The problem with political subreddits is they have gigantic blind spots due to heavy groupthink and constant obsession with semantics and labeling.

I've never seen a discussion of why some political idea is better than another getting in depth political theory with wide coverage outside of the current groupthink on reddit. It's always varying forms of appeals to popularity, authority, or someones favorite confirmation bias study that they are trying to shove down your throat to get a sweet dunk. The way the political subs differ is just rhetorical window dressing. Totally useless.

The other kinds of subs can be nice for a time. But i've always seen them to either die, become popular/overrun, and/or get a cancerous mod that makes everyone miserable.

Not just that, but the moderator's bias is often responsible for culling any deliberative participation. I mean, r/conservative can almost be as bad as r/pyongyang.

I mean... you refer to the groupthink as some sort of force on the discussion, when in reality, you have a bunch of people who think a specific political or economic policy is sensible.

This obviously has it's limits when the group has diverse views about the policies.

The strangest, and often most interesting conversations that take place in /r/socialdemocracy when the socialists or communists who see social democracy as a stepping stone toward socialism are forced to deal with the other social democrats that firmly think some/many markets are good for society as a whole. There is a ton of nuance in those conversations, while at the same time, anyone suggesting that we shouldn't have some form of socialized health-care will be laughed out of the room.

Another example of this is the Strong Towns movement and their various subreddits. It seems to be a very serious, very cross-party neo-urbanism community which puts Bernie Sanders voters in the same subs as Mitt Romney voters, all discussing the merits of walkable cities and the inefficiencies and concerns about municipal bond debt capacity.

These niche political subs can get pretty interesting.

In my experience on reddit every interaction starts from 0 with minimal if any shared knowledge.

You speak of people debating communism vs socialism vs pro-market democrats, etc. etc. are these debates rich with historical and philosophical examples, building on a canon and discussing the ethics of how these ideas would actually play out? Or is it news articles, rhetorical games, semantics, and confirmation bias studies?

The real significance of the difference there is the sincerity of the curiosity to find a solution. If someone has dedicated their time (reading serious, old, important books or doing REAL research) to understanding they have very few original thoughts and observing what came before them so they can say something productive. From what I have seen, that sincerity is stuck at a high school level pretty much site wide.

For example, here on HN you can actually find people who have pretty deep knowledge in their fields and they don't need an online debate to show that. They just contribute and people often ask questions of them not as an infallible source or to test them but out of curiosity. The 'debates' that do happen here assume a much different character from reddit most of the time. There's a much healthier dynamic and its as realistic as I think it can get for what is possible on a text based social media platform.

Even the smaller subreddits tend to have lots of groupthink. There’s usually a prevailing viewpoint on any given sub and anything contrary is downvoted to oblivion.

Maybe I’m not looking at the right subreddits though, who knows.