Plus, my statement was about "heated political arguments", not a one-time statement from moderators which remains, to my understanding, rather rare. One thread about BLM doesn't deter me from visiting these subreddits.
I haven't spent any time there, so I'm genuinely curious: how does r/history avoid political arguments? Some people say that everything is inherently political, but history seems especially adjacent to politics
askhistorians is the best example I can think of. askscience close behind.
People I like in the world are unbearable on Twitter. I've unfollowed, muted and don't-show-me-their-retweets a good bunch of them.
If up and downvotes can work as feedback encouraging people to stop it with the "sigh" posts, or the rage-of-the-day posts, it could improve Twitter. If not, I'm not sure what could improve Twitter.
Ones that actually have a real interest group are more reasonable.
Users quickly learn that "we don't do that here", and stop.
Why, then, does the outrage porn rise to the top of the Reddit home page?
Because it measurably increases sales in a huge way right now.
To use a baseball analogy, how do you tell a juiced to the gills superstar that steroids are actually hurting their long-term outlook?
There’s no way to show Barry Bonds a future in which he’s shadow banned from the hall of fame and unmentionable even on his own teams broadcasts.
The change will come either with regulation or when a new, better system comes along and steals their users.
Besides, if our brains are designed to zoom in on certain signals, is it rational to expect technology to somehow prevent this?
Technology can mitigate it (by suppressing the signals, offsetting the effect) or exploit and exacerbate it. The former is often socially useful, but the latter is usually the path of least resistance to profits, and capitalism isn't a system whose incentives optimize for social utility.
But the solution is to find a subreddit that works the way you want it to.
r/offmychest vs r/trueoffmychest
r/gaming vs r/truegaming
r/movies vs r/truefilm
r/unpopularopinion vs r/trueunpopularopinion
I don’t find this to be the case at all. The amount of politics tolerated in each subreddit is almost entirely dependent on the personalities of the mods who run it. And for whatever reason, most Reddit mods tend to be activist friendly or at least look the other way when it comes to obvious soapbox accounts breaking the rules.
In my experience most subreddits choose to flair political posts rather than prohibit them.