I think, there’s some soft censorship too.
Either it’s the mods downvoting posts early or it’s the level of users they have cultivated.
I feel like many IRL communities have been hijacked in some way. Like the Denver and Colorado subreddits.
I can’t find anyone who hasn’t been mass downvoted and it doesn’t seem to align with the upvotes. It doesn’t seem like certain topics are off limits it seems much more like the entire idea of community organizing is off limits.
That might sound like a strange theory until you see how much the Governor is worth.
Not to mention smaller elections have brought that level of social media manipulation. This town had a mayor who won by like 8 votes and felt it was worth it to flood social media with posts about “how great the water is”.
Now look at an Englewood, CO subreddit post about the water. There’s very little arguing, but a ton of downvotes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/englewoodco/comments/1u19v64/is_the_water_just_a_lil_gross_or_actually/
Meanwhile…
https://www.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/oy4vsz/psa_e_coli_in_englewood_tap_water_how_fun/
It’s not exactly the best water. It has had issues, but you get people jumping in to say it “meets EPA standards”. You see the same lines getting thrown out like someone has been leading what they should say. If you were to point out that EPA Standards is ambiguous and that many EPA standards have been lowered and with less enforcement, it’s like no one could even hear you.
The good news is, many people simply leave those subreddits or don’t participate. The bad news is, how powerful an effect on perceived consensus it can be to come into those threads without knowing the baseline.
Has no one done an analysis on subreddit votes?
I have been researching what would be needed to show correlation between the topics and the votes. Because you can still pull the rss of new comments and posts.
I think they exploited the psychological bias that n=all.
They do it for elections and they do it for major news media.
When people see these candidates they believe all the issues are represented and organized for.
When people see news coverage they believe that all stories have made it into the news cycle.
Even at the lower frequencies. For elections that could be independents or fringe politics. For news that could be local news stations or even social media.
The truth is many many issues aren’t being represented and Many many more stories have not been told. If you look at what the national insurance pool does it could be said many are being suppressed.
https://youtu.be/BYSFvq8sr7A
That’s also true for the courts.
We’ve decided that votes save Democracy (or it could be anything else). What I have not seen represented on the National level is why we are so addicted to votes to saving democracy (or your urgent issue) and if there are better systems.
Have you never had an obvious issue it seemed wasn’t reaching the national level?
Have you ever asked yourself who’s missing?
From candidates. From news stories. From landmark legal cases.