I think you're giving Reddit too much credit. The frontpage is awash with astroturfing, agenda posts, and an obvious bias being curated by a handful of power mods. Sure, minor or niche subreddits can escape this, but that's probably only because they are non impactful to begin with.

"Flairing" posts doesn't do much good either, because the vast majority of users don't filter. I wonder if this actually makes things worse because the people who would downvote and present counterpoints have opted out of seeing such posts - furthering the echo chamber.

The real power of Reddit is to manipulate perception by a barrage of likeminded content, displayed over and over again to people who don't have their ideological defenses up because they're just browsing casually.

Minor niche subreddits are the only things that keep me on the site. The default subs are universally awful.

One of those small cozy niche subs I used to follow is now being spammed by bot reposts. Intelligent posts have dropped off dramatically. It is endemic.

The bigger the subreddit, the less tolerant of neutral-seeming Russia stories (i.e. "propaganda") and the more tolerant of heavily pro-Ukraine glory stories (i.e. propaganda).

As with all things, it's on smaller community subreddits where people are allowed to think independently to some degree.

Even my hometown's subreddit (city pop less than 500K, subreddit membership less than 100k) is so heavily group-thinked that many topics of current national debate are 100% settled on the subreddit and no-go for discussion.

That was more true a decade ago. Once a reddit gets big enough to be useful, it will be too big. After the_donald and similar, strange white supremacist posts started appearing in, say, small programming reddits that had previously been immune to shitposting.

I also experienced the reverse: programming subreddits, tv show subreddits, and even blogs and mailing lists started telling me to support BLM (which isn't a thing in my country), avoid beating up Asian people (which was easy to do since I was living in Asia), etc

I was there for Javascript tricks and they insisted that I check my privilege. It got exhausting, not because it's insulting, but because the signal to noise ratio of what I came to a subreddit or mailing list to see was way off the mark.

This seems to have improved a bit in the last year or two, since Covid stole the show, but not entirely.

That's not the reverse, we're describing almost the same problem