pterodactyl

There's conservative gays and self hating gays and guess what, they're the same gays. Imagine the mod of gaming was Bobby Kotick, sure, he's gamed, his gaming CV is a lot more interesting than most, but is he really the person you want shaping the discourse around gaming?

Oh I had, and I was all the better for it!

Like I don't want ernest to be in here during the US elections banning magazines supporting the Republican candidate

Just to be clear the last time this happened anywhere online was r/The_Donald, which was objectively a radical exception promoting racism and hate speech while also being a sub "supporting the Republican candidate". You are being misleading.

Some have also polled their userbase elsewhere, the Retro Gaming Network, which represents about 70 subs, polled on Discord - they're currently 492 to 55 to extend the blackout indefinitely. I've just looked at Reddark now and the only sub that's included from those 70 is r/retrogaming, so add 69 more to the 6250 currently dark.

Sure there's instances dedicated to being human trash as you've put it, but in the general discourse it's not an issue I've noticed, and I think there's a few reasons for that:

• There are no "Agendas" here yet: Make no mistake there are people spending a lot of money to define the discourse on major platforms. An example people are fairly comfortable acknowledging is the existence of Russian content farms, - a lot of what stirs up bigotry on platforms isn't genuine users sharing their experiences or hobbies or whatever, it's people with an agenda astroturfing discontent so their backer can point to it and say "see, the ordinary people are revolting, they would prefer our regime/product/way of life". I'm not saying every racist on Reddit is a paid actor, I'm sayinga lot of people who haven't given things much thought are being prodded and goaded into being insensitive through consuming the fake bullshit those people put out.
• There are no advertisers here: Again, look at the major platforms, they sideline content and spaces about sexuality or race because they see these as unpalatable to advertisers. YouTube faced a lawsuit last year for “unlawful content regulation, distribution, and monetization practices that stigmatize, restrict, block, demonetize, and financially harm the LGBT Plaintiffs and the greater LGBT Community.” On YouTube, content is separated not by target age, or [N]SFW status, but advertising palatability.
• These spaces are not US centric. The US has some stupid laws, which Spez alluded to in relation to NSFW content, an example of which is FOSTA-SESTA. This is one of the reasons Tumblr and Only Fans attempted to go SFW. The laws claim to be anti sex trafficing but in reality they're just social conservatism for the internet age, you'll note in the link above regarding YouTube, the platforms defense of discrimination was that they were only abiding by the US Communications Decency Act, of which FOSTA-SESTA is an amendment.

The latter two points largely just hide or remove users from platforms, but that contributes to an overall atmosphere where bigotry goes unchallenged or bigot mods support bigot users. If people aren't seen as a valid part of the community things do go sour from there.

It's a link aggregator, people will see more relevant news by going to their local media outlets website, I don't see this as a valid reason not to go dark.