They've now been asked to appear in front of Congress to address concerns about politically motivated violence being incited through their platform: https://oversight.house.gov/release/chairman-comer-invites-c...

Personally I believe I've seen more people in the past few years wish a politically motivated death on somebody else via Reddit, than I have anywhere else in my life.

Now if it was "just" the incitements to violence, or if it was "just" the libeling of random businesses, that would be one thing. But the fact that BOTH types of illegal speech are becoming a problem at the same time suggests to me that Reddit's failure to moderate is systemic and total.

It is becoming exhausting watching all of these tech companies commit crimes, or enable someone else to do so, and getting off with a slap on the wrist.

- /r/energy used to ban everyone in favour of nuclear energy

- 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.

- /r/UnitedKingdom banned me for critizing a government welfare program

- /r/assassinscreed banned me for critizing a character in their latest game

For me it makes sense that the smaller subreddits should have the freedom to moderate as they want but the larger reddits should aim to at allow opposing viewpoints to prevent echo chambers from forming. Moderation should be focused on quality, not on viewpoints. Obviously it goes without saying that threats of violence and celebration of murder have no place on any platform.

The irony is that all this censoring just creates a backlash and further polarisation. If you are only allowed to discuss certain subjects on a "left" space you both create the illusion that the left only cares about a subset of topics and by banning people you create resentment that drives them towards (more welcoming) extreme spaces.

There's many factors that form the political preferences and opinions of the younger generation but it would not suprise me if for a subset (young college educated males?) of them Reddit heavily contributes towards increased polarisation.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

To take an apolitical comparison, think about an ordinary crime- a murder, a rape, an arson, etc.

There is some set of people saying "We know that this man murdered these victims. We think that is very bad. We think the murderer should go to prison so that he doesn't murder more people".

Does a neutral centralist say "Yes, the murderer should go to prison" or do they say "I'm remaining central, I don't want to join the side that is condemning the murderer. I think they hate the murderer. I think the murderer should remain free."

My belief is that a neutral centralist agrees to send the murderer to prison. And if someone supports letting the murderer carry on murdering people, then they can reasonably be said to be supporting the murderer rather than claiming to be a centralist on the murder issue.

For example, I don't think it would be logical for someone who literally believes abortion is murder to bother allying with a side that doesn't believe as such unless there is a bigger crime that is being commited that they both can agree on. See, both sides would agree that that compromising with someone condoning murder for the sake of centrism would be fucking stupid. Obviously no side thinks they're condoning murder, they simplly don't agree that the action constitutes murder.

So instead of pointlessly championing centrism for the sake of centrism, it's much more constructive to argue: no, they are not a sex offender, no they are not directly engaging or aiding and abetting corruption, no those foreign allies are not worthy allies because of xyz etc etc.

Then again, I suppose definitions can differ. Maybe you have a set of principles and boundaries. Maybe you're just rooting for or against a sports team.

On the other hand, there are some old jokes hiding in there somewhere.

Your newest fascist.

Since that sub's arbitrary ban behavior is allowed, other subs banning people for similarly arbitrary reasons (like people who have been vetted by its mod circle into being allowed to post there) should be permitted.

To more precisely respond: "A eye for an eye leaves the world blind"

If you think there's a better set of global rules that reddit should adopt, that's a fair observation. But until it does, it's not fair to call out other subs for mirroring the rules of a problem sub. If it can behave that way, so can they. If it can exist as a safe space for MAGAs, the rest of us are free to create a safe space from MAGAs.

The thing about morality is its about how you "should" behave not how you "can" behave.

> If it can exist as a safe space for MAGAs, the rest of us are free to create a safe space from MAGAs.

If you think its a-ok when /r/conservative does it, then by all means sure. I mostly object to the hypocrisy here. The original comment found /r/conservative's mod policy objectionable. Either it should be ok for everyone or it should be ok for noone. The part i'm objecting to is the implicit idea that its ok when people you like do something but not ok when people you don't like do it.

As long as you apply your moral views consistently i'm fine with it, regardless of whatever they are.

I should be eating off golden plates and live in a house made of candy, and I shouldn't have to worry about the president's goon squad invading 'liberal antifa cities', or any of the other insane shit that's going on, but life isn't quite living up to my expectations at the moment.

Perhaps when they open up their safe spaces and behave in a civil manner, other communities might take their demands for access more seriously.

All-in-all, if your biggest political concern right now is that you've been banned from a few subreddits because you're a participant in another one, I'm sorry that it's causing you distress. But I'm afraid that your problems aren't ranking very highly on my list of immediate political concerns. When the ship's on fire, I frankly don't care about the poor feng shui of the deck chairs.

When it comes to morality, we can't control how other people act, we can only control what we ourselves do.

Especially when the "retaliation" is aimed at members and not the people implementing the mod policy.

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.

Heck, many other level 3 subs tend to be gaming ones. Ones clearly woth paid off mods who act as a PR wing rather than someone caretaking a community

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Very well. But their party leader does, and few in the party or even among constituents don't seem to push back on it at all. At the very least, they do not oppose the actions and statements taken and made.

I disagree with this as well, and I specifically disagree that the "actions and statements taken and made" commonly cited to evidence the point actually evidence the point.

And I have been disagreeing about this since the 2015 election campaign. The pull quotes, to me, very obviously did not mean what they were represented as meaning, and I remain convinced of this.

This week alone:

- Trump was ranting about Trans athletes. In the middle of a meeting with Canada.

- we have had 2 inditements of political opponents based on a DM-mistakenly-turned-tweet listing opponents he wanted sued.

- he called democrats a Gnat to take care odd while addressing the generals of the military

- he's mobilizing the national guard, again to invade a city that is not in emergency. When a judge halted this, he tried to sent mobilized CA national guards (which is currently under lawsuit) go Oregon instead. The judge had to summon the DoJ at 7pm on a Sunday to halt this.

- He's also in the process of trying to deploy Texas NG into Illinois. This is on top of a judge needing to tell federal agents to not use force on Chicago journalists. Likely in reaction to the fact that ICE shot a protesting pastor in the face (and yes, that's another lawsuit)

- in midst of a government shutdown, he's trying to plan around laying off 750k federal workers, and not pay any of them as the government has always done.

- and to top it off he wants to call for the arrest of a governor and mayor because they do not want their city invaded.

That's just Trump, just this week. Not talking about RFK's nonsense, Noem's photoshoots, Johnsons attempt to election fraud and blame shifting, and Bondi's embarrassing senate hearing. These are several GOP leaders' consistent behaviors over months. It is the GOP c.2025

And this isn't an unusual week. This entire year's been a firehouse of conflicts that make Watergate seem like a tame kerfuffle. We're well, well, well beyond the idea of "well nothing is happening".

To deny the last 10 months of consistutional crisis is the deny reality. There's really no other way to say it. You're free to disagree with reality but that does not reject it.

Look up any of the nearly 200 EO's, the dozens of court cases against the DoJ, or the hundreds of hours of raw footage out there if you really care about what's happening. Clearly I can't fit that into a HN comment, and I can't make a horse drink even if I could fit it here.

Sharing conservative ideas is not against reddit's community guidelines. the sitewide guidelines are pretty simple, actually:

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.

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)

Mods bots do ban you for participating in other subs. I was banned from a handful for posting in /r/JoeRogan

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.

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.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45530566

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.

(That said, I do agree with you on nuance)

And of course content creators / news aggregators know this so they purposely strip all nuance out of their reporting.

>Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.

is against TOC. You can talk about trans issues and offer reservations. You cannot say "trans people are a mental illness" or "trans are not people". That is clearly promoting hate and has nothing of substance to discuss.

For a more explicit and current example, you can say "I don't think female-affirming trans athletes should be allowed to compete in female oriented divisions of sport. Their testosterone output makes for an unfair advantadge".

That might STILL be removed, not because that comment breaks the rules, but because reddit seems to have a serious problem on the issue and it always devolves to "we need to take men out of women's sports" and then some long chain of people denying trans people of their identity. That's promoting hate. Especially since that is not too far off from what the U.S. president argues.

You definitelly can. There are plenty of big subreddits with posts like that, whose mods agree with.

To be clear: your position is that refusing to see other people as they see themselves, in one specific aspect, is inherently hateful?

That's likely the crux of our disagreement in the other subthread, then.

Either that or you imagine that "denying identity" refers to something else, but I've only ever seen it used in cases that boil down to that. This often gets described as "denying existence", which from my observations conservatives just think is absurd. The entire point is that "identity" refers to self-image, while "existence" refers to what is externally observable.

Yes. That tends to fall under "hate speech":

>public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation

Denying existence or identity will fall under that curtain either way. That seems to be the interpretation Reddit uses, so your account or community will be banned for breaking its rules, regardless of your interpretation. Both dehumanize, and dehumanization is a one way ticket to denying someone as worthy of the rights humans enjoy.

These are different things (which was most of the point),

> will fall under that curtain either way

... but I fail to see how in either case.

> Both dehumanize

I don't see this, either.

Again, the actual act we refer to is:

> refusing to see other people as they see themselves, in one specific aspect

Is there any other aspect of how people see themselves which would lead you to the same conclusion? For example, if I consider myself physically attractive, and others disagree, are they hating me?

You're free to argue with thr reddit admins on how. It's not my call.

But as a hint, it's pretty easy to deny existence when you dehumanize someone. If you can't see that, you may need to read more history.

This has the logic backwards, and is also playing semantic games with the meaning of "deny existence". We're talking about a claim that someone already does not exist (which is why people think it's absurd: they're often actively having a conversation with the person they're falsely accused of believing not to exist), not the act of causing someone to cease to exist (an imprecise, colloquial way of referring to murder).

I’ve personally caught a couple of Iranians and Russians brazenly posting such threads at 4am British time (working hours in Tehran) and the moderators did nothing. They simply allow such threads while deleting any thread that goes “is anyone sick of the constant threads about immigration?”

These threads generate so much engagement from people of all opinions that it makes the sub appear in people’s feeds as recommended content even if they’re not subscribed to the sub. It gives people the impression that there is only one political subject in the UK that gets any discussion.

I don’t know why the moderators of this sub do this, but the effects of their moderation are clear.

Not denying that there are people in these countries who want to cause trouble on the internet. But there are many such people in all countries...

The clincher was that they deleted their account as soon as I pointed they were Iranian.

I’m going to guess they bought a Reddit account from someone without looking at the past history on the account.

Please tell us why an account with a history of posting on Iranian subs was masquerading as a British person, getting British people riled up at 4am BST? And why did they delete the account immediately after this was pointed out?

State sponsored doesn’t necessarily mean they’re highly competent.

I found one on r/portugal, clearly coordinated network spreading political news of a certain persuasion.

R/donald became famous because the admins turned on national flags for users there revealing a significant percentage was Russian IPs without even a VPN. The Russian users called it “the mark of David” and compared it to Nazism.

There were also investigations showing Russian activity in The Donald. But somehow the flag story is something I seem to have dreamed into this story. Doesn’t seem have happened (even though I have oddly specific memories about it).

That said I have no idea if what GP said is true or not

There were also investigations showing Russian activity in The Donald. But somehow the flag story is something I seem to have dreamed into this story. Doesn’t seem have happened (even though I have oddly specific memories about it).

People believe that these countries would love to do that, but for some reason, they think they are not doing as much as possible.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19802

[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/25/scottish-ind...

Part of me hopes that some amount of resources are being invested by someone in our government to analyze and assess this, but maybe that is overly optimistic.

Then Musk bought X and turned the game around.

I believe you. But I've also often been accused of being a bot or working for an intelligence service when posting my own opinion in political discussions, not in coordination with anyone at all, and not pretending to be anything I'm not. I think the people accusing me of this did genuinely believe it too.

What I typically saw was accounts that had a decent sized but very generic history, things like gaming or cooking. Then suddenly the accounts became very politically motivated over one particular thing. Then within a few weeks to a months the accounts were gone.

My assumption these were sold/farmed accounts with reused comments/boring posts that were then used to push a political message when needed.

So if your opinion happens to be in line with whatever narrative someone is trying to spin up, it will end up getting quashed.

Frankly there isn’t any solution to this, and you either end up losing ground to mechanised speech while having a low ban load for humans, or you end up acting on likely mechanized speech, and have a higher number of humans you ban.

The way Reddit is set up, people will select the first option over the second.

There were also investigations showing Russian activity in The Donald. But somehow the flag story is something I seem to have dreamed into this story. Doesn’t seem have happened (even though I have oddly specific memories about it).

To a lot of people, Russian is just a state of mind. It simply means that you disagree with them, or the regime that they support. Also, the mods on reddit are overwhelmingly these people, banning all opposing opinions, or banning people for being Russian, or Iranian, or Chinese, etc...

They think this is legitimate: aaah, so you're Chinese. I knew there was something wrong when you insisted that the Chinese weren't evil thieves hellbent on destroying freedom, by nature. You're not allowed to post in the West.

All governance in the western world has become weak as hell. You only need a few bucks to corrupt anything, unless somebody with a few more bucks is already corrupting it. And certain intelligence agencies have the deepest pockets. Maybe little fiefdoms wasn't the best way to structure the internet? Maybe section 230 would be obviated if there were clear, deliberative processes to allow entire groups to both take action and responsibility for what they allow in their discussions?

Take note about how adhering to parliamentary methods protects private organizations: in most places, having proper rules set up (not EULAs and ToCs) actually has the practical effect of creating law because it sets up obligations to the users as well as obligations from the users. There's no such thing as a benevolent dictator.

Pretending that there aren't concerted efforts to exert political influence on Reddit isn't helpful, and comes across as pretty disingenuous.

All governance in the western world has become weak as hell. You only need a few bucks to corrupt anything, unless somebody with a few more bucks is already corrupting it.

Yes, corruption and bribery exist exclusive in "western" governments. Thankfully "eastern" governments are completely immune to these issues.

And I know, "I never said those exact words!" but that at was the obvious intention.

/u/Turbostrider27 is a shared account between marketing firms. Saying their name in any sub the account is active on will shadow ban your message.

That's fascinating. How does an account like this not blatantly violate the TOC for personal or commercial use of Reddit?

Why do you think r/hailcorporate was killed?

I wonder if this could be approached in a way that new subreddits didn't have this disadvantage so that they could compete on mod quality and slowly grow / migrate the community.

Of course there are advantages to short unique names like readable links. But it seems that this false authority may not be worth the downsides.

Perhaps intentionally using uuids in the URL instead of slugs and improving the recommendation/search algo (e.g take into account the average post length or cited sources in the ranking) would solve this issue. Main challenge might still be that its very hard to move an existing user base if the moderator(s) blocks all posts about other communities.

Perhaps a more democratic moderation system or a system wide rule that disallows moderators from blocking posts about other (competing) subs would work?

One other option sites like scored.co do is they allow subs to use their own url (like their Trump sub is called patriots.win). The site admins have kind of given up on the site though so I'm not sure if you can still do it, but it seemed like a clever idea.

Although I do notice that r/science is apparently down to "only" about 1300 moderators. I'm pretty sure they broke 2000 at some point. (The large majority of those have been around for at least 5 years; it seems that the Reddit UI caps the displayed age, because I recognize names from much more than 5 years ago.)

There can be only one subreddit named r/politics, so whoever gets that name essentially decides how you can talk about politics on Reddit. Same applies to any other subject.

R/fishing will always sound more credible than r/fishing2 or r/2wqy4f. If there's some kind of fishing controversy, and the mods of r/fishing only allow one side to speak, that side gains a lot more credibility. The other side can move somewhere else, but that place won't have the credibility associated with r/fishing.

Reddit can try to fight this, but as long as subreddits have unique and memorable names instead of IDs, this is going to be a problem and require them to get their hands dirty.

When explaining his actions he said something like, "I've moderated forums before so I know how sustained censorship can change a community". And then he set out to do it.

Reddit has been garbage for a long time and people's reliance on it is a huge problem. Abuse of it redirected Bitcoin onto a fundamentally different path (one nobody had agreed to), simply because of the sustained gaslighting and psychological manipulation its format allows.

That said, user-driven content moderation sucks everywhere. Wikipedia has the same problem. So does HN to some extent. The future is moderation driven entirely by LLMs with openly published prompts.

I know at least a couple of subreddits for specific 'true crime' cases which split into one for people who believed the suspect was guilty and one where everyone believed they were innocent.

The thing is, the split fora were actually much better than pre split. When both sets of people were together every topic degenerated rapidly in exactly the same way:

    meticulous_postrr: I just reread the transcript of Fred's sixth interview and noticed that he mentioned seeing a purple t-shirt in the woods. Could this be the shirt that Ahab was wearing at the road house, which looks blue in the security footage? 
    middled_aged_loner: Nice try, but unless you can explain the severed foot in the ashtray, the blue shirt is irrelevant here. 
    AhabDidIt: Still trying to shill the 'only two feet' theory, m_a_l? What about what Edgar saw?

    curious_n00b: Hi, I love the podcast but I'm not sure about one thing: is the Sylvia mentioned in Dushane's diary the same Sylvia who knew Edgar from volleyball camp? 
    AhabDidIt: welcome curious. Good question, but you're wasting your time with the diary. The July entries were written in August, by April. See my previous threads /r/TheScarletFred/Ahabs_lies /r/TheScarletFred/Ahabs_lies_2 and /r/TheScarletFred/the_diary_evidence_reexamined
    middled_aged_loner: So in your opinion ADI, April apparently knew that Dushane had seen Vanessa on the rollercoaster but didn't mention it to the police on the 1st October? This completely fails to stack up. What about Vanessa's unfinished ice tea? WHAT ABOUT THE SEVERED FOOT?

I know we're all supposed to be worried about echo chambers, but sometimes an echo chamber is somewhere a specific conversation can take place which couldn't elsewhere.

As you can see in my comment I'm merely listing a few examples.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith

Let's aim to keep HN better and more pleasant to use than Reddit;)

The HN guidelines are there to improve the quality of the conversation, there's not much to further discuss so I'm going to leave it at this.

The sub currently requires moderator approval (specific flair) to comment on most threads.

The parent commenter is correct: It is widely known as one of the most censored subs on Reddit because the mods remove comments from unapproved accounts (those without flair).

Their rules claim that some threads are open for everyone to participate in, which may have been the case in the past when you commented.

However it’s not true for any of the popular threads. They will remove comments from unflaired accounts

This is all state in their rules. It’s not speculation. The parent comment is correct.

It's a bit like banning entry into the US because you've visited Russia.

It doesn't really matter how Russia runs their own country, you might have even gone there to argue against totalitarian dictatorships.

But a US border guard looking at your passport and rejecting your entry based on that alone feels like overreach.

How subs choose to moderate their content is roughly speaking sort of fine, as long as there's no organised harassment, sharing of illegal materials (child porn, revenge porn, war materials etc) and threats of violence or death.

This is at least such a common practice, that certain countries issue their entry visas in such a way, that they can be removed from the passport. I'd expect issues entering the US, if I had an Iranian stamp in my passport.

They state: "This is designed so that a couple posts per day are almost guaranteed to have conversation which is not hijacked by leftists and other non-conservatives.Who Gets Flair?

Only mods can assign User Flair, and User Flair is only for conservatives. Once you have a solid history of comments in /r/Conservative, and have been commenting in the subreddit for at least two weeks,[..]

Please understand that this is for conservatives. We do our best to vet you based on your post history on reddit. You will need some post history to qualify - ideally within the subreddit itself. If you do not have a conservative leaning post history you will likely be asked to re-apply when you do."

"Strangely" there isn't a single post on their frontpage at the moment, which doesn't require a flair to comment.

Why are you so concerned about participation criteria for the conservative subreddit, one of the only distinctly right wing places on the whole platform?

How do you know the question was rhetorical?

Which, to be fair, is not unlike how the GOP has been operating over the last few years.

You can get banned for posting traditional conservative opinions there if they go against the message the mods want to allow, even if it’s conservative.

Don’t be tricked into thinking it’s some conservative safe space. It’s a propaganda outlet for the mods who ban even conservatives if they don’t toe the line and agree with the mods.

The user raises concern that a right leaning forum has right leaning filters but fails to mention you see that with some left leaning forums. Based on the shock this person has never visited a left subreddit. Does that mean he is right leaning? Or does this person seek out a right subreddit because they are doing research?

I would guess research because the shock tells us he doesn't visit these places often and he doesn't visit more conservative places lile truth social because they censor at a higher rate.

There is my reasoning. You're challenge is to disprove this.

Saying "you are not a conservative" (not you but the comment you chose to defend) when you can't possibly know that is a ridiculous argument to make.

I gave my best answer with logical points. What is yours? This is a process law enforcement goes through when moving from unknown to known. I like my theory but I am open to others that may conflict.

I read all the same comments you did, and i didn't reach any particular conclusion about the person's politics. Your case is incredibly contrived, imo. A conservative who attempts to use a conservative forum and has a bad experience would have every right to talk about it. Why wouldn't they?

The point here being that it is hardly relevant how a subreddit specifically and explicitely for conservatives is moderated, when we are talking how mainstream subreddits are censoring conservative opinions.

Many grievances appear to be liberals concerning themselves with how /r/conservative is moderated, most likely after being banned for astroturfing there.

Edit: To be clear I wasn't picked on by anyone. It's a bot they run. This is a blanket ban that /interestingasfuck extends to anyone who has commented/posted on /asmongold, or any subreddit they consider to be right wing (by USA standards).

I guess the ratio of well moderated subs compared to poorly moderated subs heavily skews towards the poorly moderated. Irrespective of their political viewpoints.

You as a person who uses reddit have a general agreement most likely with the concept of reddiquette, and perhaps go to engage with diverse views, maybe to learn something, maybe to just have an argument. Normal internet forum stuff.

However, you are arguing with a vertically integrated propaganda machine that is basically an experimental weapons testing facility for rhetoric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency but on so steroids, of which those steroids are on various white powders and no this isn't the War on Christmas. It's less obvious because this machine mimics normal, centrist US culture in ways that slip under the cognitive radar.

You could more easily recognize this if it were AI prompts in the style of 1984 or Pravda; but it's more difficult in this case - it is just rational enough to be ridiculous/incredulous; that it seems like debate is a suitable avenue; it aligns to your context enough and while you might not agree; you could see how 1 in 10 people might be misled.

As a result, you engage and then one of the following happens:

- You make a point so salient they banhammer you because you cannot control the narrative.

- Or they mock you, and rally their "side" into feeling superior as a reaction/answer to their side's questioning of "huh, are we the baddies?". Of course not, it's the "loser woke left antifa attack helicopter pronoun'd TROUBLEMAKERS", who are an outgroup and just don't think about it too hard, k? Don't do the hard work of self examination! Just yell at this outsider!

As a result you aren't engaging with the centre right you hoped to; and if you even get close you will be removed as a threat, ASAP.

The game being played by one participant is "try anything that catches attention, causes fear and lures people to our mindset"; vs your (reasonable, but ultimately mistaken) view that rational debate would correct this and mutual understanding may emerge (and that's a positive; win win social outcome)

This isn't your fault, even longtime slightly centrist conservatives end up falling victim to this trap; when they realize their values don't align to the mechanics above, and are surprised when they are turned on by their former allies.

Unless you have a firm grounding in human psychology and few qualms about manipulation; it is unlikely that discourse or debate will get you anywhere if based on facts, not feelings.

I would firmly encourage you to keep the instinct to engage in discourse; but find social forums where it is a lot harder for a propaganda machine to control the narrative. Will still be tough, but face to face interactions in common spaces can build community.

The "other side" of the political spectrum or almost any group is absolutely just as liable to end up in this situation. It is not some "right wing" specific problem, it is a small but powerful group hijacking others to further their own goals, and people protecting their interests by funding the small group.

This is great lol

The specifics always depends on the subreddit, reddit doesn't pay moderators so its the wild west out there. You can find whatever echo-chamber you want honestly. Which subreddit does HN map to? Perhaps a mix of r/neoliberal and r/conservative (you know, healthy centrism /s)

/r/conservative, a place for conservatives to discuss "from a distinctly conservative point of view", is one of them. It's kind of also in the name.

Do they ban conservatives for criticizing Trump? I don't know, perhaps. I'm going to assume many such comments on there will in fact be made by liberals.

Meanwhile, I was immediately permabanned from my country subreddit when I expressed a pro-Israel opinion in the comment section of a relevant post. In the Modmail I sent, the "moderator" basically insulted me.

They won’t even allow you to comment there now unless they can interview you, audit your comment history across Reddit, and pre-confirm that you align with the message they want to allow.

Deviating will result in a ban.

Why are you commenting so much to defend a subreddit you admittedly don’t understand?

It’s not both all the other subs, the point under contention is about that you cannot be critical or reasonably discuss anything proper in r/conservative.

I don’t know if you have been following the sub, I have, and it always follows a similar pattern. If it’s a new topic, some discussion is allowed, but soon everyone needs to toe the party line.

Edit : I encourage free discussion on this point, instead of downvoting.

The more you separate people the more unhinged they become. If you went back and talked about how reddit tried to hide that Biden was demented or that Harris was unpopular so would be a catastrophic election loss that would also have been onion worthy but today its reality.

I would not call that unpopular.

There is a lot of hot talk, a lot of insular bubbles working themselves into online frenzies, but it is, objectively, a boring, passive time out on the street. No, there is no cliff.

Outside of the USA: talk of invading Canada, Greenland, indiscriminate execution of people on the high seas, a tariff war that seems to be a series of own goals, destabilization of NATO, the burning of 75 years of goodwill.

Inside the USA: military in the cities, half the country is being depicted as 'the enemy' by those in power, an embarrassing cadre of incompetents are in powerful positions and are wrecking the departments they are nominally in charge of, North Korea style adulation of an idiot leader, attacks on judges and members of congress are on the order of the day, teams of masked man snatch people (men, women, children) off the streets and out of their beds, endless violations of the law by the authorities, naked power grabs and abuse of pardons, attacks on the free press, destruction of the machinery of the state are the order of the day.

Those things you mention were bad, but they were still within the framework of the normal functioning of a state, it never looked as though there was a real chance of the USA fracturing or turning on itself no matter how bad they were. But this time it looks very much different. If you can't see that then that's fine with me but 'historical ignorance' is an easy card to play if you have already decided that what's happening right now in the USA is business as usual, and to me it does not look like 'business as usual' at all. This is unprecedented, and it is getting worse every day.

What I think is happening is that the 'flooding the zone' strategy is working so well that people are simply no longer able to keep up with all of the assaults and they hunker down, hoping that it will pass them by. That's a coping mechanism.

George HW Bush deployed national guard to cities to deal with unrest, Lyndon Johnson deployed the national guard multiple times to deal with unrest, Eisenhower didn't just deploy the National Guard, he sent in the 101st Airborne - the real army. The current deployments are small and peaceful in comparison.

The rest of the world - so outside of your bubble - hears that talk and is getting seriously worries. Not just about the leadership of the USA, but about the USA as a whole.

> George HW Bush deployed national guard to cities to deal with unrest,

But not on a pretext, though, arguably, he did start a major war on a pretext, so there's that.

> Lyndon Johnson deployed the national guard multiple times to deal with unrest, Eisenhower didn't just deploy the National Guard, he sent in the 101st Airborne - the real army. The current deployments are small and peaceful in comparison.

But they are on a pretext and that is what should worry you. The commander-in-chief has gone nuts to the point that he is inventing reasons to send the military into cities that do not want them.

But if you want to choose to ignore all that and pretend that everything is just a-ok, be my guest. We'll see how your comment ages.

Propaganda, Anxiety, none of it is real. Parent is right, its made up outrage and the US and world is better now than ever.

The only thing that is extreme is the hate spewed by both sides.

Widescale race riots, Vietnam war protests, a President and Presidential candidate assassinated etc. That said a few cms or so difference and that bullet takes out Trump.

Certainly divided right now just genuinely not sure if it's quite at that level or not.

> Appreciation subreddit dedicated to the life and art of Michael Joe Jackson

Criticism of Jackson would be off-topic.

Plus it's not like anybody who is a fan of Jackson doesn't know about those allegations and some of the weird things he did. People who feel the need to say he was weird about kids in that subreddit are probably just trying to troll Jackson fans. It's not going to make the subreddit better for fans who are there to celebrate the art and music of Jackson.

That was considered “instigating violence” lol

"We should just execute them and save money" is instigating violence.

If you aren't willing to spend resources because it's "obvious" to you, you do not care about Justice.

Cops always think they got the right guy, and they are regularly blatantly wrong, including for people on death row.

That's why we have trials, with independent judges, juries and rules.

Remember when the Boston marathon bombing happened, and Reddit users identified dozens of different people as obviously, and definitely, the bombers (https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/reddit-regre...)? Remember when the LAPD opened fire on multiple random civilians who they thought might be Christopher Dorner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings_a...) remember when the DC sniper was active and the tip line received thousands of calls from people claiming to have 100% certainty that they saw the sniper, then describe people of conflicting races, ages and physical descriptions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks)

We have trials so that we make sure we put the bad guys in prison, not random innocent people who were misidentified. They're for the benefit of everyone else, not for the criminal.

That's a pretty hilariously one-sided example, given /r/conservative is one of the most comically moderated subs on Reddit. Like, you were so close with that example, but no, it turns out it's all the other subs that are to blame.

/r/conservative is just a renamed The_Donald. It has essentially nothing to do with conservatism, and anything even remotely critical of the dear leader, where critical can be just asking for clarification or correcting a wrong claim, leads to an immediate permanent ban. I actually thought it was performance art and was echoing the famous, and hilarious, North Korea sub. Turns out it's actually sincere.

As to the rest of your list...yeah, I think we'd need to see examples. When people do the "they banned me just for {x}", they often conveniently leave out a lot of not {x} that actually led to the ban. People are remarkably biased in how they tell these tales.

But ultimately I don't particularly care. I'm not a whiny little baby, and if people need to create such an echo chamber in the service of a child rapist, so be it. That is their prerogative, and all the more power to them. You hilariously replied as if I'm licking my wounds and stomping my feet demanded my voice in that sub, when all I was doing is pointing out that bringing up that extreme example of moderator overreach, but then not using it was a bit comedic.

>The problem is default subreddits handing out permabans over political opinions.

Sounds tough for you. I can see why you are getting banned. But, you know, any sub can ban people for their own policies, even just that they don't like the energy you bring to a sub. There is a bizarre subtext to your comment that is a sort of "/r/conservative is ours, stay away, but also we are entitled to our views in other subs...because, default or something". Pretty telling.

The entire basis of your argument was that it is for conservatives, so non-conservatives should be banned. And FWIW, I am classically a conservative. An actual conservative, not the cult of personality sort. In this new era suddenly I'm some weird liberal.

>many moderators, just like you

Like me? LOL, I'm not a moderator on Reddit, and can't fathom wasting my time like that. But, eh, people have their own hobbies.

And I've been banned on a number of "liberal" subs like worldnews, because of the aforementioned conservative foundations of my views. And...eh...I sob into my pillow a bit and move on. There are numerous other news subs, and I can make a /r/conservativeworldnews or something and compete for hearts and minds. Whatever.

There are not numerous other mainstream news subs where you would not get banned for conservative opinions. In fact I believe worldnews may be the most conservative leaning one. I know that /r/news is far more left.

You don't think that's a problem with the platform?

Regardless, and to rehash, the foundation of your position was that conservatives have their own place and non-conservatives should be banned on sight to give them their zone. But it isn't a conservative sub, it's a Donald Trump cult subreddit. Which everyone knows at this point -- it certainly isn't a secret -- but again I only brought it up because it was so comedic to mention that sub but not offer as an example of absolutely insane subreddit moderation.

If there is a problem with moderation on reddit, /r/conservative is the perfect example of power tripping moderation and an inability for casual visitors to understand how one-sided the perspective has been curated to be. Again, I only pointed out how hilarious it was to mention that sub, but only to criticize other subs.

>You don't think that's a problem with the platform?

It is a reality on any curated or moderated site (including HN). Every single human on this planet has biases and agendas and conflicts of interest.

Should every sub have a firehose of moderated away comments and or banned users and their reasons? Sure, probably, in the same way that HN has showdead. I mean, there's going to be a lot of heinous stuff among it, but it would make for a fascinating analysis.

EDIT: Every comment I made suddenly got a -4 applied to it, which is kind of funny in the context of this discussion. I am 100% convinced that HN has "super arrow" users, though this has never been disclosed or detailed. But, eh...

But is it a perfect example? I don't know. It's political in nature and one could expect that it's run by MAGA considering the current state of the Republican party and the fact that they banned the Trump subreddit.

I'm more concerned about /r/worldnews and my country subreddit. Reddit should enforce some standards for moderation and make sure those default places aren't run by political activists.

But maybe that's the least of Reddit's problems. Today I have seen multiple posts openly glorifying the Al-Qassam brigades. These posts may well be illegal under various European laws against publicly glorifying terrorism. Many upvotes too, and the posts have been up for hours.

And the funny thing is Redditors think that Twitter/X alone was a terrible platform that needs to be censored.

Now /r/conservative HAS to be strict with modding, if not the entire liberal leaning army of redditors will either have it banned, or taken over. Is that better in your mind? Or are you just upset that it was used as an example?

Could you motivate why this is relevant and what your counter point would be? I'm genuinely curious!

Furthermore, I'm sick and tired of self-created right-wing narrative of censorship when they're ever so eager to do it to the fullest possible extent they can with their current powers and societal acceptance. And then we're not just talking about random people being mean to you on Twitter, but government power. All while leaning on a narrative of "We're just doing what you did before" that they've created themselves by endless repetition.

I would prefer not to link my Reddit account to my HN account furthermore it's common for comments to be deleted at a ban so I'm unable to give you the exact comments but happy to provide insight into any (perceived) biased! I have voted D66 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrats_66) during the last elections, I'll let you do your own assessment of their standpoints.

I understand your frustration about the (perceived) narrative of censorship. But I think we can agree that censorship of _viewpoints_ (no matter who it's coming from) is a bad thing.

Unfortunately that seems to be rather rampant on Reddit and is the main point in my original post. As others have pointed out /r/conservative also seems to suffer from bad moderation so this seems more like an issue with Reddit than something coming from a particular political flank.

Hope this answers your concerns!

Understandable, no worries.

> I have voted D66 [..] during the last elections

I've been seeing sentiments like this before but I don't value them high because what matter is what people do and decide when things becomes hot and their professed principles need to be actually proven.

As an anecdote, and yes, I know it's an extreme example, but it's interesting to me and brings the point home: When listening to an audio book (it's on Audible if interested, recommended!) a while back that compiles a bunch of interviews with defendants of the Nuremberg trials, a surprising amount of them suggested, paraphrasing; "I was actually a liberal before the war!" (and also a strange amount of teachers curiously!).

I understand your point about deciding and acting when things become hot but shouldn't we place political vote(s) above comment(s) on social media? Realistically I would hope that the average voter in Europe does not encounter a "hot" situation where his or her morals will be tested as they were during the second world war.

Yet what we vote for influences real world actions, what we say online might influence one or two opinions slightly.

I’m thus unwilling to take Rep. Comey’s decision to call Reddit to testify as evidence of anything. Feels more like political theater to me. This doesn’t either condemn or absolve Reddit, it’s just not strong evidence.

My explicit hypothesis is that he’s not holding these hearings out of a desire to investigate, he’s holding them for other reasons.

Also you’re slipping down a slope here. Originally the question was about promoting violence yet you keep referring to hatred or even being glad someone’s dead. Promoting violence is not the same as being glad someone has passed away.

And let's not ignore the owner of the site posting inflammatory/hateful/violent rhetoric.

The closest that I've seen is conversations about violence rates and nationality (in the context of immigration) but these topics have also been discussed in the liberal left Dutch newspaper (Volkskrant) and conservative center newspaper (Neu Zuricher Zeitung) that I read.

My main point would be that Twitter does a better job at not amplifying calls for violence than Reddit. I, obviously, do not have access to internal Twitter data so my assessment is purely anecdotal but nonetheless seems relevant to the conversation.

But if that's your twitter experience then you have a very well curated feed and on top of that are somehow able to side-step the stuff that Musk pushes really hard.

While Twitter has many issues, I still find value in it and I figured that a counter point to the common narrative would add value to the discussion.

I would love a LLM curated social network where I can drive the content that I see by adjusting the prompt to ensure that only high quality, fact based content is presented to me.

While no doubt not perfect and accounting for LLM biases (at scale) is not trivial this seems doable on a small (personal or small community) scale. Given the low cost of LLMs these days (queries on Flash 2.5 Lite or QWEN usually cost me a fraction of a cent), this might actually be a pretty cool weekend project!

---------------

Reddit absolutely does have a moderator problem, as one would expect for a platform that relies on anonymous volunteers, but this might merely be the pretext for a witch hunt. e.g. The Trump administration may actually attempt to track down users who posted anti-Kirk or anti-Trump memes. It might be something even more though. There may be an attempt to coerce these platforms to start moderating in a way that's more favourable to Trump. Reddit is a hotbed of anti-Trump memes after all.

Protest is the bane of authoritarian regimes. That's why the Trump administration moved to lock down colleges so rapidly early this year. However, online social media also has significant capacity for influencing public opinion. This is why so many authoritarian regimes simply cut off internet access for their people. Others (e.g. China) have attempted to censor, manipulate, and control the internet rather than cutting it off.

Americans, and the world, should be paying close attention to these hearings. They should also pay attention to any sudden changes in behaviour of these companies. Merely being summoned to a hearing might be enough of a threat to make them give Trump all he asks for.

That’s the real comedy about this; when we like it censorship is good, when we don’t like it (Covid shutdown, anti vax, Jan 6th) censorship is bad. The double standard is shocking, yet completely normalized.

Besides any attempt to end violent rhetoric has to start with POTUS himself, theater exactly what it is.

If mainstream media had censored Adolf Hitler at the time, the Holocaust and the war in Europe might have been prevented. On the other hand, if they'd censored Winston Churchill, the Holocaust and the war in Europe might have been worsened.

It's like the argument for deregulation. Well, good regulations are good and there should be more of them; bad regulations are bad and there should be less of them. There's can be no serious argument for whether the number of regulations to go up or whether it should go down - that should entirely depend on each individual regulation being good or bad. Any argument that all are good or all are bad is pure irrational ideology.

I like the ones I think are good and I don't like the ones I think are bad. That's not a double standard - that's rationality. Besides what I think, there is also usually an objective measure of goodness or badness, but it's a lot harder to get at. I am not flipping a coin to think something is good or bad - I am estimating whether it's objectively good or bad. Am I a good estimator? Hard to tell.

Who is "we" in your comment?

Simply put in reality some censorship of some kind or I can simply 'win' by screaming really loud so no one else can even get a word in about their view.

The paradox of tolerance tells us that any view that intolerant of the existence of another person for simply existing should not be allowed as it is a terminal case. Of course electing the most violent and intolerant person we could find means we're going to have a hard time.

In my understanding, libel is a civil tort, and the victim can sue if they think they have been libeled. And wishing someone dead isn't illegal in the US, though it may be elsewhere.