Reddit moderation is also completely broken. Mods can ban anyone for any reason and do ban people for very stupid reasons with absolutely no recourse. It is so bad I have completely stopped posting on Reddit.
Reddit itself bans and shadowbans for no good reason on a very regular basis. And their appeal system generally does not work.
And Reddit bans are used by powermods to get rid of any rivals. They will pay to bot the report system so your account is instantly perma-banned by Reddit. And Reddit has the most aggressive system of all the social networks for detecting duplicate accounts, so you'll have a hard time ever using the site again.
> It’s highly unusual to have some sort of judicial process.
Every forum I ever used prior to Reddit had a ban appeal process, as did most game servers. For a few games reading the ban appeals could be more fun than playing the actual game. This was usually moderators making executive decisions based on a user-submitted form, but it was better than nothing.
Really depends on who the mods are. I got two bans on reddit:
First one:
In a programming sub, as there was over 10 years a rather known bug. Typical discussion goes off and using the bug as a example of issues that never get fixed in the language.
Short term sub banned for breaking the rules. The stated "broken rule" was one of those very broad one's where you can hit any discussion with. Appeal the ban, stating that my comments are based on facts. Pointed to the github, the 10 year long discussion. No answer beyond "you are perma banned for breaking the rules".
Got private contacted by one of the main developers of the language, as he noticed my banned status and was unable to get a answer from me.
We gone over the bug in PMs. Bug got assigned to somebody and fixed. Thanks for fixing that 10 year old bug.
That was my first experience with mod overreach. But that did not undo the ban for "being right".
Second one:
In a specific country sub, i noticed there was factual proven misinformation. Corrected the user in a lengthy post, with multiple links to news articles. Short term ban by a mod, for "misinformation".
Appealed the ban, got into a whole discussion with the sub mod. Told him that he is using his own opinion, not the facts. Stated multiple times my news sources from my post (not entertainment news but professional news), inc reuters.
Stated that he is not following the rules by using his person opinion as basis for the temp ban and asked for escalation of the ban review. Asked to show what rule i broke (never got a answer beyond his personal opinions).
Other mod came in, stated that i "attacked the mod" by asking for a escalating of the review, and by accusing the mod of not being neutral (i mean, using personal opinion vs official news websites = your not neutral).
Perma ban ... Kafka lol. As you can guess, never got a answer to what "misinformation" that i broke.
/Insert slap head emoji ...
What did the mods gain? Maybe that short dopamine hit for "winning" by banning somebody. Sounds more like losing if you need to ban based upon your opinion, and not the facts, but hey...
O, made new account, and back on sub. Never got banned again. Did i change my posting behavior. Nowp ... If i see misinformation, i come with receipts (links to actual reputable news articles).
Its like, what do you gain? Its just power tripping people that love to mod. There are good mods out there but a TON of them are just nasty dopamine junkies, that want to "win arguments" with bans.
Most older forums had an element of self-selection... people don't hang out where they're not wanted. But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) so you're either there or nowhere. This forces to some extent people who would gravitate away from each other, and personalities go overboard. There's more need of a judicial process there, than there would be elsewhere. And that was before everything became politically polarized. Now that you could be perfectly happy talking to someone about X, you still end up hating their guts because they love/hate Trump/Obama and it slips out (over a long enough timespan).
But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics)
What are some examples? In my experience there are numerous other communities of various types for any given interest. Reddit is just kind of a convenient surface level a lot of the time.
> But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) so you're either there or nowhere.
Reddit wasn't even that good as a community space in the first place. It was a content aggregator with user-moderated comment sections, and those make for pretty awful communities because on anything remotely controversial you get factions dog piling each other trying to hide each other's posts.
That said, communities are all on discord now, and quite honestly I think it's for the better. It gives moderators a lot more discretion, but balances the scales by making it very easy to create new servers where one can invite like-minded people and grow organically.
Dang and the other moderators here are incredibly scrupulous. If you browse with show dead on, and find an account that is posting regularly but banned, and go back through their history, you'll almost always find multiple warnings and a public statement about their banning.
HN has problems but moderation being arbitrary isn't really one of them.
Yes, it does. Partly at least. It documents what rules/guidelines were violated, when and how often. In terms of transparency that's miles above reddit. I have also seen dang and Tomhow (?) repeatedly call out users for violating the guidelines - they do it openly and react to discussions. Again, miles above reddit. They edit headlines when the original titles are misleading and comment openly on it. Transparency. I haven't been here for long but the traceability of moderation on this site is laudable, so is their restraint when it comes to commenting on topics/users - and I should know: I have moderated a software forum for over 10 years and had my fair share of temptations.
It's the anonymity and odd changes in who is moderating that makes it feel different.
Standard setup to me would be consistently opinionated person, or team with some central directive (and hopefully oversight).
I was banned from /r/sourdough for asking a question about rye flour, because someone dug into my post history and saw that I had posted a few times on the Catholicism subreddit. Someone's first instinct when reading a completely benign, neutral question was to see if I was on this or that "team".
There used to be bots that would do this automatically, but they seem to have fallen out of favor due to the high rate of false-positives (user from Subreddit A posts in Subreddit B and gets automatically banned by the automoderator on Subreddit A).
They implemented a change recently where users can make their profiles private which seemed like a cool idea to prevent this sort of thing, but in practice it is used almost exclusively by bad actors. Some users suggested the change was made to facilitate government intelligence agencies running influence campaigns on the platform.
I learned a simply truth about social media. When you answer a person in a discussion, are you answering the person or the world?
When you are answering the person, and the person has seen your response by time or counter answer, there really is no need to keep your post alive beyond a few weeks.
By then the topic is already on page 10 and only of interest to google / bots / AI.
Is this a problem for the future? Not really ... if the answer is important like i want the world to keep seeing it, you keep it undeleted.
If you did a product review, keep it alive, but just answer people, or having discussions that have no relevants a year from now, just get rid of them.
But lets be honest, most of our answers are often discussions and not some deep zen state thinking exercises that everybody needs to see years from now.
The world has not gotten better and your faced with a dilemma. Reject social media totally and avoid all the mess of people using your past post history, bots and AI/LLMs eating your data non-stop, or potential profiling. Let alone if governments change...
Or use this trick ... there really is no perfect answer and you do what you feel is good for you.
Oh the automatic banning from subs for posting in another sub is particularly annoying. And often they won't even say what sub? This is amazingly lazy because it doesn't take into account if you posted in /r/conservative that Trump is a moron and got banned for it, you will still get banned form dozens of other subs.
I have a lot of Catholic family, is there some connection between Catholicism and sourdough that I'm unaware of?
As someone whose family comes from the more left wing Catholic culture, which is a thing, I sometimes am disappointed when Catholics are thoughtlessly lumped into right wing culture war topics. It feels like this assumption is particularly common in the US vs. other places.
Let me guess: it was a Pizza Cake Comics post? (Context, she's made posts about how women are always paranoid about men and men minimize/make fun of that and she says she's not anti men as she has a son herself. All this (edit: plus lots of commenters and mod drama) in the span of a single comic btw.)
Edit: this comment on such a politically touchy topic lasted almost 40 minutes before getting 2 downvotes, honestly I'm impressed it lasted almost an hour.
Of course as always, the downvote is a signal of communication, and without a reply, all communication I receive is that this is a sensitive topic. If there's anything factually wrong I'll be happy to change it. (And I would consider myself having spent ~~too much~~ enough time on reddit to know which comics are popular and/or get folks banned easily.)
Yes, they can and that's how it's set up. Each community makes their own rules and can choose who participates.
It's not Reddit. It's the sub that made the decision and I'm not sure how it would be possible for Reddit the company to deal with sub level rule complaints and appeals.
I think it would be better if Reddit took more ownership. In other words, instead of hosting a platform where anyone can claim a subreddit as their little domain, and then it’s theirs forever, Reddit could say that the subreddits belong to the people that use them. For example, perhaps they could institute some sort of system where members of a subreddit could vote out moderators who abuse their power.
> For example, perhaps they could institute some sort of system where members of a subreddit could vote out moderators who abuse their power.
Leaving aside everything else wrong with that, that would be trivial to abuse, especially with the help of sockpuppetry but easily enough even without that.
There are some big wins that they've never taken care of, despite spez talking big about fixing them, e.g.: stop allowing mods to pre-emptively ban you. I don't know anyone who uses Reddit that isn't banned from r/pics simply because they posted somewhere else on Reddit. The list of subs they ban for is huge.
That's pretty crazy. I've been on reddit since its inception and have never been banned from pics despite having posted on all kinds of unsavory subreddits over the decades.
If I cared about it. I might want to find a set of subs which when you simultaneously post in will result in largest number of bans. Would be interesting experiment. Exactly how many posts you need to get banned from largest number of sub-reddits...
If you're at the point where you have been vetted and allowed to post on r/Conservative, you've gone way past mere "association." This isn't like some board game forum where you can just create an account and start posting. r/Conservative (probably with good reason) has a long and very active vetting process before you're allowed to post there, and only posts that conform to their ideology stay up. So getting banned for participating is a little more than just "guilt by association."
You need to send a photo of your FSB / KGB id to be able to get recognized as a true conservative from USA + you need to post the propaganda of the day
Reddit does have global rules about deceptive content manipulation (e.g. voting rings, bot farms etc.)
If this guy had disclosed his conflict of interest, he would just have been an obsessed crank and even as a moderator, that's his right. But when he didn't, I'd say it was large-scale manipulation, and it's clearly in Reddit's interest to not allow this sort of thing (especially now that they're selling all their data to AI companies).
I think the reason it feels offensive is that subreddits of common names feel like they should be more democratically managed or held to a high standard. Instead it’s a bunch of fiefdoms and if you create an alternate subreddit with a poor name it just won’t get readers. Codebootcamp2 or whatever is doomed from the start because of the importance of names.
I have some bad news for you about news.ycombinator.com or any other web forum. Unless you actually own the web site you can be prevented from posting on a whim.
Of course, most reputable forums have policies and rules but at the end of the day these do not mean much. Who are you going to complain to if you get unjustly banned - the Internet police?
You can always start your own blog/forum/subreddit and post whatever you like.
