The 'proof' is a screenshot of a post that was called '92 of the top 100 subbreddits controlled by the same 5 people' that got removed. Why did it get removed? Who knows?

Do better. If you want to be better than reddit don't do the same dumb shit that it does and check your sources.

But there is something to be said about having the censor cabal out in the open for everyone to see. Compare that with Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, where there is no record of who is determining what is and isn't ok to say.

There's value in any information-sharing they do in that they share trends across subreddits that reddit themselves are opaque about, but the subs still operate autonomously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard

Video game producers are starting up fan discords that also have the troubleshooting/bug reports channels for the game on them. Video game mod communities are moving to discord.

Its going to really suck when a few years go by and a company closes or moves onto a new game and shuts down their discord. A lot of community sourced info is going to be flushed down the drain if people don't archive it.

Dedicated forums for particular topics were generally tiny. A forum with 10k+ people was a sizable forum, and not many where that large. Small communities got very little attention from spammers, and while they had their own trolls giving problems they were much less rarely subjected general trolls unless something like 4chan or whatever came before it picked up on them.

The internet is also huge and has zero degrees of separation in most places. I could post a link to a tiny forum here and 1000 people may see it. I could post it to reddit subthread and a hundred thousand people could see it. Or I could get a front page post on Reddit and a million+ people could see it. And with it tons of trolls, spam, and general idiots will follow and quality goes to trash.

This barely has anything to do with Reddit/Facebook itself. It's the power of network effects congregating people. Facebook was always going to happen, maybe in a slightly different flavor, or slightly different form, but once we got the computing capability to have millions of people at one place at once time, someone was always going to build it.

Piss off the admin and you might be insta-banned with no recourse. You'd even lose connections to the other users on the forum and would have no way to reach them. You didn't have the option of opening a competing forum where all of the old users already had access like you do with opening a new sub. You'd also lose access to the posts themselves and any content you found useful for the private forums.

You were reliant on the admin to keep the site running. Most had extensive downtime. Things would often break. The admins would have to run charity fund raisers to keep things up and many would threaten to take everything with them if people didn't pay up.

I still think it has devolved into one of the biggest tire fires on the Internet, but it was a cute idea. Maybe the next attempt will suck less.

Specifically, I really like the way Slashdot provides more categories for rating comments. '+5 Funny' vs '+5 Insightful' is a very useful distinction. '-1 Off Topic' vs '-1 Flamebait/Troll' is a useful distinction. I don't want to read off topic spam, but I often do want to read unpopular dissenting opinions. Slashdot let me read the "trolls" (dissenters) without having to wade through the literal spam. Great system, HN and reddit would be better if they had something similar.

They banned a load of female-centred subreddits too, a couple of years back. The moderators of these subs then set up their own Reddit-like forum at https://ovarit.com, with a mission to uplift women's voices, especially on topics where they had been censored on Reddit.

Reddit also discriminates specifically against homosexual women, in similar ways: /r/lesbians is a pornography forum dedicated to the male gaze, while /r/actuallesbians is filled with men pretending to be women. Any lesbian subreddit that is created exclusively for actual female women to use gets swiftly banned, and similarly for comments that support being exclusively same-sex attracted. This sort of 'progressive' misogyny and homophobia is increasingly common in other forums too, not just on Reddit.

The common theme of all this banning and censorship is users not toeing the line towards a particular set of US-centric political viewpoints that are currently popular amongst those who call themselves 'progressive'. Though in reality their views and actions are regressive and authoritarian.