But Reddit just takes it to the absurd:
- Automods which remove posts which simply contain certain words (e.g. "coronavirus", apparently because too many covid deniers). I get trying to restrict covid misinformation, but I'm not even exaggerating, they remove anything discussing covid even if it's supporting.
- Mods removing some posts seemingly at random (seem using sites like reveddit.com). These posts really don't involve anything controversial at all and I can't understand why they were removed.
- Automods which ban you simply for posting in certain subreddits. And not radical ones, ones like r/PoliticalCompassMemes or r/watchredditdie. Btw, check out r/watchredditdie yourself to see more issues
Another issue is that Redditors in top subreddits tend to add politics to pretty much anything. Like, there is a highly upvoted post in r/nextfuckinglevel (a subreddit designed for e.g. people running ultra-marathons or doing crazy gymnastics or magic tricks) that is literally just a guy in his 40s ranting about how the U.S. government is fucked. And yeah, I agree the US government is pretty bad, but I don't need to hear about it in every single subreddit or r/AskReddit thread.
I’m dreaming of an “old Reddit”/HN-esque discussion board where moderation policies are opt-in. E.g. submit a thread to /r/bayarea, users compete to moderate e.g. ban/censor content. Users “follow” moderators to opt-in to their moderation policies. Basically upvoting/downvoting but for moderation itself.
Even better if a user’s moderation policies could be forked and lightly edited. I even think there’s room for a learning curve here, given how thoroughly social bookmarking sites have trounced traditional media.
Smaller communities can rely on simple upvote/downvote, possibly with some intelligent logic to notice who you tend to agree with - I think Slashdot was primarily this?
But past a certain scale, just dealing with spam is a huge deal. Plus you need 24/7 coverage, and you want mods to be reasonably responsive. Assuming each person can put in 42 hours/week of moderation that still means you need four moderators.
And of course you need a default for people who have just arrived at the site, so that they're not buried in spam or attacked by trolls on their first post.
It's a meme sub on the surface, but the discussion there is higher quality than any other political sub.
It's amazing what even a tiny dose of nuance can do for the discussion.
My time spent on Reddit has dropped massively over the last months. And I moved back to 4chan. It is so refreshing to see raw and uncensored communication. Even if 4chan often borders on insanity, it feels so much more honest and real than the cleansed cliques of sameness.
I remember it. A non-negligible part of the traffic was pedophiles posting LazyTown content, and users of /v/ would keep folders full of transsexual porn on their desktop just to derail threads they didn't like.
