With the recent Chinese company, Tencent, in the news about investing in Reddit, and possible censorship, it's amazing to me how so many people don't realize Reddit is already one of the most heavily censored websites on the internet.

I was looking through these recent /r/technology threads:http://bit.ly/2SvswgW it seems that there are a lot (probably most) of people completely clueless about the widespread censorship that already occurs on reddit. And in addition, they somehow think they'll be able to tell when censorship occurs!​I wrote about this in a few different subs recently, which you can find in my submission history, but here are some main takeaways:Over the past 5+ years Reddit has gone from being the best site for extensive information sharing and lengthy discussion, to being one of the most censored sites on the internet, with many subs regularly secretly removing more than 40% of the content. With the Tencent investment it simply seems like censorship is officially a part of Reddit's business model.A small amount of random people/mods who "got there first" control most of reddit. They are accountable to no one, and everyone is subject to the whims of their often capricious, self-serving, and abusive behavior.Most of reddit is censored completely secretly. By default there is no notification or reason given when any content is removed. Mod teams have to make an effort to notify users and cite rules. Many/most mods do not bother with this. This can extend to bans as well, which can be done silently via automod configs. Modlogs are private by default and mod teams have to make an effort to make them public.Reddit finally released the mod guidelines after years of complaints, but the admins do not enforce them. Many mods publicly boast about this fact.The tools to see when censorship happens are ceddit.com, removeddit.com, and using "open in new private window" for all your comments and submissions. You simply replace the "reddit.com/r/w.e" in the address to ceddit.com/r/w.e"/r/undelete tracks things that were removed from the front page, but most censorship occurs well before a post makes it to the front page.There are a number of /r/RedditAlternatives that are trying to address the issues with reddit. via /r/technology http://bit.ly/2TLYsu3