I give them tons of credit for this! With Twitter becoming, in my opinion, basically a Nazi echo chamber, the corporate brands and public personalities staying on the platform basically lends it legitimacy. It says “it’s normal to hang out in public places where hate groups thrive and are encouraged”. Microsoft making this choice is sending a public message that Reddit’s conduct is making the place unsafe - that it’s not perfectly normal to hang out in the subreddit that are lacking moderation.
It’s not necessarily a perfect comparison because I think Twitter’s leadership is directly doing things to promote harmful and hateful content, whereas reddit I think is just hurting it’s relationship with its own community, but the throughline is the lack of moderation making the content more extreme.
@wjrii
@Madbrad200
my experience is eerily similar to yours. Used it a bit in the first few days, popped in on occasion. Deleted my account today. When I first went on, one of the questions I asked was “is this FOSS or privately owned” and got bombarded with that cadre of users explaining why it’s better and safer for it to be owned by one person and that Jake would never make bad decisions like this exact one. At one point a user was being so agressive about how I should just trust Jake that I said I must be talking to his mom.
I also briefly had a Voat account when I thought Reddit was cracking down too much/too arbitrarily, and quickly realized that I was not in good company. I’ve been very optimistic about this Reddit exodus because it really doesn’t have the same ideological bent to it, so the diaspora isn’t just the dregs of reddit.