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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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It's the money. Campaigns are increasingly expensive by design. That and Citizens United basically made it so moneyed interests never have to worry about grassroots ever again. That's (very tangentially) why the internet is also getting so unpleasant, I think, to poison the discourse. If people were nice to each other all the time, we'd band together more easily. Paid trolls exist for a reason.
On reddit, for my criticism of the Democratic Party, I am often censored on liberal spaces besides r/50501.
I follow the rules always, I cite sources, I am polite, and I am a US citizen. I am not influenced by Russian propaganda (to the best of my knowledge), and I'd like to say I have decent stances; I advocate for nonviolence and human rights, and generally advocate for progress and civility.
The "trolls" (I do my best to always assume good faith) here have nowhere near as much power here on the fediverse as on reddit.
On reddit, once you block someone, it shuts down discussion completely. Users there strategically block after their first rebuttal to prevent any of your responses from showing up and to gain the last word. I often waste time researching and typing a response, only to find out I was blocked and my response is only showing up for me. The only way to get around this is to edit your comments from before they blocked you, and it is very awkward (and usually results in lots of downvotes when you can't properly respond to someone calling you a Russian troll).
If OP blocks you, you get kicked from the thread completely. You can neither see the thread after that point, nor respond to anyone else. Even your comments on the thread are invisible on your user profile (so unless you do voodoo and find the comment permalink, it's difficult to edit your comment with a response).
Mods also abuse automod to trick you into thinking your posts or comments are showing up for others (like setting it to remove everything for a specific user). They do this to avoid accountability when they can't easily explain what rule you broke or when mods censor based on ideological grounds. I also get censored automatically by automod often and find that my posts or comments don't show up randomly - presumably I hit automod filters, but I still worry every single time that my account is shadowbanned.
If automod and the blocking functionality isn't abused, any divergent opinion or perspective gets completely buried by downvotes. Like me pointing out how rigged things are for progressives (it's hard for me to stomach people acting like the Democrats need to move right because progressive policies are "extremely unpopular").
Anyway, moderation has been very fair here to me, I just want others to know that reddit is completely busted for healthy discourse and some of the tricks users and mods use to create echo chambers.
It's a lot of energy to invest in a discourse that is being oppositionally refereed. Under better circumstances I'd say it was laudable, and on Lemmy the effort is certainly less wasted, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe the better part of our energies are better spent on in-person political efforts.
I agree - I struggle a lot with my health, but there has to be something I can do in-person. Our direction needs to change as a society.