6 ms·

> - If you post on /r/conservative you can expect to receive a bunch of bans from unrelated (popular) subs. Doesn't matter what you posted, being associated wit

> - If you post on /r/conservative you can expect to receive a bunch of bans from unrelated (popular) subs. Doesn't matter what you posted, being associated with that subs "taints" your account enough for some moderators. You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until the moderators there audit your post history and perform an interview with you to confirm your ideology matches theirs. If someone does pass the test they’re allowed to comment. If they make a comment that disagrees with the message the moderators want to push, their commenting privilege is revoked. It’s not a real subreddit. It’s a moderator-curated echo chamber. They run it like a propaganda outlet, only allow approved thought from approved commenters, and ban anyone who steps out of line with the mods. That’s why every thread you view there will have “load more comments” buttons that never load anything: They remove more comments than you’re allowed to see.

docmars 1y ago
Could it be that sharing conservative ideas is against Reddit's community guidelines? There are other subreddits with primarily right or moderate leaning communities and comments in those get deleted all the time with moderator messages saying they risk the entire subreddit getting taken down by Reddit simply for sharing basic conservative views.
- square_usual 1y ago
  I'm sure you can give us examples of these "basic conservative values" that gets entire subreddits banned off a platform run by a libertarian prepper who admires Elon Musk.
- stickfigure 1y ago
  This is not credible without evidence.
  - DiggyJohnson 1y ago
    I can testify this is credible. You can prove this by trying it out yourself.
    - jibal 1y ago
      Your testimony isn't credible. You have made plainly false statements here.
      - DiggyJohnson 1y ago
        What on Earth?
  - observationist 1y ago
    The evidence gets deleted. Go talk with any of the mods or former mods for right of center-left discussion forums - any deviation or disagreement with far left narratives is asking for conflict. Anything that risks brigading or attention by one of the larger leftist subs will get nuked because those smaller communities can't expend the hours needed to deal with the flood of hate and harassment they get. If you find that not credible, you haven't been paying attention - reddit is a leftist cesspit echo chamber, and the only way any dissenting viewpoints survive is through having an absurd level of micromanaging and moderator involvement, like r/conservative, or being so small as to fly under the radar and not attract notice. Centralizing forums to reddit was one of the worst things to ever happen to the internet, in retrospect. We should have stayed diverse and decentralized, and leaned into federation style community links, and made it easier for people to navigate and surface interesting unique communities, independent of the arbitrary politicization and ideological nonsense that infects reddit.
    - array_key_first 1y ago
      Commenting conservative things is not against community guidelines. However, most conservative comments are against community guidelines. For example, supporting Trump is fine. Repeating what Trump says might be against community guidelines. Not because being a trump supporter is against the rules, but because trump sometimes says blatantly racist things, and that IS against the rules. It's simple to be both conservative and not rude, nasty, racist, sexist, etc. Many influential conservative voices struggle with this. So they get banned, and, by value of following their lead, their followers. Another example, on a bigger scale. Trump can be upset about losing an election. That's allowed. But Trump cannot advocate people go cause violence because of it. That's not allowed, and we had days in court because of that.
      - vkou 1y ago
        > Repeating what Trump says might be against community guidelines. For the irony-cherry on top, repeating what he says is also often against r/conservative guidelines - they'll happily ban you for it, because a lot of the things Trump says are also really fucking stupid and contradictory, and his supporters don't like to be reminded that the emperor's naked.
- abustamam 1y ago
  Out of curiosity, what views? I'm trying to understand if Reddit is just ban happy against conservatives or if basic conservative views are really against reddits TOS
  - DiggyJohnson 1y ago
    Trans related topics are expressly against TOC and enforced unless a subreddit is ruthless in removing any comments that aren't expressly positive and affirming. There is no room for nuance on this topic. Just giving an example.
    - alittlebee 1y ago
      As a trans person, I find it interesting that so many people have opinions on an illness that truly sucks. It’s rough reading every day that you are “wrong” about something you suffer from. I wish folks could see the losses we experience when we transition. I think if they did, they might extend a little more grace and compassion. (That said, I do agree with you on nuance)
      - cestith 1y ago
        Nuance is not a popular thing in the US in recent decades. The false dichotomy appears to be more than our collective favorite logical fallacy, but some people’s favorite avocation.
        abustamam 1y ago
        I blame the media, as well as people. People's "news" have been reduced to headlines or 30 second clips on tiktok/insta. Of course they won't convey nuance. And of course content creators / news aggregators know this so they purposely strip all nuance out of their reporting.
        nerdponx 1y ago
        Nuance is the enemy when you are trying to run a propaganda campaign and push an agenda. Blaming the American people is victim blaming.
- DengistKhan 1y ago
  https://i.redd.it/cw47uodbkhh61.jpg https://i.redd.it/cw47uodbkhh61.jpg
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >Could it be that sharing conservative ideas is against Reddit's community guidelines? Sharing conservative ideas is not against reddit's community guidelines. the sitewide guidelines are pretty simple, actually: https://redditinc.com/policies/reddit-rules https://redditinc.com/policies/reddit-rules to summarize: 1. don't harrass people on or off-site, nor promote hate 2. no spam or content manipulation 3. no doxxing nor non-consential sexual material 4. no CSAM or CSAM-adjacent material 5. don't impoersonae others 6. label NSFW content 7. no illegal content 8. don't break reddit on purpose other conservative subs have historically had issues with rules #2 and #8, so I'm sure Reddit is more sensitive to that. In addition, current conservative leaning subs do tend to have more issues with rule 1, even to this day. I imagine what you are seeing are content being pre-emptively removed to prevent potential harassment that can get the sub banned.
  - mlrtime 1y ago
    To the average reddit, simply being conservative or voting for trump is promoting hate. I guarantee you 100% they think this. Take a /r/all post that is anti trump and read the comments about republicans, they hate them.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      Perhaps. But admins won't ban a sub for being conservative or voting for Trump alone. Admins are the ones who can ban subs, not mods. Mods from there have absolute power, as long as they follow the above guidelines. As we know, the rules can be as petty as they want. Their only limit is that they can't ban someone who's never participated in a sub (so they can't pre-rmotively ban someone for existing)
      - mlrtime 1y ago
        /r/TheRealDonald was banned by admins. Mods bots do ban you for participating in other subs. I was banned from a handful for posting in /r/JoeRogan
bawolff 1y ago
> You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until the moderators there audit your post history and perform an interview with you to confirm your ideology matches theirs. > If someone does pass the test they’re allowed to comment. If they make a comment that disagrees with the message the moderators want to push, their commenting privilege is revoked. Be that as it may, i dont see how the solution to /r/conservative being a weird echo chamber, is for other subs to be an anti-/r/conservative echochamber. Seems like both are wrong, and two wrongs dont make a right.
- noir_lord 1y ago
  I don't see an issue with it, if you are willing to put in the effort to swim in the cesspool that is /r/conservative you don't get to complain when other people find the smell objectionable.
  - mlrtime 1y ago
    if /r/conservative is a sespool, what is /r/politics? You're just pointing out your bias.
    - noir_lord 1y ago
      Oh I’m definitely biased, I’m not a huge fan of quasi-fascist morons hiding behind a thin veneer of legitimacy while breaking the law, electing a sex offender, destroying every relationship with their foreign allies and engaging in hilariously blatant corruption. Nor am I fan of their voters/supporters. At this point if you don’t oppose them you implicitly support them, the normal rules no longer apply.
      - inemesitaffia 1y ago
        Like Taylor Swift apparently. Your newest fascist.
      - mlrtime 1y ago
        >At this point if you don’t oppose them you implicitly support them, the normal rules no longer apply. ^ The average far-left in a nutshell. You are either with us, or against us. There is no centralist.
mothballed 1y ago
If you say anything remotely controversial anywhere on reddit you will be hunted by a moderator of another sub and then targeted for banning. I pointed out on a sub that the question on the 4473 (form to buy a firearm) asking if you are a drug user is a 5th amendment violation as it asks you to incriminate yourself to exercise a right. An Ivy league lawyer, moderator of another sub, about a whole year later, found it, declared that it was illegal legal advice, then had my whole account nuked using his legal credentials to scare reddit into getting rid of me.
Workaccount2 1y ago
Lets go down to /r/conservative and throw rocks at them for being dumb was a pretty popular activity for people. For anyone who has been on reddit for any length of time, it should be abundantly obvious why the sub needs extremely heavy moderation. That sub is like having an LGBTQ tent at a redneck festival.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  There's heavy moderation, and then there's enforcing propaganda. If you really want to look there during controversial issues, you'll see even long time posters get comments removed when it goes against whatever agenda they want to push. That's no longer a matter of trying to facilitate unpopular discussion.
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    But that's just reddit in general.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      Sort of, but not to this degree. I think there's 4 levels of "control" a sub can have. 0. "Soft" power from votes, which determines what topics are de facto allowed to be talked about. Mods don't have as much influence here (hence why it's not really "#1"), but they can still influence it by removing certain comments. The psychology of down votes and how it affects communities has been studied for well over a decade so this isn't too crazy 1. "Petty mod abuse", which is probably what many comments remember reddit comments for. You make a tame comment, some lawful evil mod removes your comment, and any discussion over that ruling is met with mutes or bans. This is usually backed by "some" rule, so most of the time they have some point (no matter how stupid) 2. "Soft rules abuse", which is where "off-site" behavior kicks in. Where there's unlisted rules that are enforced, often from behavior not even directly performed in that community. It can also be personal grudges from some sort of supermod, which bans you from multiple subs they moderate over behavior in one of their subs. 3. Then there's "sentiment abuse", where people are moderated less for their behavior and more for whatever the mod feels like that day. Either to forge their own narrative, or from being paid off and following some external party's sentiment. These are almost never listed as rules because they are either too blatantly biased ("do not insult Google" on r/Google wouldn't work out well, even if it is run by Google employees), or simply because the rules change too frequently. I'd say r/conservative is solidly in tier 3, and even there is a very extreme example. It was interesting seeing how the sub quickly changed on topics like the Epstien files based on whatever spin occurred IRL.
zahlman 1y ago
> You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until You present this as if it were somehow evidence that somehow justifies the bans from the other unrelated subs. There is no morally justifiable reason why having mainstream conservative viewpoints (which is to say, ones held by a very large fraction of the general populace) should bar someone from non-political participation in non-political subreddits. The bans in fact are another symptom of the same cause: every kind of right-wing enclave on Reddit gets trolled constantly. The generally left-wing userbase does whatever they can to ostracize right-wingers, or perceived right-wingers. Which includes both banning them from other spaces, and mocking them in their own. > It’s a moderator-curated echo chamber. This describes every vaguely political or ideological themed subreddit. Except maybe the general r/politics, which might still be "letting the votes decide" if you don't have the "acceptable" views on every issue. I have literally seen subreddits that would ban people for "ableism" for using the word "stupid" to describe an idea or proposal. And that was like a decade ago and it was getting clearly worse year after year.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >There is no morally justifiable reason why having mainstream conservative viewpoints (which is to say, ones held by a very large fraction of the general populace) should bar someone from non-political participation in non-political subreddits. Rule 1 of site guidelines includes: >Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned. And given the conservaive mindset as of late in the US against trans people and undocumented workers, you can see the issue you run into. I do disagree with banning off-sub behavior, though. you can use it to tag users and keep a closer eye on them, but moderators moderate their own space, not the entire site.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    > And given the conservaive mindset as of late in the US against trans people and undocumented workers I disagree that they have the beliefs you ascribe to them, broadly speaking. Again, we are talking about the mainstream. Views held by a very large fraction of the general populace.
LexiMax 1y ago
> They run it like a propaganda outlet, only allow approved thought from approved commenters, and ban anyone who steps out of line with the mods. When almost any community is particular about who it lets in and who it doesn't let in, it can be seen as a reasonable moderator precaution. Heck, some of the very best social spaces I'm a part of are only accessible by knowing people who know people. But Reddit at it's core is a content aggregator with a comments section, which uses a moderation model driven by a strange mix of authoritarian mods and mob rule. A mod can ban you for any reason, but there's nothing stopping an outside mob from trying to control a narrative by mass voting in a way that mods have little to no control over. In practice, /r/conservative can't really be considered a functional social space. But this core contradiction at the heart of the Slashdot/HN/Reddit model means that none of them function very well as social spaces either. These days, the actual "community" part of most hobbyist subreddits are on alternative platforms like Discord, and quite frankly I think it's for the better that this is happening.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >there's nothing stopping an outside mob from trying to control a narrative by mass voting in a way that mods have little to no control over. if it's really persistent they can't. Votes are one of the few mechanisms mods have no control over in their sub. But in general, mods can remove any post they don't like, even if it gets voted against their wishes, as well as ban any users posting such posts. Do that for a few days and that usually wins out.
  - LexiMax 1y ago
    Platforms like Discord give their moderators much more power and discretion, while removing mechanisms for users for protest them. Despite this, Discord largely succeeds in facilitating social spaces for its users. The biggest reason why this works is that even though users have fewer recourses against power-tripping mods, it also takes away the moderator's leverage of being the tastemakers of content aggregation that Reddit/HN/Slashdot mods and power users have. Without content aggregation, it's a lot easier for social circles to cleanly split if there are disagreements. I also think that the fact that Discord servers are opaque works to its benefit. The openness of Reddit leads to a lot of cross-subreddit co-mingling, which invariably leads to drama and conflict. There's a lot less of this happening on Discord - it's not zero, but it's to the extent that posting discord conversations outside of their servers is widely considered "leaking" and Discord actively uses legal avenues to go after dragnet-style log archives.
mlrtime 1y ago
You're kidding right? Think critically for a moment. Do you understand how politically scewed reddit is? What do you think would happen if /r/conservative was wide open, what would get upvoted, what would get burried? Give me your honest prediction.

docmars 1y ago

Could it be that sharing conservative ideas is against Reddit's community guidelines? There are other subreddits with primarily right or moderate leaning communities and comments in those get deleted all the time with moderator messages saying they risk the entire subreddit getting taken down by Reddit simply for sharing basic conservative views.

square_usual 1y ago
I'm sure you can give us examples of these "basic conservative values" that gets entire subreddits banned off a platform run by a libertarian prepper who admires Elon Musk.
stickfigure 1y ago
This is not credible without evidence.
- DiggyJohnson 1y ago
  I can testify this is credible. You can prove this by trying it out yourself.
  - jibal 1y ago
    Your testimony isn't credible. You have made plainly false statements here.
    - DiggyJohnson 1y ago
      What on Earth?
- observationist 1y ago
  The evidence gets deleted. Go talk with any of the mods or former mods for right of center-left discussion forums - any deviation or disagreement with far left narratives is asking for conflict. Anything that risks brigading or attention by one of the larger leftist subs will get nuked because those smaller communities can't expend the hours needed to deal with the flood of hate and harassment they get. If you find that not credible, you haven't been paying attention - reddit is a leftist cesspit echo chamber, and the only way any dissenting viewpoints survive is through having an absurd level of micromanaging and moderator involvement, like r/conservative, or being so small as to fly under the radar and not attract notice. Centralizing forums to reddit was one of the worst things to ever happen to the internet, in retrospect. We should have stayed diverse and decentralized, and leaned into federation style community links, and made it easier for people to navigate and surface interesting unique communities, independent of the arbitrary politicization and ideological nonsense that infects reddit.
  - array_key_first 1y ago
    Commenting conservative things is not against community guidelines. However, most conservative comments are against community guidelines. For example, supporting Trump is fine. Repeating what Trump says might be against community guidelines. Not because being a trump supporter is against the rules, but because trump sometimes says blatantly racist things, and that IS against the rules. It's simple to be both conservative and not rude, nasty, racist, sexist, etc. Many influential conservative voices struggle with this. So they get banned, and, by value of following their lead, their followers. Another example, on a bigger scale. Trump can be upset about losing an election. That's allowed. But Trump cannot advocate people go cause violence because of it. That's not allowed, and we had days in court because of that.
    - vkou 1y ago
      > Repeating what Trump says might be against community guidelines. For the irony-cherry on top, repeating what he says is also often against r/conservative guidelines - they'll happily ban you for it, because a lot of the things Trump says are also really fucking stupid and contradictory, and his supporters don't like to be reminded that the emperor's naked.
abustamam 1y ago
Out of curiosity, what views? I'm trying to understand if Reddit is just ban happy against conservatives or if basic conservative views are really against reddits TOS
- DiggyJohnson 1y ago
  Trans related topics are expressly against TOC and enforced unless a subreddit is ruthless in removing any comments that aren't expressly positive and affirming. There is no room for nuance on this topic. Just giving an example.
  - alittlebee 1y ago
    As a trans person, I find it interesting that so many people have opinions on an illness that truly sucks. It’s rough reading every day that you are “wrong” about something you suffer from. I wish folks could see the losses we experience when we transition. I think if they did, they might extend a little more grace and compassion. (That said, I do agree with you on nuance)
    - cestith 1y ago
      Nuance is not a popular thing in the US in recent decades. The false dichotomy appears to be more than our collective favorite logical fallacy, but some people’s favorite avocation.
      - abustamam 1y ago
        I blame the media, as well as people. People's "news" have been reduced to headlines or 30 second clips on tiktok/insta. Of course they won't convey nuance. And of course content creators / news aggregators know this so they purposely strip all nuance out of their reporting.
        nerdponx 1y ago
        Nuance is the enemy when you are trying to run a propaganda campaign and push an agenda. Blaming the American people is victim blaming.
DengistKhan 1y ago
https://i.redd.it/cw47uodbkhh61.jpg https://i.redd.it/cw47uodbkhh61.jpg
johnnyanmac 1y ago
>Could it be that sharing conservative ideas is against Reddit's community guidelines? Sharing conservative ideas is not against reddit's community guidelines. the sitewide guidelines are pretty simple, actually: https://redditinc.com/policies/reddit-rules https://redditinc.com/policies/reddit-rules to summarize: 1. don't harrass people on or off-site, nor promote hate 2. no spam or content manipulation 3. no doxxing nor non-consential sexual material 4. no CSAM or CSAM-adjacent material 5. don't impoersonae others 6. label NSFW content 7. no illegal content 8. don't break reddit on purpose other conservative subs have historically had issues with rules #2 and #8, so I'm sure Reddit is more sensitive to that. In addition, current conservative leaning subs do tend to have more issues with rule 1, even to this day. I imagine what you are seeing are content being pre-emptively removed to prevent potential harassment that can get the sub banned.
- mlrtime 1y ago
  To the average reddit, simply being conservative or voting for trump is promoting hate. I guarantee you 100% they think this. Take a /r/all post that is anti trump and read the comments about republicans, they hate them.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    Perhaps. But admins won't ban a sub for being conservative or voting for Trump alone. Admins are the ones who can ban subs, not mods. Mods from there have absolute power, as long as they follow the above guidelines. As we know, the rules can be as petty as they want. Their only limit is that they can't ban someone who's never participated in a sub (so they can't pre-rmotively ban someone for existing)
    - mlrtime 1y ago
      /r/TheRealDonald was banned by admins. Mods bots do ban you for participating in other subs. I was banned from a handful for posting in /r/JoeRogan

bawolff 1y ago

> You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until the moderators there audit your post history and perform an interview with you to confirm your ideology matches theirs. > If someone does pass the test they’re allowed to comment. If they make a comment that disagrees with the message the moderators want to push, their commenting privilege is revoked. Be that as it may, i dont see how the solution to /r/conservative being a weird echo chamber, is for other subs to be an anti-/r/conservative echochamber. Seems like both are wrong, and two wrongs dont make a right.

noir_lord 1y ago
I don't see an issue with it, if you are willing to put in the effort to swim in the cesspool that is /r/conservative you don't get to complain when other people find the smell objectionable.
- mlrtime 1y ago
  if /r/conservative is a sespool, what is /r/politics? You're just pointing out your bias.
  - noir_lord 1y ago
    Oh I’m definitely biased, I’m not a huge fan of quasi-fascist morons hiding behind a thin veneer of legitimacy while breaking the law, electing a sex offender, destroying every relationship with their foreign allies and engaging in hilariously blatant corruption. Nor am I fan of their voters/supporters. At this point if you don’t oppose them you implicitly support them, the normal rules no longer apply.
    - inemesitaffia 1y ago
      Like Taylor Swift apparently. Your newest fascist.
    - mlrtime 1y ago
      >At this point if you don’t oppose them you implicitly support them, the normal rules no longer apply. ^ The average far-left in a nutshell. You are either with us, or against us. There is no centralist.

mothballed 1y ago

If you say anything remotely controversial anywhere on reddit you will be hunted by a moderator of another sub and then targeted for banning. I pointed out on a sub that the question on the 4473 (form to buy a firearm) asking if you are a drug user is a 5th amendment violation as it asks you to incriminate yourself to exercise a right. An Ivy league lawyer, moderator of another sub, about a whole year later, found it, declared that it was illegal legal advice, then had my whole account nuked using his legal credentials to scare reddit into getting rid of me.

Workaccount2 1y ago

Lets go down to /r/conservative and throw rocks at them for being dumb was a pretty popular activity for people. For anyone who has been on reddit for any length of time, it should be abundantly obvious why the sub needs extremely heavy moderation. That sub is like having an LGBTQ tent at a redneck festival.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
There's heavy moderation, and then there's enforcing propaganda. If you really want to look there during controversial issues, you'll see even long time posters get comments removed when it goes against whatever agenda they want to push. That's no longer a matter of trying to facilitate unpopular discussion.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  But that's just reddit in general.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    Sort of, but not to this degree. I think there's 4 levels of "control" a sub can have. 0. "Soft" power from votes, which determines what topics are de facto allowed to be talked about. Mods don't have as much influence here (hence why it's not really "#1"), but they can still influence it by removing certain comments. The psychology of down votes and how it affects communities has been studied for well over a decade so this isn't too crazy 1. "Petty mod abuse", which is probably what many comments remember reddit comments for. You make a tame comment, some lawful evil mod removes your comment, and any discussion over that ruling is met with mutes or bans. This is usually backed by "some" rule, so most of the time they have some point (no matter how stupid) 2. "Soft rules abuse", which is where "off-site" behavior kicks in. Where there's unlisted rules that are enforced, often from behavior not even directly performed in that community. It can also be personal grudges from some sort of supermod, which bans you from multiple subs they moderate over behavior in one of their subs. 3. Then there's "sentiment abuse", where people are moderated less for their behavior and more for whatever the mod feels like that day. Either to forge their own narrative, or from being paid off and following some external party's sentiment. These are almost never listed as rules because they are either too blatantly biased ("do not insult Google" on r/Google wouldn't work out well, even if it is run by Google employees), or simply because the rules change too frequently. I'd say r/conservative is solidly in tier 3, and even there is a very extreme example. It was interesting seeing how the sub quickly changed on topics like the Epstien files based on whatever spin occurred IRL.

zahlman 1y ago

> You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until You present this as if it were somehow evidence that somehow justifies the bans from the other unrelated subs. There is no morally justifiable reason why having mainstream conservative viewpoints (which is to say, ones held by a very large fraction of the general populace) should bar someone from non-political participation in non-political subreddits. The bans in fact are another symptom of the same cause: every kind of right-wing enclave on Reddit gets trolled constantly. The generally left-wing userbase does whatever they can to ostracize right-wingers, or perceived right-wingers. Which includes both banning them from other spaces, and mocking them in their own. > It’s a moderator-curated echo chamber. This describes every vaguely political or ideological themed subreddit. Except maybe the general r/politics, which might still be "letting the votes decide" if you don't have the "acceptable" views on every issue. I have literally seen subreddits that would ban people for "ableism" for using the word "stupid" to describe an idea or proposal. And that was like a decade ago and it was getting clearly worse year after year.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
>There is no morally justifiable reason why having mainstream conservative viewpoints (which is to say, ones held by a very large fraction of the general populace) should bar someone from non-political participation in non-political subreddits. Rule 1 of site guidelines includes: >Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned. And given the conservaive mindset as of late in the US against trans people and undocumented workers, you can see the issue you run into. I do disagree with banning off-sub behavior, though. you can use it to tag users and keep a closer eye on them, but moderators moderate their own space, not the entire site.
- zahlman 1y ago
  > And given the conservaive mindset as of late in the US against trans people and undocumented workers I disagree that they have the beliefs you ascribe to them, broadly speaking. Again, we are talking about the mainstream. Views held by a very large fraction of the general populace.

LexiMax 1y ago

> They run it like a propaganda outlet, only allow approved thought from approved commenters, and ban anyone who steps out of line with the mods. When almost any community is particular about who it lets in and who it doesn't let in, it can be seen as a reasonable moderator precaution. Heck, some of the very best social spaces I'm a part of are only accessible by knowing people who know people. But Reddit at it's core is a content aggregator with a comments section, which uses a moderation model driven by a strange mix of authoritarian mods and mob rule. A mod can ban you for any reason, but there's nothing stopping an outside mob from trying to control a narrative by mass voting in a way that mods have little to no control over. In practice, /r/conservative can't really be considered a functional social space. But this core contradiction at the heart of the Slashdot/HN/Reddit model means that none of them function very well as social spaces either. These days, the actual "community" part of most hobbyist subreddits are on alternative platforms like Discord, and quite frankly I think it's for the better that this is happening.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
>there's nothing stopping an outside mob from trying to control a narrative by mass voting in a way that mods have little to no control over. if it's really persistent they can't. Votes are one of the few mechanisms mods have no control over in their sub. But in general, mods can remove any post they don't like, even if it gets voted against their wishes, as well as ban any users posting such posts. Do that for a few days and that usually wins out.
- LexiMax 1y ago
  Platforms like Discord give their moderators much more power and discretion, while removing mechanisms for users for protest them. Despite this, Discord largely succeeds in facilitating social spaces for its users. The biggest reason why this works is that even though users have fewer recourses against power-tripping mods, it also takes away the moderator's leverage of being the tastemakers of content aggregation that Reddit/HN/Slashdot mods and power users have. Without content aggregation, it's a lot easier for social circles to cleanly split if there are disagreements. I also think that the fact that Discord servers are opaque works to its benefit. The openness of Reddit leads to a lot of cross-subreddit co-mingling, which invariably leads to drama and conflict. There's a lot less of this happening on Discord - it's not zero, but it's to the extent that posting discord conversations outside of their servers is widely considered "leaking" and Discord actively uses legal avenues to go after dragnet-style log archives.

mlrtime 1y ago

You're kidding right? Think critically for a moment. Do you understand how politically scewed reddit is? What do you think would happen if /r/conservative was wide open, what would get upvoted, what would get burried? Give me your honest prediction.