Reddit is bad and I would never start using it in this day and age

but it's so so so far from "the worst". FaceBook has caused literal genocides, as in past tense, as in the complete erradication of a group of people has occurred because of Facebook. They were also instrumental in getting Trump elected the first time in 2016.

what would prevent something similar from happening here? I mean, aside from the current community maybe being better

Facebook, Twitter and TikTok are far worse than Reddit.

As you said, Facebook was instrumental in at least one genocide. TikTok and Instagram were used to spread propaganda in national elections (it's been established in Romania I believe). Twitter is massively responsible for the new rise of the spread of Nazi propaganda.

So yeah, Reddit is pretty bad but not in the same scale as these (Boston Bomber, the jailbait debacle, the IPO, etc.)

I've summerized the video for you. So the conversation is accessible to people who don't want to watch it. Please don't just drop video posts without some text to help build the conversation

::: spoiler summerizer
Michaela Reigns and Reddit snark communities

• Michaela Reigns built Save a Fox, rescued foxes from fur farms, and became famous for sharing that work online.
• Her husband says Reddit snark communities targeted her for years with false abuse accusations, mockery, and obsessive scrutiny until she died by suicide.
• Reddit reduced the harm to a count of 28 active members in the harassing subreddit and banned it only after public pressure.
• A small coordinated subreddit devastated a vulnerable creator with no structural protection.
  Reddit's origin and early failures
• Reddit started in 2005, brought Aaron Swartz into the early team, added subreddits in 2008, and gave immense control to unpaid anonymous moderators.
• Open voting did not push truth upward because the platform hosted r/jailbait, creepshots, beatenwomen, and the Fappening until public pressure forced action.
• The Boston Marathon misidentification turned thousands of users into a false consensus machine that harassed an innocent family.
• Ellen Pao's attempt to ban harassment communities triggered a revolt and reaffirmed that Reddit communities accept limits only when they approve the line.

Echo-chamber mechanics

• Voting buries minority views, karma rewards conformity, and power moderators shape what millions of users can see across large parts of the site.
• Reddit's political tilt grows from moderation bias, liberal-skewing user demographics, and a cycle in which dissent becomes less visible, less welcome, and less common.
• A University of Michigan study of more than 600 million comments found moderators remove politically opposite comments more often and that this drives echo chambers.
• A separate content analysis of top political posts found 112 times more left-leaning than right-leaning content, and Pew data places Reddit news users at 47% liberal and 13% conservative.

Monetization and corporate control

• Reddit turned user labor and moderator labor into a fast-growing public company through ads, AI data licensing, IPO gains, and high executive pay.
• Google and OpenAI licensing deals turned two decades of user conversations into a high-margin AI training asset while users and moderators received none of that revenue.
• The 2023 API price increase and the blackout of more than 8,000 subreddits showed that even a platform-wide protest could not force management to yield.
• Communities feel ownership of Reddit, but the corporation sets the rules, captures the value, and waits out resistance.

Politics, regulation, and platform reach

• Reddit is dominated by English-language American traffic, so American political dynamics shape much of the platform's global influence.
• European regulatory pressure, especially the Digital Services Act, pushed major platforms including Reddit toward broader censorship standards.
• Tencent's investment, the GameStop squeeze, and r/place show how Reddit can coordinate millions of people in financial, symbolic, and political battles.
• Section 230 scrutiny, harassment liability, user fatigue, and the export of Reddit's biases into AI systems are the major threats ahead.
  Reddit's current form
• Reddit remains extremely useful for niche knowledge, technical answers, reviews, and local community organizing.
• Reddit is also a consensus machine that rewards outrage, protects ideological enforcement, monetizes user speech, and refuses responsibility for the harms produced by its structure.
• The current architecture stays in place because outrage, engagement, advertising, and AI licensing all benefit from it.
• The platform promised democratized speech and delivered volunteer rule by a small class of moderators inside a corporation that profits from conflict.

References

• [00:00] Save A Fox Rescue - Fox Sanctuary — https://www.saveafox.org/
• [00:00] Overwatch 2 - Blizzard Entertainment — https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-gb/
• [00:15] Politically biased moderation drives echo chamber formation: An analysis of user-driven content removals on Reddit — https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4990476
• [00:16] Reddit news users more likely to be male, young and digital in their news preferences — https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2016/02/25/reddit-news-users-more-likely-to-be-male-young-and-digital-in-their-news-preferences/
• [00:19] Expanding our Partnership with Google — https://redditinc.com/news/reddit-and-google-expand-partnership
• [00:19] Reddit and OpenAI Build Partnership — https://redditinc.com/news/reddit-and-oai-partner
• [00:19] Reddit Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results; Announces $1 Billion Share Repurchase Program — https://investor.redditinc.com/news-events/news-releases/news-details/2026/Reddit-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2025-Results-Announces-1-Billion-Share-Repurchase-Program/default.aspx
• [00:28] The Foreign Censorship Threat: How the European Union’s Digital Services Act Compels Global Censorship and Infringes on American Free Speech — https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/2025-07/DSA_Report%26Appendix%2807.25.25%29.pdf
• [00:32] Lemmy - A decentralised discussion platform for communities — https://join-lemmy.org/
• [00:33] 47 U.S. Code § 230 - Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material — https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
  :::

I think the main reason the author said that its the worst is that reddit openly allows harassment in subreddits dedicated to mocking and harassing someone. Like he said, if thats a famous person with a team that's not likely to make a huge difference, but for a small time content provider it can literally drive them to suicide.

As long as this place stays small and unmonetized, it should be ok. Its when money enters the picture that things turn evil in a hurry.

The ability to pick up and move without loss of content, and especially the lack of a central authoritarian control system, i.e. spez got the final word in whatever happens (or that he does not allow to happen) on Reddit, but such a thing does not exist here, even in theory.

Also, the people here are those who chose to flee the oppressive practices of Reddit. We remember why we left, and are not eager to bring those practices here as well. If you want lazy people screeching about BuT mUh FrEeDuMs!, visit the likes of Truth Social, Nostr, Xhitter, or Reddit, but that's not how we like to do things here! Including building the software in the first place.