Good!

I only visit well curated subreddits. I don't want drive-by visitors, floods of memes, or similar content. My bread and butter are subreddits like r/DebateReligion and r/AskHistorians.

If the mods are not to my liking, there usually is an alternate sub on the same subject that is.

So thank you for staying away.

And this is exactly why Reddit has gone to hell. Mods with that attitude. "I was here first, so therefore I get to unilaterally set the Overton window for all discussion herein. If you don't like it, you're banned."

HN seems to be the last place on the internet where competing thoughts can exist. It's amazing to me that if moderation is so hard, why dang can do such a good job single-handedly with a user-base bigger than most subs.

You can always create your own and be the first over there.

I agree though that there are some problems with the model, such as a long gone head mod suddenly poking back in and doing something radical, as well as a discoverability issue.

> HN seems to be the last place on the internet where competing thoughts can exist.

HN is good precisely because it's well moderated and ontopic. There are rules here as well, and content is filtered quite thoroughly. If you don't notice it it's just either because you happen to agree with the status quo by accident, or you got used to it over time.

Exactly. Like with politics, "no moderation" is really just "moderation I agree with."

And be the only one over there.

If r/keyboards devolves, sure, someone can create r/seriouskeyboards, but that doesn't mean anyone will join them. First, there are already X orders of magnitude subscribed to r/keyboards; second, if a new user is looking for a group on keyboards, they're more likely to investigate r/keyboards than r/adjectivekeyboards.

"If you don't like it then make your own" ignores all of the realities involved. It's arrogant and dismissive.

(pardon the edit, but I don't think it's a misrepresentation of what you said)

So in other words, you didn't actually want to participate in the community and the automoderation worked as intended to ward off someone who wasn't interested in following the rules used to curate a specific community. Subreddits who have aggressive automod rules are almost without exception ones that put them in place due to the excessive rule-breaking posts from outsiders, including ones exactly like you. Some of the subs enforce specific templates to filter out the flood of low-effort repeats from people who can't be bothered.

People who actually want to participate in the community will read the rules and stay. Anyone who's offended by being asked to do that probably won't be a positive contribution to the community anyway.

Or ensure group think.

(Also, you are now banned from /r/pyongyang)

Try posting literally anything contrary to the party line on any noteworthy sub, and see how long it takes you to get banned. Particularly with a new account.

I haven't bothered posting anything on that site in years because it's a 50/50 crap shoot whether it will even be seen, or that the post I just spent 5 minutes of my life writing out will be instantly auto-modded for containing the wrong keyword.

I notice you did not answer my question though. And I have to wonder what you're posting that you keep needing new accounts. As someone once said, 'If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you keep getting banned and having your comments deleted, maybe you're the problem'

For more than a year, a handful of powermods were banning users which discussed the _possibility_ that SARS-CoV-2 was less dangerous than the media and politicians were claiming (now we have the data and it was less dangerous) or discussed the _possibility_ that the COVID vaccines were less effective or had worse side effects than the media and politicians were claiming (we now have the data and they were less effective and had worse side effects). These mods, who run the default subreddits, were banning users for posting in other subs which permitted such discussions -- that's right, if you posted in a sub that critically discussed what was going on, you'd get banned from default subs like r/pics and r/tifu.

I could list at least a hundred personal examples that had nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2 (usually opposing the American leftwing hive mind), but it's too easy for someone to just dismiss those as unsupported personal anecdotes. OTOH, it was well documented how Reddit shut down discussion re: SARS-CoV-2, as many other sites and services did.

Ideology has nothing to do with it. The post could be flamebait, have a bad title such as "Give me recs", a clickbait title such as "Does anyone else hate Popular Thing", be easily satisfied by searching the subreddit, etc.