r/technology • u/Well_Socialized • 24d ago

Social Media Reddit Is Restricting Luigi Mangione Discourse—but It’s Even Weirder Than That: The website is attacking the users that made it the front page of the internet.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250313203719/https://slate.com/technology/2025/03/reddit-elon-musk-luigi-mangione-censorship.html
102.3k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

3.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.5k

u/ZanzerFineSuits 24d ago

"It’s almost as if Reddit wants to drive away the very people who made it the front page of the internet in the first place."

This has happened to every social media outlet. They see a chance to make money and chase away their base.

507

u/effinmike12 24d ago

Reddit is traded publicly. Reddit is beholden to its shareholders. That's all that matters now.

222

u/TripperDay 24d ago

Ding! Reddit would happily shed 90% of us if it made the site more profitable.

99

u/thespaceageisnow 24d ago

It’s lost 46% of its stock price instead.

70

u/TripperDay 24d ago

I don't see how anyone who has used this site expected anything different to happen.

69

u/thespaceageisnow 24d ago

Its best days are certainly behind it.

54

u/Puzzleheaded_Fix594 24d ago

I feel like reddit, more so than most other social media websites, is pretty ripe for a competitor. It's just a link aggregator with a comment section.

46

u/sicclee 24d ago edited 24d ago

I can't help but disagree. The thing you dismiss as a 'comment section' is so much more than that. It's nested, forking conversations that are regularly deep with interesting opinions, personal or professional experience, skillful and specific knowledge that's often obviously shared with passion... and so much more.

Reddit is the only place on the internet that I can find regular people having real conversations about interesting stuff without sifting through tons of bullshit clickbait and influenc-za (I just made that up, I'm so cool). It's not always true, or accurate, or useful.. but it's often engaging and it's definitely helped me realize things like where I stand on certain issues, what really matters to me, what doesn't, what I find interesting, etc..

Plus, so many reddit posts aren't links. They're prompts, or questions, or shared moments / thoughts / opinions. Even the ones that are links are usually just a push to get the conversation going.

It may be ripe for a competitor, but everyone that's ever tried to compete has massively misunderstood what makes it great. There's a reason it dominates 90% of google's first page search results.

2

u/GoodBadUserName 24d ago

It also helps that google and Reddit made a deal so google will freely have access to Reddit to train its AI, while reddit is restricting other search engines worms to make people go to google to search stuff.