as a person that came from the 3rd world country and new in fediverse environment, i genuinely would like to know about this.
edit: thanks for the replies! sorry, i literally don’t know the reason since i’m not a western lol. twitter/x is too biased especially when musk openly supports trump so i came here and seeing fediverse is mostly are harris or biden (when he’s still up for the candidate) supporters. don’t know about reddit tho, i only use reddit as a forum for linux and programming stuff.
Reddit’s early days were also far more left leaning then they eventually became.
When you have a small niche of nerds who enjoy discussing topics and ideas, then far right wing points will get downvoted to hell because they are, quite frankly, dumb, divorced from logic and the real world, and don’t stand up to actual critical scrutiny.
Reddit got more right leaning as it grew and expanded into the general population and more dummies started upvoting dumb posts, then got more right leaning when right wing political orgs took notice and started trying to influence it, and now seems even more right leaning because they’ve changed their algorithms to prioritize controversial comments and posts that get people angry because it boosts engagement.
While very true, dont discount apathy and lurking. I may have made 15-20 comments on reddit for tge 10+ yrs I was on the platform. There were so many ppl 1. That typically someone else would respond. Two reddit descended into ppl who just want to argue semantics. Here without the karma farming people have more genuine responses
Over on mastodon on the other hand… I get the feeling people brought some of the negative aspects of twitter over there. Still overwhelmingly positive but I tend to get more info on lemmy now than mastodon Imo
I don’t think there’s any less karma farming on here. People still look at their up and downvotes, and I don’t think there was a legitimate industry for selling high karma accounts on Reddit. Not one that would make a difference at scale anyways.
The problem with Mastodon and Twitter is structural, it’s based around following people, not topics. It is inherently problematic because a) personalities and status get elevated over the logic of the argument, b) following people instead of topics inherently feeds people’s egos in a problematic way, and c) a given person can use their followers problematically (brigading, etc). On Reddit / Lemmy by following decentralized topics it eliminates or reduces most of these effects, though the mods controlling each subreddit can exercise some of the same influence.
You can turn that off in the UI. I did that and it mostly makes the place more tolerable, though I do find myself peeking sometimes.
Early Reddit was very libertarian, you would not believe how big Ron Paul was. It went more to the left once it got a mainstream audience