As an aside, having scroll that thread, Reddit is a shambles. There's more deleted comments and related justification comment than actual comments. Make for a jarring experience.
It's a legal advice subreddit; they tend to have stricter moderation because their primary goal is to get the OP an answer to their question or advice on how to consult a legal professional about their issue. Posts like the one linked here tend to be a magnet for people more interested in the drama than the actual legal principles, so they end up being a wasteland of removed comments.
Exactly. There are reasons for those many deleted comments. It's specific to this subreddit for very good reasons and not something you can use to disparage all of reddit. Many subreddits have their own rules and culture.
It's not disparaging to point out a fact. The whole delete comment content but keep the comment and then add a reply comment with wordy reason for deletion of comment content is a shambles. And irrespective of whether it's on every subreddit or not, doesn't make it less so. It's basically just spam at this point.
My solution would be to simply delete the comment and PM the OP. If another user had already replied, replace the original content with a *short* reason for deletion, and PM the OP, leaving the replies in place unless they needed deleting.
It's a recursive issue, and this is something that Reddit could potentially improve. Reddit preserves a deleted comment's space in the comments section as [deleted]. Users who see a graveyard of deleted comments will comment to wonder why, especially if they are unfamiliar with the subreddit rules. This may require the mods to delete more off-topic comments, which worsens the issue, etc. So the established "best practice" is to delete but leave a moderator comment with an explanation so there's a paper trail.
It's fairly representative of reddit as a whole. Sure not all subreddits are this bad all the time but as soon as something comes up where people might have thoughts that the mods don't approve of...
Another example: r/AskHistorians is so heavily moderated almost every comment gets deleted.
Their standards of quality are very high. It's not a sub to push your views or argue, it's a sub for historians or people who can back an answer with academic references. So most comments and answers will get modded.
It's oddly refreshing. No flamewars, no junk comments, no "everybody knows the reason X did Y is Z" because that won't be accepted by the mods.
AskHistorians is far and away the best moderated sub on the site, but it relies entirely on guidelines that you can understand and agree with. Moderation on other subs (no clue about this one) is so heinously biased it makes them unusable. Very common on political and news oriented subs....
Absolutely- I can't understand why it still has such a loyal base considering how low the quality is- I see more insightful discussion on facebook half the time
Because Reddit != Reddit and each subreddit has their own audience and moderation style. Most of Reddit might be a cesspit, but that doesn't mean all of it is.
I can't understand why cigarettes have such a loyal fanbase. They're smelly and expensive. Costing roughly 4k a year, I can't understand why someone wouldn't buy a nicer car or massive TV or something.
Whenever a platform is popular these days I just assume it is more addictive.
As an aside, having scroll that thread, Reddit is a shambles. There's more deleted comments and related justification comment than actual comments. Make for a jarring experience.