The other million subreddits are most of the good part of reddit, IMO.

Until you get automatically banned from the top subreddit simply for commenting in a completely separate subreddit the mods don't like.

Maybe I have nostalgia glasses on but when I grew up on the internet forums only deleted posts that had illegal content. They did not remove unpopular opinions.

Reddit is were actual discussion goes to die. Comes with the downvote ability I suppose.

10 years ago we seen a lot of open-discussion platforms. That all died when picking a side became profitable.

You don’t have nostalgia glasses on. You have a nostalgia blindfold on.

Mods on the “old forums” routinely deleted posts and banned users because they don’t like their opinion or hell even just as a “fuck why not it’s funny”.

Source: was a mod and active participant of such forums and saw it all the time. Did my fair share too.

This is true but I vastly prefer having my post arbitrarily deleted by a random mod than the current climate of ubiquitous narrative enforcement.

I got a forum admin fired once for crap like that. Filed a BBB complaint.

instantly reminds me of two moments in the early 2000s. 17yo me got banned from the then largest synthesizer forum in 2004 just because I called a mod named Angus "Mr. Beef" one too many times. :)

And another particularly niche forum dedicated to a specific range of car chassis with a specific set of engine swaps that would permaban anyone who asked a question that could be answered via forum search. Which was at least mentioned in the forum rules you had to read before joining.

Forum mods were notorious power trippers on any forum I've been on. Sometimes it was worth it just to keep order. Other times it led to flame wars and forum splinters where a few people would start their own in competition to try and pick up the unhappy crowd.

So really nothing has changed because this is exactly how most discord/telegram servers, forums, subreddits, etc still function.

> Forum mods were notorious power trippers on any forum I've been on.

Back about 10-15 years ago I agreed to be a mod on a pretty large and popular forum, naively thinking I could help keep the place decent and useful for the users. What I discovered instantly were hidden mod forums where they made fun of all the users, laughed about arbitrarily banning people, and discussed about how they banned posts about illegal stuff mostly because it gave away their secrets. I gave that up quickly and decided I was all set with modding.

Just reminded me of another mod power trip. Local buy/trade/sell car forum got sold when the owner got approached with a cash offer. The way the forum worked was it took mod approval before your listing would go live. Kept out spam/trash posts and helped keep the forum organized. It was eventually discovered that he was screening the listings for things he could make a first offer on and flip somewhere else for profit. Caused the whole place to implode and everyone moved to a handful of splintered facebook swap shop groups.

Never went to SomethingAwful forums then.

Is there a non-trivial number of instances of this happening where "separate subreddit mods don't like" is not synonymous with "hate-fueled misinformation subreddit"? If I wanted to run a good sub, I would think banning every member of something like "the_donald" would do nothing but 100% improve the quality of users on my own sub.

Congrats, you are the problem.

Half of my hardworking, law-abiding immigrant community of doctors, engineers, and scientists were on the_donald. These are people who’ve actually faced hate in this country and who likely have way more exposure to people of different races & backgrounds than the average American.

If that does nothing to make you reevaluate your opinion, then you are sadly and ironically a victim of divisive indoctrination.

I’m not convinced you actually saw what sort of content was posted on the_donald. It definitely was not just a hangout for Republicans. It was /r/c*ntown with a different name.

Important also to note that it was, by far, the most heavily “moderated” subreddit. You’d get banned immediately for posting anything critical of certain themes, even if it was completely in good faith.

Want evidence? Spend some time looking around at https://web.archive.org/web/20160601000000*/www.reddit.com/r...

Its worst content was no worse than what you saw (and still see) on other subreddits that align with the political zeitgeist.

People of all backgrounds were on the_donald, which should make you question the reasons you took issue with much of the content there.

Which political subreddit calls their opponents “fucking cuck” or equivalent with extreme regularity? For the record, this is devolving into a flame war and that wasn’t my intention. I suggest this stops here.

I’m going to assume you’re responding in good faith. “Fucking cuck” is honest-to-god no worse than the numerous insults I’ve seen hurled at conservatives by left-leaning subs. I’m a little surprised that’s the worst you could come up with.

Trump did very poorly with the highly educated and with minorities so it wouldn't be shocking to find the intersection was even worse. For instance 8% of black college grads in 2020 and 30% of Hispanic college grads.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-biden...

Doctors had amazing voter turn out in 2020.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

I couldn't find an analysis of how they actually voted in 2020 but only 26% voted for Trump in 2016 before he bungled the pandemic

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/873266

Then there is the fact that a number of doctors think pre-covid trump already was in need of mental health help

https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/13/health/trump-mental-health-ex...

Only 15% supported a repeal of Obamacare heavily promoted by Trump before the worst public health crisis in my lifetime.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-obamacare-doctor-s...

Far from it being half of America it looks like a small fraction of educated folks and minorities and a large helping of mostly uneducated white folks. If anything the fact that he has any support at all from educated people in America proves that being an expert in one field doesn't necessarily make you wise.

Yes, I’ve seen the stats.

Let me ask:

Do you think all 30% of college-educated Hispanics who voted for Trump were wholly misguided? Do you believe none of them had legitimate reasons for supporting him?

How about the 8% of black college grads, or the 26% of doctors?

None of these people were competent enough to make an informed decision?

This seems like a fairly obvious yes since his performance is no longer hypothetical. Donald Trump is a mentally impaired bigot who combines inattention to detail, massive ego, inability to select quality underlings, and failure to manage and performed abominably.

None of them were competent enough to make an informed decision insofar as the leadership of the nation because they relied on faulty analysis, willful ignorance of Donald's many flaws, and self interest in lower taxes.

I'm not sure why this is controversial. The average college educated individual is presumably skilled in their profession but their profession but that is hardly sure to inform their understanding of matters out of scope of that profession.

Do you find it surprising that 30% of any group makes poor decisions?

You could replace the words “Donald Trump” with “Joe Biden” and have an equally valid argument, with inflation to boot.

Half of inflation is economic reality having little to do with the president and half of it is corporate greed. If you think the two are equivalent I submit you haven't analyzed the situation accurately

They're not equivalent in reality (that wasn't my point, but you seem to think it is), but your argument lacks sufficient detail and presents an ambiguous enough framing to make it applicable to Biden as well.

Although your first sentence is probably half true, there were a few stimulus signed by both the previous and standing president which contributed to the issue as well. The amount of money that was printed between 2020 and 2022 did indeed help with inflation, which was signed off by both presidents.

Congrats, you are also the problem.

The most tragic part is you don’t even recognize it. You peddle loaded language with the broadest of strokes without seeing that you yourself are the very thing you believe you’re fighting against.

Genuinely believing every single one of those hispanic grads or doctors were misguided or uninformed, tells me you haven’t had many good faith conversations with people across the aisle. Nowhere do you even acknowledge the legitimacy of or a desire to understand the grievances and concerns that led to their voting behavior. But you’re certainly quick to insults and labeling.

Don’t be an Intellectual Yet Idiot.

“The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited.”

https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...

> For context, the parent advocated banning users from an entire subreddit as a sound moderation strategy.

It is. 100% it is. If a subreddit shows that it's users continuously abuse the rules of the site, then yes, 100%, it's a sound moderation strategy. Banning regular users of the subreddit and just flushing it all out is sound.

> If that does nothing to make you reevaluate your opinion, then you are sadly and ironically a victim of divisive indoctrination.

The problem is you are misrepresenting what happened. Reddit didn't just "ban users from an entire subreddit." They didn't just randomly pick a large subreddit and ban all the users. Suggesting that they did that is disingenuous at best. So you can play the victim card all you want, but if you can't be honest about what happened that does nothing to make you reevaluate your opinion, then you are sadly and ironically a victim of divisive indoctrination.

Never did I claim it was an arbitrary banning. In fact, it indeed was the opposite. I addressed this in a downstream comment.

You are right and its actually possible since post history is public and some subs have gone further by making it impossible to participate if you had commented on the_donald. This method can trivially lead to collateral damage insofar as people may comment or even subscribe in order to needle and torment Trump supporters especially around 2020.

A more through approach might to be to analyze the sentiment or at least the score of comments or even go further and analyze the mix of comments and sentiments to decide if someone is an undesirable.

I'm saying getting banned from the top subreddits deprives you of very little value.

For the record, I don't like Reddit.

But there is something to be said about having the censor cabal out in the open for everyone to see. Compare that with Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, where there is no record of who is determining what is and isn't ok to say.

Why do I care? That it's 0.0001% more transparent of its top-operators? If anything, I at least can see who works under the VP of Integrity at Facebook via LinkedIn - I have no idea who GallowBoob would be if he didn't make it explicitly known.

You linked to an HN thread which linked to a reddit thread as proof of this. I would like you to know that is absurd since the reddit thread makes an accusation with no proof.

The 'proof' is a screenshot of a post that was called '92 of the top 100 subbreddits controlled by the same 5 people' that got removed. Why did it get removed? Who knows?

Do better. If you want to be better than reddit don't do the same dumb shit that it does and check your sources.

Given that reddit surprisingly still has a working API, this isn't actually a hard thing to check. Here's a script that works courtesy of ChatGPT:

https://gist.github.com/bspammer/6b5eff6670e4b839ffea89ceaed...

The highest non-bot user moderates 12 subreddits in the top 100. There's quite a few users who moderate more than 5. I believe the situation was much worse a few years ago, and reddit the company put pressure on them to give up some of their subs.

Can you provide the data that is output?

The highest person on there that isn't a bot moderates 13 subreddits. The second 12, and down from there. Doesn't look like anywhere near '92' for any 5 people.

Yes because like I said the fallout from the original post caused a lot of the power moderators to give up their spots. The biggest one "Cyxie" straight up deleted their account.

Ah, so the fact was wrong.

Cyxie just moved to the account TreKs

This is a list of accounts, not persons. One person could be operating several of these accounts.

Yes, that could be. It could also be two people for each account. We can make lots of conjecture, can't we?

.. the mods of most subreddits are public. This is a trivial thing to verify. It's as valid as any other information posted that you haven't personally inspected. I have no idea why you're so belligerent about this, but it's odd.

If it is so trivial then verify it and come back with verification instead of stating your confusion as to my tone.

How am I supposed to do that? You don't accept other people's verification of information.

The person above you just did it. It's called 'show your work'. And it doesn't show what the parent says, at all.

Almost like if you read the followups, those few power mods created multiple alt accounts in the wake of the post.

But keep acting super weird about this, I guess.

Asking for proof is 'super weird' but 'conspiracy of reddit mods' is not?

No, a conspiracy of Reddit mods is not super weird.

Cliques of petty tyrants are nothing new on or off the internet.

What’s weird is thinking Reddit is somehow immune to human nature.

Sorry but 'human nature' doesn't preclude need for proof. Just because something seems plausible doesn't make it evidence that it happened.

There’s plenty of proof a Google search away. This wasn’t some great secret.

Yeah I have been asking for it and gotten either 'search for it, it is easy to find' or a runaround where people claim to have it and then don't. So, provide it or stop asserting that you have it.

Being very active in the Facebook groups/pages scene, I can tell you that very similar situations happens there. Same thing for Discord. Even back in the 90's, it was common for people who enjoy being a moderator or admin to be all over the place.

current lead on r/relationship_advice here - none of these people actually "control" anything, and gallowboob (for instance) has largely stepped away from modding.

There's value in any information-sharing they do in that they share trends across subreddits that reddit themselves are opaque about, but the subs still operate autonomously.