Censorship disguised as moderation. This is exactly what killed reddit. You can't have a discussion over there without getting banned, it's just individual echo chambers who all censor and ban each other
It's just a list of nouns and proper nouns. Depending on what your post is, it could be a very unpopular opinion! Censoring words is why I won't ever go back to Reddit...
Don't get me wrong, banning words is stupid and gives us the Scunthorpe problem and I am very glad that we have an alternative to Reddit because its just a cesspit.
The subreddit "r/unpopularOpinions" was not full of unpopular opinions, and the words banned were obviously popular opinions because everyone talked about them until the API change and the regime cracked down.
I still go on reddit. In a lot of ways it's a lot worse than it used to be. It's way more corporate. Huge portions of the site seem sanitized, often in obvious and eyeroll inducing ways. There's also a lot less content in general. The content that does exist is lower effort, and way more repetitive.
However in some ways it's genuinely better. The discourse is a lot less toxic than it used to be. A lot of genuine cruelty wrapped in virtue signaling that defined the site from 2018 to 2022 is either gone or greatly diminished. It's also slightly less of an echo chamber.
I think what happened is that after the mobile apocalypse, a lot of the power users left the platform. While these people contributed a lot to the site, they were also extremely toxic people with an even more warped worldview.
The mods are a reflection of this. They are more corporate, which leads to a lot of censorship like this. However it also means that scrolling is quite a bit more pleasant.
Overall I spend more time on Reddit than Lemmy. There's very little content here once you filter out all the outrage bait.
that's easily dissuaded by no re-posts or reddits algorithm burying those. The problem was more likely because they were popular and highly engaged so they had to step in. Fucking "spez" is in there and you still feel the need to play devil's advocate?