> He suggested that Reddit users are more skeptical and discerning than other people online, making it difficult for conspiracy theories to gain traction on the platform.<p>Yeah, /r/The_Donald, /r/conservative, /r/politics, etc. beg to differ. Reddit's community is mostly young and largely clueless. Any sub-reddit that maintains any level of quality at all does it through insane amounts of moderation, like /r/askscience or /r/history that will straight-up delete any comment that doesn't cite a legit source.<p>That said, reddit <i>has</i> been taking steps to crack down on bots and toxic communities: shadow-banning users suspected of being bots, quarantining subreddits, etc., so they deserve some credit for that. It certainly hasn't made it impossible to astro-turf a campaign but has probably made it at least somewhat more difficult.
Could it be it just isn't "cool" for those types of internet communities anymore? I mean even on 4chan which is considered its birthplace it's now mostly talked about in the negative[1]<p>[1]<a href="https://desuarchive.org/_/search/text/qanon/" rel="nofollow">https://desuarchive.org/_/search/text/qanon/</a>
For those of you who don't understand how the media works stories like this are not organic.<p>They are initiated and controlled by the subject of the story (in this case Reddit). See also the article about how hard the HN admin's job is.<p>Atlantic gets clicks, Reddit gets to pat itself on the back for not solving a problem that never existed, and everyone gets publicity.<p>That's how it's worked for a century if not more.