Earlier quoted context omitted.
>”if you just want to talk about knitting, you can avoid the people talking about politics.” I don’t find this to be the case at all. The amount of politics tolerated in each subreddit is almost entirely dependent on the personalities of the mods who run it. And for whatever reason, most Reddit mods tend to be activist friendly or at least look the other way when it comes to obvious soapbox accounts breaking the rule…
I'm not super active on reddit, but I do frequent (mostly as a lurker) some subreddits from time to time, such as r/math, r/learnjapanese, r/history etc. I don't remember running into any sort of heated political argument in any of these subreddits. Of course, for other subreddits it might be different, but this is my experience.
People I like in the world are unbearable on Twitter. I've unfollowed, muted and don't-show-me-their-retweets a good bunch of them.
If up and downvotes can work as feedback encouraging people to stop it with the "sigh" posts, or the rage-of-the-day posts, it could improve Twitter. If not, I'm not sure what could improve Twitter.