I'm pretty much done with reddit at this point. It is so insanely user hostile. The frontend is a broken pile of shit. And the subreddits are echo chambers controlled by anonymous individuals with no checks and balances and no audit log. Even 4chan is more transparent than that. Every post I make gets removed, either immediately by a bot because the title wasn't in the right format or something, or just silently by a moderator without explanation.
Would really like to see an alternative that doesn't get taken over by nasty vagrants banned from other platforms.
100% agree. Reddit is propped up by its name recognition at this point. In my local city subreddit, I wrote a comment on a political thread. My comment appeared for me -- and clearly did for other users temporarily since it was being voted on. After a few minutes, when viewing the thread not logged in, it revealed my comment was removed by a moderator. The post continued to appear like it was visible to other users when I was viewing it from my account.
It completely killed my spirit for wanting to engage with my local subreddit. This wasn't an isolated incident. I had submitted local news articles previously to the city subreddit only for it to be instantly "shadow banned" (appeared for me, not for others) due to keywords used in the article title. When messaging the moderators asking why the thread wasn't appearing, I never received a response.
Quora was going in a good direction until it decided to remove question details. It could have easily expanded its offering as a more high brow Reddit, but instead it has seemingly dumped the flavours in favour of mass market low brow content now.
The international subreddits are much more awful than the American ones because they are moderated along American lines despite the cultural and political differences, and always dominated by uneducated American expats who seemingly have no understanding of world cultures or how local cultures interact with the world.
I think it all fell apart around the time of the first Trump election, whether you blame the Trump supporters or badly handled moderation, but the moderation has seemingly turned the website into an echo chamber with a huge American and left-leaning mass market tilt.
What I find very ridiculous is the NSFW alert that appears after you've been reading/watching for quite a while. It's clear what its actual purpose really is.
Would really like to see an alternative that doesn't get taken over by nasty vagrants banned from other platforms.