Comment by Aurornis
5 days ago
> And it's also been widely known for that long that Reddit is an influential venue in which to take over a corner -- for marketing or propaganda.
Capturing moderation of a subreddit has long been a strategy of marketing agencies.
Even when they can’t take over the actual mod positions, they’ll shower the mods with free product and make them feel like a VIP. I watched this happen from inside one company and I couldn’t believe how easily the marketing team turned a mod into our biggest advocate by sending free products to them from time to time.
> A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.
In some of the subreddits I followed, the remaining subreddit users felt some relationship with the mods over time and felt they were on the same side. There are subreddits like /r/nootropics where many users don’t realize the mod team has been captured by a supplement company (Nootropics Depot) and that they have a history of deleting some posts critical of Nootropics Depot. You would think this would be grounds for a subreddit riot, yet whenever I check it feels like everyone there is fans of Nootropics Depot and therefore they get a pass. Note that the quality of the science discussed on /r/nootropics is generally terrible and of very poor quality in recent years, which is certainly a related factor. It’s also not hard to find comments in other subreddits from people who were banned from /r/nootropics.
I think this happens across a lot of subreddits. Moderators find reasons to ban the dissenters and shape the conversation until the hive mind consensus favors the mods, so any issues aren’t discussed. People who object are banned for different reasons and minor infractions, then get tired of Reddit and move on. What remains is captured by companies pushing their products to an audience who thinks the mods are doing them a favor.
I wonder if it would work a free speech site to allow mods to not include a story in a category/ subreddit, but then just place that story into, say, /r/changemyview/banned. You'd still need sitewide moderation, but you'd always be able to see the way your feed was being edited within that context.
this seems to be happening on city based subs as well where the split is political; creating echo chambers for each side. This feels dangerous as any potential middle ground gets eroded away.
It's gone multiple ways in the past for not just city subreddits, but all kinds of regional ones. For example, r/canada has r/OnGuardForThee (because they thought the mods were allowing bigotry) and also (now private) r/RedEnsign (because, more or less, they thought the crowd making r/OnGuardForThee was falsely defaming them as bigots).
Example?
r/sandiego. The mods are political and territorial. I posted once about the suggestion to create a discord for the sub and they removed my post and DMed me this:
> What experience do you have modding such channels and the reddit community?
> Managing city subs are among the most difficult on the site... these are not single topic communities and discord is not organized in the same way so that bad actors can creep in and cause problems without being back lined to the site.
> There's more to this than people saying they're interested. It's also what kind of interest and what is being said and done that has to be in support of the sub and not a backdoor community that leeches activity from the sub / site and forwards it to something off site.
> Lots of concerns here.
Basically, we will not have the same kind of absolute power there that we have here, and we can't risk it becoming a rival community. This was to the innocent suggestion/question as to why there wasn't one already.
3 replies →
/r/Seattle and /r/SeattleWA.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/54ie2t/seat...
/r/nyc had a homeless mod for awhile that was on a power trip for awhile. They would ban anyone who used the word "homeless". Not in a derogatory way, just type the word out. It took years to get rid of that person.
/r/Texas allows conservative discussion (it doesn't get banned) but nothing gets posted or voted on, effectively making it a sub of people who hate Texas.
r/Toronto and r/Toronto_Ontario
r/CanadaPublicServants vs r/CanadaPublicServants2 (banned) vs r/CanadaPublicServants3