I have never been accused of being a racist transphobe whatever, if that’s your number one issue with the site maybe some inward reflection is in order? Just don’t get involved in political flamewars, they serve absolutely no purpose for anyone involved.

I mostly stick with smaller, non-default subs and don't really run into this problem anymore.

Perhaps you simply haven't encountered the kind of person who, at the vaguest sense of an opportunity to claim the title of Most Moral Person, will leap up to condescend you based on the most uncharitable and motivated reading of your words.

If it happens again and again, in different circles with different people, like GP indicates happens, then maybe, just maybe it's not everyone else that's the problem.

If I think AITA subs and similar communities really aren't very tolerant people at all. Sure, there are people that like to provoke, but I think some subs are just some form of merger of similar people believing themselves to be oh so generous in their judgmentality but in reality are pretty toxic by almost all standards.

> in different circles with different people, like GP indicates happens

But you just chose to ignore it and soldier on with your rambling diatribe.

If people in completely different subs like StarTrek and CanadaCoronavirus and god knows how many others all say someone is an asshole, then the person is just a fucking asshole. That’s all there is to it.

It’s not some big conspiracy caused by “merging of subs” or whatever other BS you and your friends come up with to justify your shitty behavior.

Considering this thread is no longer on the front page and you somehow chose to reply to all my comments and their sibling threads in here, I’m just going to go on a limb to say you’re probably a sock puppet for someone else here. Next time, just use your main account.

And only on Reddit.

In real life, and in other online communities (e.g. I’m a member of a “DINK” Facebook group for people without kids), I haven’t had this problem.

I haven’t gotten into flame wars with ad-hominems in recent memory either.

People are a lot less eager to play the “you’re vaguely problematic” card outside Reddit.

Reddit is not one person, you understand that right?

If multiple people on different parts of Reddit are telling you you’re an asshole— something I explicitly called out— then Occam’s Razor says that you are, in fact, the asshole.

The meme certainly applies, but not in the way you think it does.

If it’s only Reddit that finds many people’s behaviour objectionable Occam’s Razor would determine that Reddit is the problem.

Bullshit.

Reddit is made up of millions of people with different viewpoints. There are subreddits that are left leaning, centrist, right leaning, and everything in between. And many, many more which have no political viewpoint because they literally have nothing to do with politics.

To claim an entire user base has a “certain political viewpoint” is plainly ignoring the reality of the situation.

It certainly is a great strawman but it’s in no way shape or form representative of reality.

I’m going to ignore the rest of your comment because you clearly can’t conceptualize the basic idea that Reddit is not one mind. Come back to me when this most basic of concepts has sunk in and we can have an actual discussion rather than whatever this idiotic back and forth you’re insisting on is.

Next time, don’t bother replying at all and save everyone the minute.

Did you also bother to read your own comments while you were at it? I would have assumed you did but you clearly have shown that comprehension is not in your wheelhouse.

> painting any assessment of Reddit to be a statement that Reddit has a single political opinion, which is a statement that nobody is making

I mean, that's literally what you did, but go off sis.

> I think we both know that Reddit has a certain political viewpoint, so let’s not pretend that we don’t.

Gotta love how you can't even keep your own argument straight, let alone comprehending a basic fact like "millions of people have their own thoughts and opinions on a site"

No.

Your quote does not support the assertion.

An average does not mean that individual data points can have different values.

I’m not a woman. My username is my own name. I’m not sure what you were trying here.

You should probably read the HN guidelines.

Almost word for word.

Is your cognitive dissonance that extreme? This gaslighting is idiotic when your own comments are right there to read.

Just stop. You’ve clearly proven you can’t even keep your own arguments straight, let alone properly respond to others’. There is no basis for discussion if you refuse to acknowledge the things you’ve clearly said.

Again, this doesn’t preclude there being a multitude of political affiliations on Reddit.

I’ve been very consistent on this and think you’ve done very poorly in response. It’s possible you’re so angry you’re not even reading what you’re quoting.

But ok.

> it’s Reddit that is out of touch.

> If it’s only Reddit that finds many people’s behaviour objectionable Occam’s Razor would determine that Reddit is the problem

Hell, even in this comment you continue to do it.

> Again, Reddit leans left of the general population.

Now suddenly Reddit is multiple people with multiple opinions?

> I’ve been very consistent on this

Consistent is the opposite of what you've been. But ok.

Do you actually believe the things you write? Like actually?

If this struck such a nerve with you, then you may want to take a step back and re-evaluate why you're so deeply triggered by people advocating for introspection instead of deflection.

It's pretty clear from your comment you won't, but that's a separate issue.

Projecting your obvious superiority complex onto others while at the same time accusing others of doing so is, quite frankly, hilarious.

Next time, just introspect instead of digging this idiotic hole further. It’s not really that hard to ask yourself “am I the asshole” and it’s quite obvious you’ve never done it in your life.

Either way, I’m done with whatever you want to call this obnoxious rambling of yours.

I've not run into that either and I've been on reddit since before digg v4

Banned. That's anti-vaxx propaganda on my part, evidently.

I messaged the mods to explain that I was triple-vaxxed and what I said was not only factually correct, it wasn't even controversial.

The mods patiently replied that anti-vaxx trolls like me will be reported to reddit to have my entire account banned "for harassment" if I contact them again.

What inward reflection do I need? This is just one of myriad examples with mods who don't actually read or process the content about which they're banning people.

Does it seem to you like the kind of person you’re interacting with is reasonable here but unreasonable to the point of group toxicity elsewhere? Or that I'm unreasonable here?

Your initial comment here was unsupported by real world examples, and used a lot of rage-bait buzzwords.

When asked to put up a concrete example, no-one called you a fascist/nazi/transphobe in the example. They banned you for, according to you, "just asking questions" on a country specific coronavirus subreddit.

Your tone comes off as "I'm right, they're wrong. I'm the victim here!"

" saying at the time we didn't yet know how many doses and on what schedule of the vaccine would be needed."

"I messaged the mods to explain that I was triple-vaxxed "

So we can infer from this post that this happened sometime after Aug 2021. So someone went into the Canada Coronavirus group, a group where posts seem to get tens of comments, and brought up completely innocently, "how we don't know how many doses" we need. To make a broader point on what... could it have been, "how we shouldn't have a mandate?"

Perhaps this was closer to Feb/2022 where the Trucker protest was raging across Canada. Of course, the mods may not want a big flamewar over mandates in their group that seems like a niche information aggregation sub.

I consider the playing of the accusation of the JAQ wildcard (an immediate victory in the minds of some subsets of observers) to be a much more dangerous (often literally unrealizeable) cultural norm, it is a go to staple technique in any delusional internet rhetorician's toolkit.

It is a well known tactic for ill intent. For a reason. People do it all the time and should be called out for doing so.

It's quite obvious when someone asks you questions with ill intent.

You believe the example was asked in bad faith? I heavily doubt it, it is a pure insinuation. I believe you are just walrussing here.

edit: Never mind, "walrussing" allegedly does exist. But I believe the criticism still can be understood.

Just because you can’t does not make it impossible.

> You believe the example was asked in bad faith?

When, exactly, did I claim that? Show me the exact quote because it doesn’t exist.

Making up things other said is a very obvious way to tell if someone is coming with bad intent.

Intuition yields belief, but beliefs and knowledge are not the same even though they are typically indistinguishable to the one who holds them.

This was the content of my comment, which got me banned from /r/CanadaCoronavirus.

I answered yes. As someone who has built communities online and in the real world, you are someone that, at best, needs careful management. I wouldn’t willingly include you in a team or community. I’ve done life or death stuff with the teams I built, I’m pretty good at this.

From reading through here plenty of other people think similarly. You are more willing to argue than you are to hear that your behavior is problematic. Even after asking specifically, and being told so.

You are exceptionally talented at this. You have literally dozens of people bickering. Congrats.

Unambiguously, I consider you toxic.

Someone who has a strong opinion and defends it?

Someone whose basis for their strong opinion you’ve deemed woefully insufficient?

Someone who doesn’t change their strong opinion when presented with a dozen comments against it and a similar number for it?

That HN commenters are divided on my opinion isn’t toxic: it demonstrates it’s an issue with Reddit that’s affected half of those who’ve spoken up and it’s left us annoyed, shamed, or slighted. That we’re discussing it here demonstrates it’s a Reddit-specific problem.

If my behavior is problematic, then why is it only problematic on Reddit? On HN, apart from this thread, when someone disagrees with me they don’t reach for any -ist or -ic words (“toxic”, “problematic”) to describe me: they disagree with the comment on its own merits.

What does “problematic” even mean, other than that it’s bad and I should feel bad?

Calling someone toxic, problematic, racist, homophobic, etc allows for no defense because they can’t prove evidence of absence. “I’m not problematically toxic and here’s the proof…??”.

Lucky we are not building medical devices here. I’m not interviewing to be on your team in a work environment.

Instead this is an example of the kind of topic that is interesting to discuss casually on HN with other hackers.

The benefit of HN, unlike Reddit, is that disagreeing with someone doesn’t also turn them into a cartoon villain who must be vanquished. People here are allowed to be wrong without also being -ists, -ics, or assholes.

Here’s what I was originally responding to.

> Does it seem to you like the kind of person you’re interacting with is reasonable here but unreasonable to the point of group toxicity elsewhere? Or that I'm unreasonable here?

This isn’t an ad hominem attack. He asked for a judgment on his personal behavior.

"Do people have ideas, or do ideas have people?"

Carl Jung

Some mods have a hair trigger on that ban hammer.

Nope. That is it. Many, many subs would outright ban you if you dared to question the narrative or posted to a "misinformation" subreddit like /r/lockdownskepticism. It was pathetic, honestly. God forbid anybody disagree with what society chose to do with covid....

That’s kind of what I mean about inward reflection. If you find yourself on the receiving end of modding after stating entirely true and relevant facts… yes, maybe the mods are out of control. But maybe the impression you’re giving off while stating truth still leaves a sour taste. If you find yourself fielding accusations of being antivaxx and being racist and being a transphobe, etc etc, all in different subs with different mods then there’s only a few commonalities left. I’m not saying you did deserve any of this, I don’t have the evidence to, just that it’s something worth pondering.

My claim is the latter: it's a Reddit auto-immune disease that was hardly present in the early days and is now impossible to miss after years of gradual decline.

There are power-hungry mods, no doubt. They can be politically oriented in either direction, or sometimes just like to be the monarch. But I've been around reddit for over 15 years now, and in my view if you're regularly being accused of being toxic, I'm inclined to believe that you're the cause. And it may not be due to the factual nature of your posts, but the manner in which you share them.

Again, I don't know you, and my experience certainly can't generalize to everyone else. I was a mod for about six months, hated it, but that gave me all the insight I need into how dishonest (or possibly not at all self-aware) people can be when recounting how they were "wronged."

This is the very basis of why HN rules and moderation are structured the way they are: to actively discourage such an anticipated decline.

If a person seems reasonable and thoughtful on one anonymous forum, Occam's Razor suggests they are similarly thoughtful in another anonymous forum.

And I would argue any giant social network also inevitably declines into troll behavior and bad-faith brigading without active mitigation strategies. It is hard to balance these things.

I certainly think "I'm routinely regarded as an a-hole because I act like one" to be much more plausible than "I'm routinely regarded as an a-hole because this giant social network has a metaphorical auto-immune disease that results in me experiencing this routinely."

Especially when others participate in that same social network and don't experience that same problem.

The one benefit I could give this person is that they are seeking out subs that have a high likelihood of being ran by highly political moderators and are extrapolating that to the whole of reddit. The same could be true for what kinds of discussions they find themselves participating in. If they are attracted to highly political communities and controversial discussions, they would have a higher likelihood of running into such issues.

If interacting every day, it's getting harder not to be labeled an -ic or -ist of some kind in a sizable home town sub or a sub about a generic tv show.

That problem doesn't seem to exist on HN: more often people reply to the content of the comment without labeling the commenter.

My main problem with your conclusion is that this does not comport with my - and seemingly many others - experience, and my brief time as a mod has shown me that people who believe themselves to be victims often don't appreciate or admit their own culpability.

But I can't say that with any certainty, you're a whole human being with your own lived experiences, and I've no desire to review your reddit comment history either way. I do appreciate you are not the only one that feels as you do. I just can't square my experience with the one you claim impacts "every user" which is, quite frankly, preposterous and one of the main reasons I have a hard time taking your observations at face value.

But that's about all I have to say on the matter.

Don't forget the sub-perceptual cultural axioms of the era the Event occurred in within Time.

When you ask a reddit mod what is bias? It doesn't know. It was surrounded by it its whole life.

Maybe the burden of moderation makes them this way, I don't know. But reddit is worse off with them.

If you have ever moderated a subreddit you'd understand why mods wind up with heavy handed approaches.

Even moderately sized subreddits are a lot of work, especially of a post gets to the front page. You can't have gourmet experiences at fast-food scale. When you have a long list of reports to go through, and you have been moderating long-enough, your decisions are based on heuristics rather than nuanced explanation or checking the post history of some (non-subscribed guest) snowflake Redditor who think their spicy take is insightful and/or you're taking away their 1A rights when they haven't bothered to read the rules of the subreddit they are commenting in. Subreddits are not a townsquare open to all-comers, they are very large clubhouses with distinct rules and norms - mods exist to enforce those rules.

There's no time for - nor an upside to splitting hairs on whether a commenter is a transphobic nazi[1] or merely matches the archetype. When modding, false positives are vastly preferable to false negatives since mods value their time more than the individual commenters who get caught up, and I don't see this changing even if you were to become the mod

1. Or is a "woke brigader" on the conservative subreddits.

They're somewhat less so to those who end up being the false positives.

If your hobby's main forum on the internet dried up and withered away 12 years ago because the only place to discuss it is reddit, then it's not as if such a person can just go elsewhere. You have a monopoly on the conversation and you're clearly not interested in justice anywhere near as much as you're interested in kicking out people you just don't like well enough to care about justice for them.

Anybody that thinks Reddit is fascist should spend 60 days moderating a popular sub. Your attitude might change.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t mods with power trips. Reddit has essentially outsourced their trust and safety department. It isn’t going to be perfect.

I have little in the way of opinions about Reddit, but this strikes me as the wrong approach on general grounds.

It might be true that anyone who spends time running a subreddit will change their mind about moderation. However, the only point of a subreddit is for people to talk to each other and to read what others are talking about; moderation is nothing but incidental overhead. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or unimportant, but it does mean that the burden is on the moderators to prove themselves reasonable to participants who don’t and shouldn’t have to, by default, understand their work going in.

There can be different approaches to that, and in some of them the participants will come to understand and care about how moderation works—I’m not saying that they shouldn’t. But I am saying that if they don’t see why they should but the moderators wanted them to, generally speaking it’s the moderators who failed.

There is no natural law that says that there’ll always be a way to succeed, though. Perhaps in some communities, in some political environments, etc. there just can’t be a good discussion forum. In such cases, maybe it really are the users who suck. But the fact remains that if users get annoyed about the moderation and leave, then the moderators have built a forum that’s wrong for those users.

(This is of course the standard argument against every instance of “the users just don’t understand how complex the backoffice is” ever. But this instance might look a bit unfamilliar because it doesn’t involve computers.)

The balance seems impossible. If your moderation is "light touch" the forum ends up like 4chan. If your moderation is heavy handed, you're a power-tripper control freak lording over your site. You can't win.

I don't know how dang does it here. He's some kind of wizard.

Even 4chan has stronger moderation than what you advocate

(There are moderation practices that I disapprove of and are not coincidentally outright incompatible with the view I expressed. Like the advice to just ban the user if you dislike interacting with them or if they’re complaining about suppression—especially in a small community like that advice was targeted at, I know I’d be more or less unsalvageably bitter after witnessing this in practice, let alone being its target. But it’s still not the strength that upsets me in this hypothetical, it’s more the perceived arbitrariness. Which, if the moderator is not in fact being arbitrary, is again a communication problem, not a policy one.)

Moderation is overhead, but so is Postgres. Both are very useful solutions to real and difficult problems. Both still have to pay for themselves with some mix of user-visible shinies and keeping out of the way instead of grumbling about how difficult the problem is. The correct choice of that mix is highly situational and I don’t pretend to have the panacea in that respect.

Except in this case the ones in the “back office” are volunteers and not staff.

I’m amenable to your argument in most other contexts. But it strikes me as an awful argument to apply to volunteers.

In that context, if you don’t like it then you have to step up and do it yourself. If someone is doing work for free, you don’t get to complain about the quality. Instead, you pick up a broom and do the sweeping yourself.

Which isn’t to say that Reddit mods are beyond question or reproach, but if there’s a concern shared by all moderators, it strikes me as wrong to say “that’s a backoffice issue”. If you don’t like it, go back into the office.

The bright line for me is whether they can handle direct criticism. Everything else is window dressing - is your ego strong enough to handle someone saying they don't like you? If not, you won't make good decisions.

You never used IRC, have you?

Your response is to disagree with him, identify yourself as a moderator, and then... be abusive?

How exactly did you think that profanity and personal attacks were going to help make your point?

I'm not the person you're replying to

I don't think "abusive" is quite the right word for your tone.

> you're clearly one of the folks who was a problem if that's your opening position ... You comment is v clearly just ignorant.

"Rude", "abrasive" and "confrontational" are probably better fits. And I think you have a God given right to be as obnoxious as you feel is fitting in response to someone you disagree with with. But maybe that's not conducive to a healthy Reddit

Let's have a look at some of the adjectives you have used, directed at people in this thread,

Noisy

nonsensical

ridiculous

silly

a problem

ignorant

It's not abusive to call a "squeaky wheel" "noisy" when that's what it is.

When some one is ridiculous, it's fair to point it out, just as you are being nonsensical in this list of examples.

Ignorant means you just don't know. I am plenty ignorant about many things, modding a fairly popular and large sub is just not one of them.

Emotionally charged, sure abusive? lol

I don’t think “jesus fucking Christ” complies with the HN guidelines, but anyway:

I was recently banned and accused of secretly being a Russian spy by the moderators of a politics subreddit, for my liberal, but not far left views. I am active on at least two subreddits of invading Russian soldiers dying so I would’ve thought it would have been clear that I dislike the Russian government.

I'm pretty sure you were the problem

What problem is that?

Your comment reads like a puerile "no u" and adds nothing to the discussion. It's quite ironic given the topic.

For example, these wouldn't be the insults you would here from anyone who qualifies as centrist or anything further right unless you are legitimately doing something wrong. There are also plenty of more conservative subreddits with awful mods too that would never use those insults. And if someone calls you a "transphobe" on some niche gardening subreddit, odds are you are doing something obnoxious and off topic that would upset the mods regardless of whether you are actually a transphobe.

Combine that all together and it starts to sound like OP is one of those people who is "running into assholes all day" without ever questioning whether that is any indication of their own behavior.

Gaslighting in action.

To earn the Transphobe badge, all you have to do is complain about anyone else bringing up the subject of trans-anything on a niche gardening subreddit. Or refuse to boycott Harry Potter.

You're very quick to denounce this guy as an asshole "doing something wrong" based on absolutely no material information-- just a bunch of assumptions and speculation. Hardly an honest assessment on your part.

In my experience on reddit, most of the time people heavily complain about how awful mods are it ends up being that person was actually just an asshole.

I agree that mods can be an issue and many are power hungry weirdos. I’ve been on reddit over a decade and have dealt with them plenty. My solution to dealing with subs run by bad moderators is unsubscribing/filtering them, as the content is typically of poor quality anyway and it’s usually a giant echo chamber. If that solution doesn’t work and you are constantly running into problem mods, it’s more likely that you are the problem or maybe you are seeking out communities where it's very likely to be ran by bad, heavily political moderators.

The comment in question above does seem like the typical comment you see on reddit, where when you look at their post history you realize they totally deserved it. If that’s actually the case for this person, I can’t say, I agree there isn’t enough info. But I can say I’m not surprised people are quick to assume that’s the case, cause it definitely reminds me of those kinds of comments where that is the case.

Yes, this is the "obnoxious and off topic" behavior I was talking about. The mods of a niche gardening subreddit likely don't want to moderate a debate about your refusal to boycott Harry Potter.

For instance, I recently earned the badge by saying the Dax character on DS9 isn't "a trans person"... she's an alien with a symbiote, that has lived 7 lives and doesn't much care which gender of body it inhabits per se, or whom its host is going around kissing.

I'm providing plenty of content here in my comments based on which to either denounce me as an asshole or to agree that I'm not one.

That's p clearly a metaphor for fluid concepts of gender and sexuality.

You're jumping through a lot of hoops to not directly show or link to what you actually said, making vague remarks about what was said instead and then playing the victim game.

Someone else called it out in a separate thread as well, regarding the Coronavirus debacle. You seem intent on providing a single side of a story and then expecting everyone to believe you without doubt.

Maybe just make it easier for everyone, link to the comments, and let us judge for ourselves.

Whether or not my reasoning is correct that the Dax character is too loose a metaphor for trans people to be applicable to real world issues, the point is this makes for no reason to label me an enemy of the state. I could be right or wrong, but it's a valid point of discussion in a Star Trek sub, under a post about how Dax is a trans character.

I'm not linking directly to the comments for one obvious reason: I don't want to link my HN account and my Reddit account together.

For that reason you can judge everything I've said in the worst possible light if you think that's fair under the circumstances.

Many people come to niche subreddits specifically to get away from all the divisive political rhetoric that has infected all other corners of the internet.

If it walks like a duck...

A partial defense is the reactionaries are quite good at mainstreaming their blather. For example, a few of us fell for Haidt's moral foundations nonsense, if only briefly.

Not that I’d equate the decline and fall of quality interactions on Reddit with “oppression”.

Reddit's moderation system is exactly the kind of world I don't want to live in.

I left in 2018 or there-around. Probably stayed too long, in retrospect. 10+ year account, moderated multiple subreddits and a pillar of the community type figure in a few others.

On some level it felt like each election cycle dug deeper trenches until the entire website looked like the battle of Verdun. This wasn't exclusively an American phenomenon either. The same thing happened on several national subreddits.

I also got the sense that the reddit members cultivated a sort of creeping depression that was really allowed to fester on some subreddits essentially all about exchanging thoughts of hopelessness and doom. This was before Covid. I can't imagine it got better those years. Granted, Reddit was wallowing in "forever alone"-memes even 15 years ago, but it feels like the darkness of that abyss got darker as the years passed.

I've looked back a few times but I've immediately turned heel as I saw what a toxic dumpster fire it's turned into. Like it isn't as obvious if you've been in it, but jesus f christ on pogo stick is it ever clear to see when you've been away for a couple of years.

“It’s already turned into an echo-chamber of nonsense, ruled by all-powerful mods to whom every user is a racist transphobe nazi homophobe enemy.”

Moderators (excepting automod) are human, and like all of us they sometimes make mistakes, some may have biases or having a bad day. I have not seen what you are describing.

Nobody on Reddit has called me any of those things.

I guess later that meant that masstagger flagged me as a T_D poster, so about 10% of my future posts were responded to by someone telling me I was a racist piece of shit.

I would also get mod messages once a week from subs I never post in(like 2xc) saying I was banned from their sub for participating in hate subs.

And then later my account was perma banned for no good reason at all, I'm assuming it helped that I was tagged as a T_D poster.

I hope that is sarcasm. Consent is important, and spamming people with whatever pet theory you've decided is the "truth" is certainly not the actions of a moral person.

That pretty much sums up most online forums these days.

Most of one group: This disagrees with my views. I'm going to boycott it / ridicule it / or ask it to go elsewhere / some/all of the above.

Most of another: This disagrees with my views. THIS IS WAR, I will destroy it!

A few sensible people on all sides try to have a more mature debate, but are drowned out by the cacophony, mostly from those declaring war.

You need to learn what the word "censorship" means if you want to continue using it and have people take you seriously.

Until you win hearts and minds, nobody's going to want to hear what you have to say. Strafing a community with truth bombs will not endear them to you, even if you're right.

This never happened and you seem unwell

A person who broke their codes of conduct, who also happened to be a sitting president, was mass banned.

The great Digg migration was something of a perfect storm. Digg shot themselves in the foot, yes, but Reddit was already up-and-coming and viewed as the most viable alternative.

There isn't really a viable alternative to Reddit yet.

I’ve literally never had this problem. And I’ve commented on a multitude of subreddits for years.

Curious to see some concrete examples where your comments were framed in this manner.

It really reached an insane degree on the official subs at least. There are some karma farmers that certainly are human that post and post the ever same topics, but the quality of many submissions really dropped significantly. And I compare that to the former reddit quality, which was optimized for mass instead of quality. Today it looks like some form of propaganda spam. Perhaps a result of news outlets copying more than before.

Reddit should have build on its strengths. It was better for discussion than Twitter or Tiktok. Not too deep, but at least you could find new ideas. Now they used the platform to consolidated opinions and killed the advantages that formerly differentiated the platform.

- commenters who are the problem according to the other half

- moderators who are the problem according to the other half.

I admit I'm much more of a lurker than a contributor, but I do post things from time to time. Comments fairly frequently in technical forums, and posts much less frequently, but when they are, they are either: 1) to show a project I did, or 2) to ask a technical question.

Basically all of these use cases are more and more an exercise in frustration. I've been using the site for at least a decade, but I can't remember having so much trouble using it until quite recently. The last several posts, let's say during 2023, I've made get either manually or auto-removed. Every single subreddit no matter how small has its own, different, set of "rules" and if you don't memorize them you get your post removed. These rules are often very antisocial, in my opinion.

For example, in one forum that I read very often, I never post anything because I only like to post my own work, as I consider such work to be "original content" -- I'm not one to spend my time scouring the internet for other people's work to share, instead I like to share when I've got something to share, right? Seems natural enough to me anyway. Well, I posted a project that I spent 2 months developing, yes as part of the startup I work for but it was a for-fun April-fools type project, intended to amuse. Banned. Immediately. For "self promotion". (There were literally no ads in it or anything, just a website with a fun interaction, and the startups logo in the corner.) Thanks guys. Guess I'll take my ball and go home. Apparently they prefer reposted nonsense to original contributions? Bizarre, backwards..

Another example, someone was asking where they could go for some discussions on a certain topic, so naturally I responded to point to some other subreddits. Immediate auto-remove due to "posting links to other subreddits". Really? So, like, they have rules against hyperlinking? That thing that is at the foundation of the web?

Similarly I posted a question to a Python forum, actually quite an advanced question about an interesting phenomenon I noticed related to async generators -- auto-removed. Told to repost it in LearnPython. Great. Did so, got a bunch of beginner replies, as I expected, instead of the in-depth discussion I was hoping for.

Now, I understand that these rules and bots exist for a reason .. mainly one reason actually, which is to fight spam. But enough is enough. At what point does spam fighting become intrusive to normal, community sharing of ideas? To be honest, this has gotten me so down regarding reddit that I'm considering just not using the site any more, as it's gotten quite boring because I can barely contribute without jumping through hoops. Trying to post or share something is just depressing because either it breaks some rule, or people jump all over it with negative comments. It just doesn't feel like it's worth the effort anymore.

Does anyone else have this experience, or is it just me?

But I have been soft-banned from the Raspberry Pi subreddit for years (which is rich!) for self promotion since I used to link to my blog posts about various Pi topics.

So I started doing text posts, and would have 3-5 paragraphs about the topic, then at the bottom a link for more info to my blog post. Nope, self-promotion.

I had similar issues in many other places, and in a lot of subs, even if you post a link, if you forget to also add a comment with specific points, or set flair after posting... all kinds of arcane rules, then your post will get deleted.

I haven't been banned from any sub AFAICT, but mods are swift to ban for almost any reason these days, especially for anyone who dares to challenge whatever the groupthink is (in the Apple sub, it was basically "if you dare put Apple in a bad light or question anything they do" for a time, I think I may have been banned there for posting a complaint about the Touch Bar!).

"I was banned from a subreddit for self promotion since I promoted my own blog"

Like, come on man.

But to be completely fair to him, it's Jeff Geerling.

Being hyperbolic here, but practically all the content in the Pi (and Homelab, and several other subreddits) is either directly his or in some way derivative of his work. He has just put in that much time and effort into this space.

So the same post that got deleted would have likely been reposted, with less context, minutes later. Likely multiple times by multiple different people.

And Reddit (and HN, and Digg, etc.) started out as link-sharing sites.

If not for "self-promotion", new blogs would never have been noticed once the era of blog rings died off and Google tried (and partially succeeded) killing RSS.

I think blatant self-promotion for selling things is wrong. But writing a blog post with information relevant to a community and sharing that seems like it's useful. If the community thinks it's spammy, then the community can flag it or downvote it.

I think it boils down to the sad fact that "writing a blog post with information relevant to a community and sharing that" has become somewhat of a minority case for blogs nowadays. They are generally either "self-promotion for selling things" (blatant or not) which you mentioned, or just straight up blogspam (almost always blatant). And when your job is to moderate a large community, you don't really have time to go in and evaluate whether each and every single post is the latter two or an earnest attempt at getting information across.

> If the community thinks it's spammy, then the community can flag it or downvote it.

In theory, yes. If everyone used the voting and reporting system appropriately, and people whose posts were reported took the judgement tactfully and with grace. But I've seen people constantly argue that "what they said wasn't against the rules" just because it wasn't explicitly listed as a rule.

When a moderator's job is already so loaded, they're going to push for making their lives easier. Blanket banning "self-promotion" means it's a simple decision when it does get reported and makes it harder to argue against a removal.

FWIW, I think the model you mentioned works a lot better here, where there's a bit more of a professional bias, and especially when people have linked their real-world professional identities with their accounts. It adds a level of courtesy and assumption of best intent that isn't as prevalent on Reddit.

Others have noticed the very same effect and felt disenfranchised by it.

In some subreddits your post gets removed because the title didn’t end in a period.

It results in subreddits full of boring recycled dreck, because the smart folks take their ball and go home.

Even if they wanted to actually be a useful community, the tools mods get on reddit are woefully unfit for purpose for communities of millions of people. You cannot have a public forum with that many people. The human brain is just not built for it. Perfect moderation is impossible

Some subreddits are notable exceptions, though—-those are the ones I’ll actually miss if this thing collapses. By and large, they’re small, very focused subreddits on particular topics; seems like once a subreddit reaches a certain size it just collapses into the above mess of behaviors.

It's usually a bunch of people making an inferior version of neofetch or whatever basic tool is well known to the community.

Weird, I've been put off of reddit because of the prevalence of transphobes, homophobes, and racists who inundate so many threads. I wish there were better mods to remove those folks from the site.

I have always been pretty left wing (have been a member of and organised for a range of left wing political parties) but Reddit was what very much moderated by belief in 99% of left wing politicians and would be politicians. If the kinds who rise to the top of subreddits ever saw power in our societies we would see the terror and widespread violence. There's a performative aesthetic idea of what being left wing is based on positions on issues, knowledge, rather than an actual mindset and series of real beliefs about what is the right thing to do.

It comes down to what I had always seen as the territory of the right but now realise that people of any political persuasion can do it:

1. Blame the system for your own problems

2. Other your enemies and make their problems personal failings

3. Claim that justice would be their destruction rather than their rehabilitation

And for social media companies these lonely, angry, miserable people drive huge amounts of engagement.

Reddit has huge governance issues as a community that stems from the fact that the corporate leadership cannot serve two masters. In retrospect when they did the big slow down on the "hot" algorithm was the moment it could not be saved.

It's less about the wokeness and more about the ability for a handful of mods to hijack popular topics and create an unecessarily unpleasant/unproductive experience for their communities.

I'll leave ineffective admins, lack of original content, spam, karma, bots, misinformation, automod, and monetization as separate points of discussion :P

Anyway, for me, "Narwhal baconed at midnight" was when I realized the site was overrun was kids. Slow decline while obsessively looking for alternatives since then.

Reddit was never good.

So? That's how every society works everywhere. Don't disturb the peace. You are an adult. You're entitled to your opinion, but you should have the courage of your convictions. Reddit is no different from other social media platforms in this regard, even HN.

Thankfully HN doesn’t fall into this hole as deeply as Reddit, due in part to the steeper requirements to participate in downvoting and simply how varied the opinions are here. Not to mention HN doesn’t have a cabal of “powermods” forcing subreddits to follow their own agenda.

Nothing of value lost with the user full of internet-points. Though I’m no reddit user (never was), so it may be really worse there, but this was already too much bullshit for my post-communist easter-european taste.

The issue is that we lose a forum for clearly examining and correcting our own beliefs, be they popular or unpopular.

This is the echo-chamber effect, and it's the antithesis of curious discussion.

Or at minimum we don't downvote as knee-jerk psychological defense mechanism.

And Dang doesn't go around removing comments and commenters he philosophically disagrees with either, even when they're obviously wrong or hyper-emotional, so long as they're not hurting the community.

And upvoting people you disagree with if they move the discussion forward in a good way is something we all should do, but it is a struggle.

- Mentioning buses in a thread about road wear

- Warning people talking about vigilante justice that intentionally tricking/luring someone into committing a crime makes you an accomplice

- Telling fellow trans people they can't equate Jim Crow with gendered bathroom stigma

- Reminding fellow queer people that Anheuser-Busch are just trying to sell more beer

On the note about queer communities: I get why queer people are sensitive because I'm a trans woman with a nonbinary streak and I was oversensitive in my first few years after coming out. My experience living out+proud all over the country for the past decade, lining up with the experience of other queer people in my life, is that that sensitivity is largely motivated by self-loathing and fear that our communities reinforce, and that one of the best things you can do as a queer person is learn to love yourself. Once you do learn to love yourself, you can see that life is actually really good for queer people--many less marginalized groups are falling over themselves to support us, our married couples average the highest household income of any other family unit when controlling for other factors, tokenistic representation and marketing are booming, and despite what the news cycle will tell you things are by-and-large improving in the legal domain. Had one bathroom incident in New York a few years back, dealt with sexual assault and groping in the early 2010s, 10 years later I'm still visibly trans and road tripping around the rural South making friends will all sorts of strangers in unexpected places.

You can apply the same logic to all sorts of other social groups and formations, internet conservatives included. The disingenous way to state the truth is that internet communities in all corners of society are full of pedantic snowflakes who need to touch grass.

It’s just a way to dismiss a point.

Reddit has controversial subreddits, the vast majority of which were closed down. That’s neither here nor there.

I’m not looking for a pleasant subreddit for racists. I’m looking for a subreddit for my local hometown where the default assumption isn’t that it’s populated by racists.

I’m looking for a subreddit for posting Star Trek memes where the default assumption is that I’m not interested in depriving trans people of their right to exist.

The problem with Reddit and its mods is that the defaults are way out of wack. It’s always war-time and anybody who isn’t quoting from the latest propaganda film is a commie-nazi.

FYI,this can come across as an ad hominem attack.