Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him

Reddit is known for censoring subreddits the admins do not like or when they're involved in some drama, they have a specific algorithm to filter out Trump's subreddit from /r/all[1][2], the default subs are strictly aligned with the admins' political views, and recently the CEO mocked Facebook's knowledge of their users data saying that at Reddit they know not only what one publicly speaks (such as in Facebook), but also their users "darkest secrets" (in an interview about advertising on Reddit).

[1] https://voat.co/v/MeanwhileOnReddit/1373659 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/shittychangelog/comments/59s3ao/red...

Thanks for the expansion. I appreciate it!

That is complete and utter nonsense. Nothing you said is true.

You can visit http://reddit.com/r/all and see that Pro-trump posts are always in the top 10 and at least 2 will be shown in the top 40. So no they don't filter our pro-Trump posts. They merely made the algorithm more balanced to showcase some of the smaller sites.

And the defaults are not political at all:

https://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/comments/4l3svc/list_of_de...

> Reddit is known for censoring subreddits the admins do not like

r/The_Donald mods were censoring all comments against Donald Trump (hence why they didn't reach r/all)

> the CEO mocked Facebook's knowledge of their users data saying that at Reddit they know not only what one publicly speaks (such as in Facebook), but also their users "darkest secrets" (in an interview about advertising on Reddit).

It was clearly a joke taken out of context from conspiracy theorist.

Moderators can run their subreddits however they see fit. They're the ones who create the rules and they're the ones that enforce the rules, as long as they don't break the rules of reddit itself. Admins, on the other hand, should not favor one subreddit over the other.

>They merely made the algorithm more balanced to showcase some of the smaller sites

By... Filtering out r/The_Donald. You can claim the reason was apolitical. Fine. But I think you have to be extremely naive to do so, given what was going on on reddit during the elections.

>And the defaults are not political at all:

Some are not, some are. All that are, are aligned with the admins' political view and routinely ban users that disagree with them.

Ever since they allowed mods to lock threads, reddit became crap for discussions of controversial topics.

Why do you make that distinction? AFAIK reddit is not a free speech platform.

Because mods aren't paid and are generally put in power by their specific community to uphold the communally agreed upon standards and rules.

Admins are paid employees of a company (reddit) that provides a platform for communities and discussion. If the platform itself is biased, then it is not really a platform but rather a specific media / viewpoint forum.

The distinction matters.