On reddit, you can totally avoid bans and still say something. On Facebook, your words and your whole account have no value if the algorithm decides you spoke a 'no no word'.
That's only true if you stay small. If the subreddit gains traction, it will be taken from you if you don't moderate in a way that suits the whims of the power mod / admin cabal. They may take it from you under a flimsy pretext even if you're doing a good job, simply because they want to add your subreddit to their dominion.
Facebook on the other hand finishes before something can even start because the algorithm checks every single word that you post, unlike Reddit.
Moderators on Reddit can be biased in different areas, they might let a comment pass or have a nervous breakdown over something they don't like. It's not clear and never will be but you still have the freedom.
Facebook algorithm does not miss. It does not overlook things or understand context. All it knows is someone said something they're not supposed to and that is the difference.
I'll take Reddit over Facebook anytime of the day because at least on Reddit, I can say controversial things (if any) on my own feed without the fear of the algorithm deleting it and banning me for a month where I have no voice, only a threat to be confirming to Facebook ideals that I have no idea what they are.
So yeah, both are censuring but Reddit allows more freedom.
I do condemn censorship in all forms (unless specific laws are being followed) but after fighting against all the platforms for a voice, I see Reddit as the best option for civil discourse. Hackernews is also very close to reddit and we know the model works very well.
Wherever I am, I'm always looking for good discussions (like this thread for example) and I'm glad that I can do it more freely on Reddit and HN than I ever could on Twitter or Facebook, hence my comments.
Granted you can just create a new account to route around it but still…
God damn I still cannot get over how many people continue to buy into this Covid nonsense.
Blinding yourself to the things that harm us doesn't make them go away, it only leaves you more vulnerable.
At least if my post is deleted I can tell. But when companies artificially limit the reach of content they do not like, you might never know.
Facebook openly admits to doing this. They are playing god by curating which information is worthy / unworthy of being seen, as well as presenting a warped view of reality to their users.
You may not even have been aware that the above is a thing; most people aren't. But in my experience it accounts for a large fraction, if not the majority, of moderation actions against real human users on Reddit.
Shadowbanning is very similar but IMO less insidious since it's a lot easier for human users to notice. I'm not sure if per-subreddit shadowbans are a thing, but I lean toward no because it has not happened to me (that I'm aware of).
Reddit as a whole does have shadowbans but at least as far as it is public knowledge that functionality is restricted to the admins. Perhaps moderators of large "default" subreddits get special tools though or perhaps they can call up the admins to do it for them.
Is shadow comment deletion not available to AutoModerator? My own experience suggests otherwise, though not conclusively.
If you haven't signed up for alerts on reveddit, odds are good you have no idea how many of your comments and posts have been silently removed: https://www.reveddit.com/y/<your_username>
One would be a "mod action audit." Each subreddit, or perhaps each moderator, would have a score indicating what % of comments are removed. Some random chunk of the removed content could be reviewed by auditors to determine what % were just spam and what came from legitimate users.
This way when I see a community where >50% of content is removed, I know that what I'm seeing is not organic.
Since then, I have taken tens of thousands of street photos, and the fact that I cannot post them on the most-used street photography subreddit is confusing and shitty.
I also got kicked out of a Discord server I moderated because someone asked to be nagged about doing their homework, and I nagged them, and then someone in the server created fanart of my anime profile picture hitting their anime profile picture on the head with a magic wand, and I pinned it. I thought it was hilarious and I treasure it to this day. But that apparently was the last straw. ("There must have been some underlying issue," I hear you cry. There was. There were some differences of opinion on how to moderate the channel and the discord server. The community skewed about 60% female, and I was pretty quick to time stuff out like "women should be in the kitchen, not watching a stream" when the inevitable edgelord showed up to troll. This was apparently a controversial opinion, and all the other mods that would back me up on those decisions had long since left. I was pretty late to the giving up party, but I'm glad I eventually left. Even if not on my own terms ;)
The TL;DR here is yeah, it's really easy to be a bad community manager, and people are pretty good at easy things. Stir in a spoonful of power tripping, and the results are predictable.
In the case of r/bitcoin, the largely invisible reddit censorship allowed for the effective capture of the coin's community and development. It was used to silence and remove those who believed BTC's primary use case should be cash. It was incredibly effective too.
For further reading:
https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor...
https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisite...
The discourse in many subreddits is invisibly dictated by the moderators.
It's not obvious when you browse posts because everything is organically coming from random people. However, moderators can entirely shape the conversation by only allowing posts that say what they want.
In other words: The moderators are speaking through users, by selectively filtering out everyone else. Many subreddits are also famous for banning any commenters who say anything that doesn't support what the moderators want to see. The remaining unbanned users are effectively curated to echo what the moderators want you to see.
Discord obviously has the same dynamics, but Discord makes it more obvious when you're switching between "servers". Reddit mashes it all into one feed that feels like something organic.
In this case, I suspect the core issue is that the person used the Stable Diffusion trademark, which resulted in Stable Diffusion playing the legal card. The correct response would have been to force a rename of this Discord (if legally obligated), though.