimes it won't. Again, this is my actual experience, and the experience of many others. If it comforts you to believe that I probably deserved it somehow, that I have to affirm my lived experience over your baseline skepticism, then it's not worth my time to try to shake you from that sort of complacency.
For example, as I relayed elsewhere on this thread, I was recently banned on a travel forum when a discussion of traveling during COVID arose and I took the position that it wasn't obviously selfish/ignorant to travel if officials in all the relevant jurisdictions approved of it. For this I was simply permanently banned, and my modmail inquiries were ignored. Now if you want to assume that I must've laced my posts with racial slurs or whatever I'll tell you that that's wrong but I'm not going to be able to prove it to you. But this is just how things work on many parts of Reddit.
This really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Not everyone is equally welcome everywhere. Different owners/moderators set different limits, often based on precious situations, which you may not be aware of.
Specifically the argument of doing things that a lot of people consider irresponsible, even if they are not disallowed, is a very sore subject with a lot of people during this pandemic. Authorities in a lot of countries have been way too lax in imposing lockdowns and restrictions, leading to much higher numbers of infected and dead than would otherwise have occurred in the same amount of time.
Odds are that the travel subreddit you mention has seen a lot of people arguing that if there is no travel ban, they should be free to travel wherever they want and however they want, which really rubs a lot of people the wrong way, especially those who have lost loved ones and consider such behavior highly irresponsible. Odds are also that the moderators previously made an announcement or even rule changes prohibiting those sorts of discussions, because of how they rile people up.
In the eyes of the moderator, you transgressed the rules of the subreddit, so they firmly showed you the door. I make no judgment on whether whatever you posted was morally reprehensible, what matters is that the proprietor of that particular space found it so.
Reddit is a collection of many little kingdoms. Some of them have kings that just don't like you, for whatever reason. That's their prerogative and there's nothing you can do about it, except maybe creating a rival subreddit that potentially becomes more popular.
Yes, and we know what they say about wearing short skirts and sexual assault as well. I know how to read a room, but the point is that the mere fact of the double-standard is offputting.
>Reddit is a collection of many little kingdoms. Some of them have kings that just don't like you, for whatever reason. That's their prerogative and there's nothing you can do about it, except maybe creating a rival subreddit that potentially becomes more popular.
Ultimately I don't disagree, I'm just pointing out how this viewpoint-based moderation creates a bad experience for a lot of people that will lead to their turning to alternatives, and that the scale to which this is happening probably is not just Reddit "working as intended." And it's not like you can just casually jump from say a hobby subreddit that bans all Trump supporters on sight to a right-wing version of the subreddit that offers a remotely-similar experience. My point is a lot weaker than you're acting like it is, which is telling. "Moderators don't act like this, but if they do it's your fault, and if it's not your fault then you need to accept that this is how Reddit works." Do I though?
Interestingly, Reddit has stepped in when moderators have tried to get too forceful with eliminationism - for example, there have been attempts to create shared user blacklists across subreddits but these have largely been quashed by admins.
You bring it up because you were affected by it, I'm not sure you would react in the same way if the tables were turned. There are double standards everywhere, affecting everyone in some way and to different extents. Some face a lot more double standards than others. Consider that your experience is not unique to you nor to those who agree with you politically. Far from it.
> "And it's not like you can just casually jump from say a hobby subreddit that bans all Trump supporters on sight to a right-wing version of the subreddit that offers a remotely-similar experience."
In that case, if you wish to genuinely participate in that particular subreddit, you keep your politics to yourself and stick to the relevant subject matter. You quickly learn to segregate subjects, some forums are fit for one type of discussion, some for other types. Some have a very strict enforcement of tone, some are basically free-for-all.
Even if someone posts a political opinion that you disagree with, you are not obligated to react, in fact reacting may show your hand and sour everyone else to you, for something that is unrelated to the subject matter of the forum.
Discretion is the better part of valor, after all.
What you're experiencing is simply that you are not automatically welcome in all spaces you try to enter. Some people have experienced that for decades and centuries.
I'm not. For example, I was banned like a week ago from a sub for arguing that it's not obviously selfish/evil for someone to travel during COVID if one is allowed to do so. It was on a travel-related subreddit where there were no rules to this effect, but a mod felt that this sort of attitude was tantamount to advocating manslaughter.
Most subs will not have "no conservatives allowed" rules but the enforcement patterns often will not follow the rules.
That's the rhetoric Reddit used but I was completely unconvinced. They spent the better part of a year looking for a reason to ban /r/td, going as far as to invent "quarantining" as a soft-ban, and when they finally did so the cited evidence was extremely unconvincing.
They would brigade and attack other forums?
They were a collection site for bad actors and even more dangerous content to the point that a large site like Reddit could get shut down.
There is some wishful thinking going on that all speech is equal, and that such speech was being conducted here.
I think those types of subs are/were annoying and filter most of them from my homepage. That said I never found /r/td to be anywhere near egregious as is said here, even the justification for the final banning was incredibly watery.
I mean Reddit changed their algorithms to ensure this never happened again.
T_D was 4chan tier stuff built around “owning the libs” and rubbing it in everyone’s face. The grace of a boozed uncle who wants to dance on your grave.
The other fun part is how long T_D was allowed to run Amok. Special gloves to avoid looking bad, something that’s also forgotten.
If you want to know how bad it is, simply see what their voat/ parler versions look like.
And I’m also not the kind of person who actually did the history digging and detective work on user accounts. This is all passive observation of internet drama.
The T_d crowd was happy with dog whistles and coded racism. For them to find r/politics or any other sub offensive is but natural.
Freedom of speech isn't the right to speak wherever you like. I don't have to let you speak on my lawn, on my stage. You just shouldn't disappear for disagreeing with the government.
To refit your analogy: what if your stage is the only stage there is?
Guess what they do there? "Hey have you heard about white genocide??" etc.
There are even people that specifically go to reddit to encourage people to leave and go to the alt right website. It is a form of recruiting for the cause so to speak.
I had a look at Parler earlier.
People like you are loud and vocal there too, you can start with the parody account Breitfart for example, the difference is that others are allowed to be loud and vocal there too.
So in a way equally bad as Twitter, just a bit more "nuanced" and even more noisy.