duxup 5 hours ago

The guilty by association by upvote system doesn't make any sense. It's not how users work, intent aside, users don't don't care about if the content is appropriate or not. Post a cute cat photo to a "no cats" sub and it will get upvoted by users who don't know / care about the rules.

It's a dumb policy disconnected from how users operate.

The rest of this article was painfully hard to read reddit inside baseball that I honestly can't figure out if anything is validated to be 1:1 as far as the reasons for anythign that happened go...

One question:

How do reddit admins even operate? I've had limited contact but my experience is they seem to all operate individually. If you catch the attention of one moderator who is helpful, all good. Others you don't get any response, and yet others ... I swear I've seen them protect bad actors for the longest times for the same actions that other admins might lay down the hammer.

Reddit administration seems very amorphous and rules vary by administrator.

  • jimbohn 5 hours ago

    The way reddit admins operate is madly arbitrary. From experience, I am willing to bet that some subreddit admins or moderators get money under the table from interested parties to look the other way or worse.

    • toomuchtodo 5 hours ago

      You're never going to be able change Reddit and it's arbitrary actions, you can only move the discourse elsewhere.

      • jimbohn 5 hours ago

        Indeed, and I encourage others to do the same. I'd rather pay a couple of bucks to make sure my post lands instead of hoping a funny intermediary will consider the post okay. I've got a post that has been pending review by moderators for six months, with me messaging the mods of said subreddit; never again. I think LLMs could actually improve reddit from this POV.

    • duxup 5 hours ago

      I don't know about money, but I did have an experience where it felt like an admin was "protecting" a particularly usual / abusive sub level moderator who seemed to frankly have some serious mental health issues. They'd rant about people stalking them IRL because of their status as a moderator. At first they were just strange questionable stories but later it escalated. Some of their stories sounded like they'd assume anything as being stalked IRL. It got to the point where their stories involved them making vague references to threats to other users. The community was at a loss as far as what to do and no amount of contacting the admins seemed to illicit help, response was always seemingly from the same admin who seemed to sidestep all the worst behaviors.

      Then somehow some other admin noticed and cleaned it all up... just all perfunctory like that.

  • p_ing 5 hours ago

    Subreddit moderators are not reddit administrators. Reddit admins are employees (or perhaps contractors) of reddit and are the only ones that can issue site-wide bans or remove content ("[Removed By Reddit]").

    But like moderators, they're inconsistent as hell as to how and what they remove or who they ban.

    All around, reddit has become a trash factory. Not only running of the site, but the content. Extreme attention seeking users ("AIO", "AITAH", etc), or simply bots (pick any cat-related sub, all reposts, all bots).

    Even some technical subs are full of blind fanboy-ism and ignorance. It's simply painful. Unfortunately it's still a good place to get US and local news, /r/aviation often being one of the first subs to report on incidents, like the DIA AA fire, with photos/videos from the sub's own users.

    • duxup 5 hours ago

      I know the moderator difference, I'm talking asking about admins.

      The admin approach to policies have always seemed very individual to the admin with wildly different responses.

      • p_ing 5 hours ago

        I agree from what I've observed. You can have topic X posted which gets removed, only for someone else in the same sub to defiantly post about topic X with a "reddit removed this!" and it will stay up.

billy99k 6 hours ago

If I talked about murdering leftists using secret code that was completely obvious to the online community, should it be banned? Would you consider this 'discourse'?

  • awnird 5 hours ago

    Users on reddit and twitter do this all the time without consequences. They say "helicopter" instead of "Luigi".

  • duxup 5 hours ago

    I think the article demonstrates that if true the "secret code" is so vague that it's hard to know the actual intent and super easy to see this conspiracy everywhere without really knowing. Ctrl + F moderation tends to always result in absurdity.

    Is there a secret code that is being used by a ton of users? I have no idea.

    • p_ing 5 hours ago

      They talk about how the love Luigi, post Luigi hats, and how Luigi should have been the one to hook up with Peach.

  • dttze 3 hours ago

    Right wing media does this openly. Killing commies being good is a meme and anything they don’t like in the government is because of commies.