This article looks at Reddit as a “comment economy.” Beneath the rhetoric of community and information sharing, the platform’s economic incentives favor conformity, reaction, endless engagement, and compulsive commenting over independent thought, meaningful discourse, and the exchange of knowledge.
Reddit’s revenue ultimately depends upon the creation of, extended attention to and the scrolling through of massive amounts of comments. This produces advertising opportunities, data value, repeat visits and valuable user engagement metrics.
They ban aggressively based on who is in power at the time. When Biden was they banned even the tiniest discussion of vaccines in a not glowing positive light. With Trump they now treat Nazism as a legitimate political viewpoint and thus the whole punch a Nazi thing that used to be accepted as part of general culture became bannable as political violence and terrorism. Which I guess technically is true but it clashes with past American propaganda so it’s hard to unlearn.