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I had always thought that Reddit would be more resistant to the censorship that plagues Digg (such as the AACS ban and white-listing a select few sites that control 46% of Digg).
Unfortunately this was proved wrong today.
The default categories that show up on the front page of Reddit to users that are not logged in are calculated by “activity algorithms”. The atheism category had legitimately (as far as I could tell by number of votes/users/comments) been one of these top categories due to activity for a long time.
Spez, an official Reddit spokesperson, responded here saying that it was removed because it was too controversial and critics were down-voting everything in it (which ironically increases the activity rating).
Needless to say people did not find this explanation satisfying. The Politics category suffers from the same problems yet it was not censored in the same way. Will there be an uprising like AACS on Digg? We shall see.
For those of you interested, here is the exerpt from Spez directly relating to why the category was removed:
Given the nature and somtimes polarizing tone of the content on the atheism reddit, it will likely always garner the ire of many other users. Showcasing religious flame-wars only serves to lower the level of discourse on the site as a whole, and unknowingly walking into such a flame-war isn’t the first-time experience we’d like new users to have here, which is why we think it best to leave things the way they are.
There are thousands of communities on reddit covering a wide range of topics. Most are for sharing new and interesting content from around the web, and others are strictly for discussion. We hope there is a place for everyone on reddit, and we also hope you realize not everything found on reddit is appropriate for the front page.
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Why don’t you give a try to http://www.infomate.org? It’s a not-for-profit fully democratic self-regulatory information sharing community. It works through a mixture of direct and representative democratic processes.
The friends system, community tagging and elected moderators(severely limited in power and their actions can be “overturned” by the community) ensure that there is little mob mentality on the site.
No, reddit SERIOUSLY censors people…most of them don’t realize it though. The only way to tell if a comment has been censored is to visit your user page when logged out and click the permalinks…it will say “There doesn’t appear to be anythng here.”
I could give you about 50 of my comments spread across 50 accounts that have been censored into oblivion. Just say something important about eugenics, zionism, or the global elite (naming names) and you will be censored.