Comment by arp242

> Getting banned from a default sub you've never posted in because you told a racist boomer somewhere else they might be falling for propaganda is bloody weird.

It's not great, but on the other hand: it's also not a completely terrible heuristic.

The challenge here is that some of these popular default subs attract tens of thousands of comments every day. Dealing with flags is time-consuming, and also "too late": better for racist bollocks to not be posted.

In the end every subreddit is a private fiefdom of the moderator(s) where they can do more or less what they want. Many subs have overly strict, obnoxious, or even bizarre rules. The original sub for The Netherlands got hijacked by some American who proceeded to ban everyone posting in Dutch.

It's not perfect, but in the end I don't think it's a bad thing. A global set of rules for all of Reddit won't work. For example of course you should be free to talk about religion, but proselyting Christianity on /r/atheism (or Atheism on /r/Christianity) would obviously not be desirable.

The thing Reddit replaced was web forums (phpbb etc.), newsgroups, and mailing lists, and those worked more or less the same.