Websites are not immutable. This is one of their largest draws. They like so much of today embrace change. That being said I have seen websites crash and burn. Cracked.com used to be my premiere website, that site that was always open in a tab no matter what. Then, it began a long slow descent. Articles got less and less reliable, with the facts being cherry picked, and the sources interpreted more and more loosely.

This is the nature of things. as they become popular to grow more and more bland, and eventually turn into little more than hollow specters of their former selves. Sure, cracked.com still exists, but it isn’t the same goofball place  it was. It’s dead inside.

Unfortunately, it seems the internet’s mega giant Reddit, has begun to make it’s steady decline into nothing more than a facade of its former self.

Reddit, is a website that touts itself, unofficially, as a harbinger of democracy. Those posts that are most popular get pushed to the heap of content. Sometimes those posts are little more than fluff, other times they  deal with much more serious claims. But for the average user you can rely on the idea that the community has chosen the frontage content for better or for worse.

Or is it?

I have been a long time user of Reddit with several accounts. My newest one was an  effort to cultivate only content that I wanted to see, so I started by unsubscribing to all of the default sub-Reddits. A sub-Reddit for those who do not know, is a smaller section of Reddit, that tends towards one specific subject.

One of the more interesting sub-Reddits I came across is called Undelete. This particular forum’s self prescribed task is to track down popular content that was for some reason deleted by the administrators.

One of the posts most recently deleted outlines the descent of Reddit from haven of democracy to little more than a puppet of administrators. The veracity of the statements outlined in this post have yet to be tested as true, but the post is reinforced by Reddit’s covert punishment of the author.

According to the author  she or he has been shadow-banned. Meaning that while he or she can see  his or her posts, no one else can.

The points discussed within the post are troubling, and the reaction, the deletion and suspension of the author in a covert way, are troubling. One can say the website has some explaining to do.