Digg's demise was due to its failure to police their content and to leave it up to the users. I remember it being a fun place, and then it became overrun by do-gooders we called the "bury brigades". Anything remotely interesting or creative got killed and you were left with press-releases from a few big media outlets. A dull news feed.
Many people moved to reddit, but /r/politics is pretty much exactly what became of Digg. If reddit didn't have diversity in its sub communities (and different people moderating them), it would've probably suffered the same fate by now.
The difference is /r/politics has a whitelist of "acceptable" domains. Essentially anything left of Lenin is OK, and anything else is deemed "far right".
That's not true at all the whitelist allows sites like Breitbart, Dailer Caller, TheBlaze, TheFederalist, and probably a bunch of others that lean heavily to the right.
Yeah, you know those bastions of Communism known as Fox News, The Hill, Breitbart, Conservative Review, Military.com, Right Wing Watch, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, TheBlaze, CATO Institute, The Heritage Foundation, and all those other left-wing news outlets on the whitelist.
"Left of Lenin" get out of here with that nonsense.
Well, my original comment was making a point that r/politics has become exactly what Digg became. A cesspit of bury brigades with a political aim.
I wasn't entirely sure what was/wasn't on their whitelist because I don't waste my time in that cesspit.
I'd be willing to bet money that they're not just "unpopular", but that there's a functional army of bots equipped to down-vote those domains automatically.
It doesn't matter anyway. It's not like somebody expecting a nonpartisan commentary will bother going to r/politics anyway. Anyone can clearly see it is full of only left opinions, and anything remotely right-leaning is heavily downvoted.
You're right, pretty much everyone knows r/politics is too left for most leftists, but people will defend to the death that it is balanced because only conservatives can be unbalanced; everyone else is a "centrist."
Though this forum is getting it's own tropes. Good luck being pro-copyright, not entirely convinced the war on drugs is a massive failure, and a person who likes living in the suburbs and owning a car.
Many people moved to reddit, but /r/politics is pretty much exactly what became of Digg. If reddit didn't have diversity in its sub communities (and different people moderating them), it would've probably suffered the same fate by now.