How about the sticky on the /r/atheism Roe thread?[1] The moderation team states that "there is no non-bigoted way of advocating" against abortion, that any argument you have "has already been addressed and thoroughly refuted", and that speaking up "will result in an immediate, permanent ban." The mods are absolutely opposed to freedom of expression. Nobody was shutting down discourse like this when I was growing up.

1: https://old.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/vjpvsa/in_honor_of...

That is indeed a pretty extreme position for a 3-million member sub to take. And r/conservative is essentially doing the same thing [1].

I wouldn't see a problem with all of that if people knew their comments were being removed. But, Reddit hides that from users, even going as far as showing you your removed comments while logged in as if they're not removed.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/vjpeia/roe_v_...

The Internet has always been full of private fora where people limit the range of discussion. There are plenty of subreddits where you can express your views, should they happen to fall on the opposing side of the issue.

The freedom to have discussions on topics you want in restricted spaces is not censorship, folks. And it’s (unfortunately) a thing that happens when your space is open to the entire global Internet.

Whenever I hear the word "Private" I immediately check my gun. There is nothing 'private' about reddit moderation, especially on a large sub like atheism (if i remember correctly, I haven't visited that cesspool since 2019). Power mods control tens of subs and cross-enforce their delusions and purity tests across them all, and reddit admins are obviously, pathetically, in league with them, always with the asymmetric tolerance and double standards. ("oh, they say 'kill all men' on female dating strategy? That's just their freedom of speech sweety. Now please remove your anti feminism post, it's harmful and ban worthy, fReEDoM oF SpEEcH dOESn'T MeAn FreeDOm FroM ConSeQuEnCEs.")

You have to stop looking at it from the ridiculous and childish private\public perspective and start looking at it in terms of right to exit and availability of alternatives. If a small, 1000 km^2, irrelevant country bans something, that's not a big problem because the residents can easily move out or otherwise subvert the ban. If a giant corporation with monopolistic control of its niche bans a thing and treats certain users unfairly, that's a much more serious violation of free speech. It's all about how easily you can get alternatives, once you reach a certain usage/alternatives ratio, you don't have the right to be "Private", you must be forced to be fair.

The public\private thing is a sort of "Stories for Children" heuristic that used to approximate the truer underlying dynamics somewhat decently, before bad faith authoritarian fan boys milked it into oblivion with cliché "Just build your own X bro" mindless slogans. The original idea being that 'public' things are usually things like states, courts, police forces and other societal structures that are usually very difficult to exit or be free of. While 'private' things are (the cliché example goes) things like gas stations or coffee shops, things you can easily exit and replace. The heuristic obviously breaks down whenever the private entity in question is $GIANT inc.

> The Internet has always been full of private fora where people limit the range of discussion.

That's fine, but Reddit shows users their removed comments as if they're not removed [1]. Users don't have a chance to migrate to another group or platform if they don't know they're being censored.

> The freedom to have discussions on topics you want in restricted spaces is not censorship, folks.

I would agree with you if the platform were upfront with users about what gets removed. Unfortunately at this point it isn't.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/about/sticky

I had comments removed, temp suspensions, and then a permanent suspension in one of the main covid related subs because I wasn’t agreeing with the hive mind around the effectiveness of “face coverings.”

Not only was my main account suspended, they banned my 2 alt accounts as well as my wife’s account. Any account that logged in from my home IP was permanently suspended without recourse.

All because I said “i don’t think masks are as effective as you guys do” in a covid sub.

One word: transgender.

Any light criticism or joke results in a subreddit and site wide ban.

100% accurate, they purged all the feminist subreddits that aligned with JK Rowling a couple years back. Ironically you are now hard-pressed to find a moderator on r/TwoXChromosomes who actually has two X chromosomes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCynical/comments/hovdsi/just_...

> Ironically you are now hard-pressed to find a moderator on r/TwoXChromosomes who actually has two X chromosomes.

Pointing this out would get you banned from Reddit extremely quickly.

Not a criticism, just an observation.

You're being downvoted but even as a progressive liberal I do think that pushing political correctness too hard and too fast has resulted in this conservative backlash we're now seeing across our country. Change needs to be iterative and sensible. I was amazed at how quickly public sentiment opened up to gay marriage and legal marijuana for example, but now equally dismayed by how quickly the conservative backlash is happening across the country. The social version of agile rather than waterfall development I suppose…

I'd hate to be the one to have to tell the minority picked last that their civil rights isn't scheduled until 2050.

I'm not saying that. Remember I'm saying I'm a super-liberal NYer trying to reconcile how good ppl in the rest of the country can have such different views. First I realize that if you've never met a black/trans/gay/immigrant person, you probably believe the worst of what Fox tells you. So as the progressive movement, we should give the benefit of the doubt to ppl (e.g. don't make a big deal of pronouns; state your pronoun without shame, but also realize that lots of ppl have zero experience w/ non-traditional pronounce so cut them some slack when they slip up). And find common ground. The biggest thing I learned moving from small-town all-white CT where yes, racism was prevalent to NYC was that wow, we're all basically the same. We all want the same basic freedoms and have the same struggles. Don't let politicians divide us and unite as Americans because we're almost all fucking immigrants.

Without being snarky, though, what's left to add? What minority is left disenfranchised?

If you can ignore the incompleteness of black/women/LGBT civil rights movements and the current attacks on black/women/LGBT rights, there's a lot that can be done in things like mental illness (both mild and extreme forms), medical debt, disability, poverty traps, veterans, homeless, prisoners.

Okay, but you specifically said:

>I'd hate to be the one to have to tell the minority picked last that their civil rights isn't scheduled until 2050.

Can you give me a specific example related to that, as in, name a minority that hasn't yet had their 'civil rights' granted?

Because my take on what's going on kinda aligns with the guy above, there's been a mass push for stuff that isn't any kind of accepted by the general populace (and affects fractions of a percent of people) and it's caused a blowback effect when people get sick of having micro-minority issues make daily headline news when their lives are getting measurably worse.

If you were talking about extending basic civil rights to groups that were measurably disenfranchised I don't think you'd be seeing the same pushback.

Instead we see 'drag queen story hour' repeat x 10. You don't have to be any kind of conservative to realise that drag shows and culture aren't well understood by the mainstream population and that a lot of people are going to get the wrong fucking idea and be annoyed as hell but the left just keep hammering it over and over again, like, it's NOT HELPING YOUR CAUSE. I can see it isn't helping. I can see it's going to create resentment and increase divisiveness. Why can't they see that? Are the walls of their bubble that thick? Do they have that much contempt for the average person?

The proud boys did terrorize children and adults at a drag queen story hour this month.

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-the-proud-boys-so-af...

Unless you're complaining about far right terrorism or intentionality divisive mainstream media coverage, you've completely lost me.

Okay, but you specifically said:

>I'd hate to be the one to have to tell the minority picked last that their civil rights isn't scheduled until 2050.

Can you give me a specific example related to that, as in, name a minority that hasn't yet had their 'civil rights' granted?

> mental illness (both mild and extreme forms), medical debt, disability, poverty traps, veterans, homeless, prisoners.

Poverty traps are a minority that haven't had their civil rights granted yet?

There is an entire and big-ish sub (I forgot its name) which basically just bans anything that mentions the word "trans", doesn't matter if it's a positive mention or a negative one, just straight up ban.

It's not that they are pro or against the trans issue (they're an "edgy" sub, that I do remember), it's just that the mods don't want their sub getting nuked by the admins and, as such, staying as far as possible from that trans subject is the best course of action.

I would do the same. Not because of fear of reddit, but because I have rarely seen a debate on trans issues not devolve into a hurricane of piss and then the janitors/mods will have to mop up the mess. I got better things to do.

moderatepolitics does this, not because they want to, but because Reddit threatened to ban the entire subreddit if there was any discussion of trans issues.

Yup, just look at the recent r/tumblrinaction and r/socialjusticeinaction bans. The reason given for the bans were "promoting hate"

Do you have any specific examples of the 'light criticism' or joke (including where it was posted) that directly caused the site-wide ban?

I don't, because it's immediately scrubbed. But I've seen it happen ine real time.

Very convenient.

What do you expect me to do? Hack reddit's Postgres databases to recover deleted comments?

There are several tools for viewing them, primarily based on Pushshift, an apparently individual-run database that grabs whatever it can from the Reddit API, usually within a few minutes. The frontends come and go; currently the major ones are unddit.com and reveddit.com (which honours user deletions, refusing to show them).

There are also Pushshift-based sitewide search engines: redditsearch.io is made by the Pushshift creator but doesn't show deleted content. ihsoyct.github.io does, but is unreliable, often randomly missing some comments and posts in any one run of a query.

With the amount of constructive comments/posts removed for seemingly no reason nowadays, and the blight of users overwriting and/or deleting helpful, otherwise anonymous comments when making privacy purges, I find it now more pleasant to browse with all deleted content shown than without.

Offer up something more than a vague "I saw this thing one time, trust me on this"?

I saw this thing many times. Trust me on this.

The Aimee Challenor debacle was a very high-profile, high-criticism, well documented incident.

Meanwhile on late stage capitalism they stickied a post with home addresses of judges, encouraging people to arm themselves and generally being hysterical. And that’s OK because woke.