I do think you're leaving out a lot of contaxt when claiming that simply posting as a right-leaning individual in a non-political subreddit will somehow get you banned. Unless you're directly attacking others or posting really hateful stuff, getting banned will first involve some kind of escalation and very often also one or more moderators asking to tone it down or disengage. If you decide to stick to your guns at that point instead of taking a break, that's when forced timeouts and bans start to happen.

As an example of you probably leaving out a lot of context, you used the phrasing "wrongthink ban", which almost always goes hand-in-hand with (false) claims of being censored.

You also wrote that engaging in political discussion from a right-leaning viewpoint in non-political subreddits "carries a decent risk of getting some sort of wrongthink ban".

Dragging politics into spaces where they're not welcome is a bad idea, and will quite rightly upset the people in those spaces. It's their space and they get to choose what is welcome in it. Someone trying to forcibly insert themselves or their viewpoints into other people's space, when they are not welcome, is bound to create friction and anger.

Reddit doesn't promise that anyone has any right to participate in whichever subreddit they want to. That is up to the users and moderators of any given subreddit, no matter how arbitrary their rules may seem. You are free to find other subreddits to participate in. If your politics or general attitude is generally so that you find yourself unwelcome in most subreddits, that should be an indicator to perhaps be a little more diplomatic yourself, honestly. Or just disengage from Reddit entirely, you'll be fine without it.

Being of the belief that you should be welcome in all spaces and greeted on friendly terms by everyone is a really privileged position to hold. Not everyone is welcome everywhere.

>Unless you're directly attacking others or posting really hateful stuff, getting banned will first involve some kind of escalation and very often also one or more moderators asking to tone it down or disengage.

Sometimes it will and oftentimes it won't. Again, this is my actual experience, and the experience of many others. If it comforts you to believe that I probably deserved it somehow, that I have to affirm my lived experience over your baseline skepticism, then it's not worth my time to try to shake you from that sort of complacency.

For example, as I relayed elsewhere on this thread, I was recently banned on a travel forum when a discussion of traveling during COVID arose and I took the position that it wasn't obviously selfish/ignorant to travel if officials in all the relevant jurisdictions approved of it. For this I was simply permanently banned, and my modmail inquiries were ignored. Now if you want to assume that I must've laced my posts with racial slurs or whatever I'll tell you that that's wrong but I'm not going to be able to prove it to you. But this is just how things work on many parts of Reddit.

Whenever you are in a space that is not your own, you have to read the room at least to some extent. If your views are against the general views held by the members of that space, you have to choose your words more carefully and present your opinions more diplomatically than if you were in your own space or a space that is at least more in agreement with you.

This really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Not everyone is equally welcome everywhere. Different owners/moderators set different limits, often based on precious situations, which you may not be aware of.

Specifically the argument of doing things that a lot of people consider irresponsible, even if they are not disallowed, is a very sore subject with a lot of people during this pandemic. Authorities in a lot of countries have been way too lax in imposing lockdowns and restrictions, leading to much higher numbers of infected and dead than would otherwise have occurred in the same amount of time.

Odds are that the travel subreddit you mention has seen a lot of people arguing that if there is no travel ban, they should be free to travel wherever they want and however they want, which really rubs a lot of people the wrong way, especially those who have lost loved ones and consider such behavior highly irresponsible. Odds are also that the moderators previously made an announcement or even rule changes prohibiting those sorts of discussions, because of how they rile people up.

In the eyes of the moderator, you transgressed the rules of the subreddit, so they firmly showed you the door. I make no judgment on whether whatever you posted was morally reprehensible, what matters is that the proprietor of that particular space found it so.

Reddit is a collection of many little kingdoms. Some of them have kings that just don't like you, for whatever reason. That's their prerogative and there's nothing you can do about it, except maybe creating a rival subreddit that potentially becomes more popular.

>If your views are against the general views held by the members of that space, you have to choose your words more carefully and present your opinions more diplomatically than if you were in your own space or a space that is at least more in agreement with you.

Yes, and we know what they say about wearing short skirts and sexual assault as well. I know how to read a room, but the point is that the mere fact of the double-standard is offputting.

>Reddit is a collection of many little kingdoms. Some of them have kings that just don't like you, for whatever reason. That's their prerogative and there's nothing you can do about it, except maybe creating a rival subreddit that potentially becomes more popular.

Ultimately I don't disagree, I'm just pointing out how this viewpoint-based moderation creates a bad experience for a lot of people that will lead to their turning to alternatives, and that the scale to which this is happening probably is not just Reddit "working as intended." And it's not like you can just casually jump from say a hobby subreddit that bans all Trump supporters on sight to a right-wing version of the subreddit that offers a remotely-similar experience. My point is a lot weaker than you're acting like it is, which is telling. "Moderators don't act like this, but if they do it's your fault, and if it's not your fault then you need to accept that this is how Reddit works." Do I though?

Interestingly, Reddit has stepped in when moderators have tried to get too forceful with eliminationism - for example, there have been attempts to create shared user blacklists across subreddits but these have largely been quashed by admins.

> "the double-standard is offputting"

You bring it up because you were affected by it, I'm not sure you would react in the same way if the tables were turned. There are double standards everywhere, affecting everyone in some way and to different extents. Some face a lot more double standards than others. Consider that your experience is not unique to you nor to those who agree with you politically. Far from it.

> "And it's not like you can just casually jump from say a hobby subreddit that bans all Trump supporters on sight to a right-wing version of the subreddit that offers a remotely-similar experience."

In that case, if you wish to genuinely participate in that particular subreddit, you keep your politics to yourself and stick to the relevant subject matter. You quickly learn to segregate subjects, some forums are fit for one type of discussion, some for other types. Some have a very strict enforcement of tone, some are basically free-for-all.

Even if someone posts a political opinion that you disagree with, you are not obligated to react, in fact reacting may show your hand and sour everyone else to you, for something that is unrelated to the subject matter of the forum.

Discretion is the better part of valor, after all.

None of this really disagrees with anything I've actually asserted. I'm saying "just accept the viewpoint discrimination or leave" is really not an attitude that would be embraced by many. But hey, if you're willing to grant the possible reality of widespread viewpoint discrimination then I'm impressed.

There really is no such thing as "widespread viewpoint discrimination", except the impossibility of genuinely discussing alternatives to capitalism in the US, without resorting to name-calling.

What you're experiencing is simply that you are not automatically welcome in all spaces you try to enter. Some people have experienced that for decades and centuries.