I used to turn to Reddit to get all the latest news about Bitcoin - and I must admit even after I jumped on the Steem ship, I still do it from time to time - I think there is just not enough of fresh bitcoin news and discussions here at Steem. However, the environment on Reddit has turned quite sour and toxic. The Reddit Bitcoin community has broken down into two rival groups. The dialog between each group is poor and each group has their own inconsistent narratives (I will probably follow up and describe some of the narratives in a later post).

Let's try to avoid such schisms happening on Steem, OK?

Group Think and Echo Chambers in social media

Have you ever heard the word ... groupthink? It's getting highly relevant in social medias in general - though quite often the word "echochamber" is used instead. We're more and more seeking out equal-minded people out there and ignoring the people we disagree with - it's a big problem when we don't realize the bias of getting our news feed from equal-minded people. At reddit it's often a big problem that comments are downvoted into obscurity simply because someone disagrees with them. While I didn't pay much attention to the US president election, I did read a Medium article titled "Dear Democrats, Read This If You Do Not Understand Why Trump Won" and I was like nodding all the way through the article, I feel it could as well have been describing the current state of the reddit bitcoin communities. Quote: "This is the problem (...) today, the technology that was supposed to bring us together actually isolated us into echo chambers and drove us further apart."

/r/bitcoin and moderation policies - or censorship, depending on your point of view

/r/bitcoin is the traditional bitcoin subreddit. During the last years, it has been quite heavily moderated. The moderators are typically insisting that the moderation is all legitimate and needed to reduce the noise level, while those being moderated are screaming about "political censorship". While quite some of the moderation going on probably do contribute to a less noisy environment, it's not hard to see that the moderation is causing a bias. Some of the posts that are removed seems to be removed for apparently no legitimate reason ("vote brigadeering" - when a viewpoint not held by the moderators gets "too many" upvotes). Ad hominems and other "bad" postings are speedily removed if it's attacking the wrong people or viewpoints, but allowed to stay if it's attacking the "enemies" - and everyone that is supporting the notion that the current 1 MB block size limit should be lifted is considered an "enemy". Three software forking attempts have been made by people dissatisfied with the veto laid down by the current source code guardians - at times barely mentioning that alternatives exists to the Bitcoin Core software has been against the moderation policy of /r/bitcoin.

/r/btc - the alternative that never became more than an ugly bigblocker echo chamber

Some people started up /r/btc as an alternative to /r/bitcoin, and urged people to move over. Unfortunately /r/btc has always been dominated by the people who has been permanently banned from /r/bitcoin - a mix of extremist bigblockers, people with exceptional skills at generating ad-hominem postings, people with very poor skills at negotiations and people totally lacking the ability to flip a coin and look at it from both sides.

Ad-hominems are typically getting lots and lots of upvotes. Some of the postings are on the format "Look ... X just said Y back in North Korea!" - where X obviously is some "despicable" small-blocker, and Y is something stupid or some quote taken out of context, and "North-Korea" refers to the "censored" forum. Some of the posts would invite X to comment, but whenever X writes a comment - no matter how well-formulated and well-thought-through the comment may be - it's instantly downvoted into obscurity, one needs to browse all the way to the bottom of the discussion, find it and explicitly uncollapse it to be able to see it. It's just ... stupid! Even if I disagree with X, I always upvote it.

The remaining /r/bitcoin - the smallblocker echo chamber

Many "moderate bigblockers" have left /r/bitcoin, looked briefly at /r/btc but found no quality there, and then left both of those reddit subs. The result is that the smallblockers typically dominate /r/bitcoin. Anyone briefly visiting /r/bitcoin would get the impression that there is a very strong consensus in the bitcoin community that the 1 MB block limit should never be lifted, and that anyone wanting higher limits are in a very small minority.

A relevant SMBC comics

Copyright SMBC, source: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939