I don't really buy that... the only liberal views I can think of that are popular in the aggregate on reddit are about the war on drugs and sometimes socialized medicine. In general, reddit is pretty hostile towards women, skeptical of feminism, overtly racist, and pro-military.

I guess I would characterize it more as libertarianism strongly centered on the perspectives of middle class, white men.

Edit: I guess "I don't really buy that" was a poor choice of words. I don't think you're lying to me. But your experience was very different from my experience. I stopped using reddit because I felt like all the big subreddits were too socially conservative!

I'm not sure how being skeptical of feminism is an inherently non-liberal view. I'd say it depends on whether the feminism in question is oriented around civil rights, or around some form of critical gender theory. "Feminism" alone is not descriptive enough to make any judgment over.

Pro-military? How? I haven't visited it in a while, but a common sentiment on AskReddit was a total disillusionment with the chauvinistic "support the troops" mentality and a belief that military service does not make one righteous in of itself.

Yes, the critical theory is what I'm talking about, and I think that knowledge is definitely associated with the political "left". The issue I had is that the skepticism is almost always ignorant and dismissive. It's just impossibly frustrating to try to talk to someone who refuses to do any background reading but wants to tell you you're wrong about concepts that live in an academic and historical context.

As for the military, I guess that one is more debatable. I agree that the Bush-era "support the troops" jingoism isn't around much, but I used to see a lot posts where it's implicit. Things like hugely popular photos of special ops soldiers followed by adoring comments of how "badass" they are.

Not sure why being pro-weapons is bad, but alright.

I disagree. Pretty much any news article or situation is sided with the left on Reddit. Its even difficult to have an open and honest discussion here on HN, because anything that goes against the mainstream view (which tends to be liberal) is downvoted and silenced.

Its getting to the point where the only way to defend against such tactics is to play just as dirty.

> I am still looking for a good place to have political discussions

I sometimes wonder if such a place can exist. Outside of friendships, I kind of don't think it can.

Theoretically, I think it can exist. However it would take a fair bit of luck for the core group that grows up around it being diverse in their opinions but also open minded.

Unfortunately most people these days are more interested in their initial opinion being right than in having real discourse that everyone can learn and grow from.

Political conversations that don't devolve into idiocy and hatred are the exception, and not the rule, in any forum or group I've ever encountered.

I think if your theory involves mass-exclusion/banning you could possibly end up with a place like this. But the conversation would actually lose an important voice at that point. The angry people are (often) angry for a reason, they're just usually pretty bad at making their point civilly.

Some of the most civil (and then again, some of the least civil) political discussions I've ever seen on the internet happen on places like Facebook, where people are friends, and where almost everyone uses his/her real name. I think those two factors are very important: 1) real identities, 2) some form of reciprocal relationship among all parties to the conversation.

If you look at a political debate from a game-theoretical standpoint, a debate among friends is a multi-stage game. You don't want to go nuclear right off the bat, because when the dust clears, you'll still want to be friends with your opponent. There's a continuity to the relationship. There will be a second, third, fourth,...,500th "round" to the "game."

I'm not sure if this situation is any more likely to yield productive discussions. But on average, it yields more civil, less abrasive discussions. On the downside, it can often result in echo-chamber conversations that never really get interesting.

Conversely, the worst and least civil debates I've seen have occurred on long-standing message boards or communities, wherein the members are anonymous, but they're known for their handles. These members have "known" each other for years in some cases, but they don't really know each other, and they have few qualms about unleashing the flames. Especially when they feel their reputations or credibility within the community are at stake. These users have created identities for themselves, and paradoxically, they'll often defend those proxy identities more ferociously than they'll defend their real identities.

Tl;dr: when people assume group or tribal identities, you get worse flame wars and less substance. When people assume individual identities, you get fewer flame wars, and possibly more substance.

I think, at least in the US, our extreme politicization makes that difficult: http://www.vox.com/2014/11/1/7136343/gamergate-and-the-polit...

My favorite part of this article is the graph showing how "Do you think Twelve Years a Slave should win an Oscar" breaks down by party lines.

I really want a place for a _structured_ political or philosophical discussion to take place. The same way that Stack Overflow placed a lot of structure and moderation around a Q & A panel.

Thats a g good question. I do have some good debates on Facebook but wish I could have it isolated from all those of my friends who aren't interested in politics.

You might want to look at http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview

They eventually bit the bullet and removed politics and a few similar subreddits from the default page.

Interesting. Thanks for that info. I will have a look again.

It's odd the Ron Paul was popular on Reddit for a while though. How do you explain that?

Libertarians align with the left on personal freedom (Weed, abortion, relatively blind to race or sex, less foreign intervention...) and they align with the right about economic freedom.

I use to hang around Reddit back then, but I don't clearly remember. My guess is that reddit found all the personal freedom stuff appealing, while mostly ignoring of the facts about closing the Fed, eliminating minimum wages, reducing intervention... But remember that during that time (2009-2011) most of the econ talk was surrounding the bank bailouts. Ron Paul's speech was actually aligned with that of Occupy WS, since most libertarians opposed the bailouts and oppose big corporations, given that they usually lead to crony capitalism. I also have the feeling that there was less nonsense on reddit back then, but this might just be my perception.

Reddit liberals and Reddit libertarians are in massive agreement on not starting wars or locking people in a cage because they have a plant; views on economics take a backseat.

Reddit was a pretty libertarian place in the very beginning.

Ron Paul was "popular" on almost every website on the internet because his fanatical supporters flooded the web with an endless barrage of Ron Paul support. Reddit, newspaper comments, other discussion boards, polls, you name it, they were there to tell the world about Ron Paul. They were a very loud minority.

That sounds like a borderline conspiracy theory. If Ron Paul's popularity on Reddit around 2008 was a fascade, it was very convincing.

Because there were no liberals running for the Republican nomination, so many/most liberals would rather support a libertarian than a conservative.

I don't. I am not saying everyone there is liberals but most are at least from my experience.

Reddit loves 4chan memes.