Jerry, I'd welcome you to come back and see how things are now. I understand there was some moderation in the past that was difficult but that a change went through some time ago.

The group of mods running the show now seem to me good people and having seen how they operate I'd be impressed if other city subs of this size are doing a far better job.

I realized after writing the above that it was likely an older word than that, but it hadn't really been a growing memey word in the sub before last year that I had noticed. Maybe the year before? Time flies.

And thanks for the note on the Portland Police Bureau. Too late to update my post, but I'll try to remember that one.

Subreddits for any location go completely against the grain of reddit. The point of a subreddit is to group people with a similar interest, but the people who live in a city don't have that shared interest, they're just in the same place. Even on the bigger side, you end up with this cross section of the entire site, shrunk down and fragmented so that it's too big to ignore the inevitable arguments between the different factions, but also too small for the moderation to be any good.

Since the concept of a city subreddit is so obviously pointless, the only people who stay are the ones who like the conflict, exacerbating the problem; or in worse cases like the Canada subreddit, there is a hostile takeover by one side. If you want to talk to people who happen to live nearby, I think you should do so on a different website; reddit doesn't work at all for that usecase.

Are you saying that people who live in a similar location don't have a shared interest in that location?

I'm not sure what point in time you're referring to, but I've been subbed there for years and I find the content to be above average in quality (although not great) relative to other subs. If I had to rank it, a very rough ranking would be somewhere between r/diy and r/technology in terms of quality. Shit-posting is on just about every sub, so I don't think it's fair to base it entirely off of the handful of trolls r/portland has.

EDIT: just noticed you mentioned "liberal city", so if it's political stances you're referring to then yes a more conservative-leaning person may not feel welcome on r/portland

> just noticed you mentioned "liberal city", so if it's political stances you're referring to then yes a more conservative-leaning person may not feel welcome on r/portland

funnily enough, I'm referring to the sub often times having a more conservative audience, often coming in from the suburbs (Vancouver being a big one there).

Ah ok. Then that goes back to my last sentence - there's a handful of trolls and I think always will be, but the majority of what I see is pretty decent.