This is a wide spread phenomenon on the platform. Sometimes its just a few comments or even dozens of comments in response to an original comment on a post being grouped together in another button saying (x number of replies) but when you open those replies its either nothing, or significantly less replies than the prompt described. Its mostly all on posts that are political in nature relating to the current fascist takeover in the USA, Luigi Magnione, amazon union busting, anti laborer’s rights legislation, loosening of child labor laws and other topics related to the wider topics regarding disappearing human rights under emboldening fascist authoritarianism. many of us have seen the news articles that mention allegations of reddit censoring comments and giving people violations for liking certain content but nothing is being said about the actual extent of this censorship. But when you can see hundreds of comments being deleted from a post such as this one here, it doesn’t bode well for the future
Definitely, though some subs have more of these ‘filters’ in place than others. Worldnews was particularly egregious; innocuous links would have a 50/50 chance of getting a comment shadowbanned, leading to a nosedrive in the quality of discourse as no one was willing to go through that gauntlet to provide sources (or just didn’t know their posts were getting censored).
Of course, any mention of ‘shadowban’ or related words is also an instant shadowban. SOP pretty quickly became to try to open your comment in an incog window to see if it had been turned invisible to everyone but you or not.
Similar thing happens with youtube comments, and probably on a plethora of other platforms as well. Between that and bots and other trickery, more and more of the conversations we see on the internet are manipulated and no longer truly real.
I mean these were political debate subs that presumably exist for the purpose of having these discussions so it seems weird to filter it, but… shrug Reddit be kooky sometimes.