news.ycombinator.com
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The biggest problem I have with reddit is mods can slowly but systematically ban users who express unfavourable opinions, and over time, anyone casually browsing could mistakenly believe those views are unpopular, whereas in reality everyone with that view (everyone who spoke it, anyway) was banned. To give a simple example, one video game franchise subreddit bans any negative discussion on the most recent title. Over 5-10 years, this shielded them from negative feedback. But the franchise has tanked because core users weren't listened to, and they ended up making something nobody wanted.
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My biggest problem with Reddit is that trolls, memes, unintelligent posts have taken over the platform. Go to any semi-popular subreddit and most upvoted posts are just low effort memes. Posts that are long and well thought out don't win over memes and trolls. One of the reasons is that posting a few short words wins in upvotes because they get posted first while it takes much longer to write something thoughtful. Reddit's system rewards these low effort posts for some reason. Over time, the platform becomes less and less trustworthy until it becomes something like Quora.
This is a good place to remind everyone that Ghislaine Maxwell is a moderator of /r/worldnews. She stopped using her main account when she was arrested but we suspect she's still moderating from prison using other accounts. If you comment or post about this on Reddit you will get an account level shadowban. Let us see if the pedophiles control this site too. Bookmark this and then check back later to see if it was flagged and removed.
The business model is fundamentally broken. Reddit, unlike other sites driven by user-generated content, forgoes the cost of huge (but ideally impartial) content moderation teams in favor of unpaid user moderators, leading to what you've described. Nothing will change unless the business model changes.
I heard an influential person say thing about YouTube. That the "real" leaders of popular movements get banned, and then people get a completely distorted idea of what people actually believe, because the only exposure they get is to the ones YouTube approves of.
While I do think quality of subs can be quite high (much higher than discourse here for certain topics and certain subs), this is a pretty well known problem. Discussion on this [1] from a post I made earlier. r/sanfrancisco is quite negative on the current mayor Daniel Lurie and frequently expresses approval for Zohran Mamdani even though Lurie has an approval rate of 74% in SF [2] while Mamdani has a 69% favorability [3] in NYC largely because of the political skew of the sub. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49556546 [2]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/sf-mayor-lurie-... [3]: https://sri.siena.edu/2026/09/23/siena-poll-of-likely-new-yo...