It's a cliche (I know) to criticize Reddit on this platform, yet I'd like to move the locus a bit further, onto structural criticism (instead of individual blame). I just started a discussion thread on /r/ultraleft/ (the leftcom meme-space on Reddit that I liked and followed from its very beginning, even though I was not aligned with their ideology).
I did this because I was interested with the most lively leftcom community on Reddit. I started a thread about Paul Cockshott's Towards a New Socialism, asking this subreddit community if they had any responses to his main arguments.
I was, of course, immediately banned. I received two kinds of responses:
1) from the community: "ask these questions of yours in /r/Marxism101" (to which I responded that I wasn't new to Marxism.)
2) from the MOD team: you are banned …
And immediately after: "you are muted for 72 hours in messaging the mods."
I'll copy paste the response I got from the mod team after the ban and mute:
I can guarantee to you that I'm not an "academic." I'm a wage slave, without any institutional background…
Anyway. I'm a fierce believer of structuralist critique of any and all platforms so my question is this: what makes /r/FULLCOMMUNISM; /r/socialism; /r/communism/; /r/ultraleft, etc. behave in a similar fashion? My instinctive response would be to point to the platform itself, yet I'm not able to make explicit its specificities, neither to connect them to the broader whole.
Sorry if this was long-winded.