Comment by LaurensBER

If you say anything remotely controversial anywhere on reddit you will be hunted by a moderator of another sub and then targeted for banning.

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.

> 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.

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.

Lets go down to /r/conservative and throw rocks at them for being dumb was a pretty popular activity for people. For anyone who has been on reddit for any length of time, it should be abundantly obvious why the sub needs extremely heavy moderation. That sub is like having an LGBTQ tent at a redneck festival.

> 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.

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.

You're kidding right? Think critically for a moment. Do you understand how politically scewed reddit is? What do you think would happen if /r/conservative was wide open, what would get upvoted, what would get burried? Give me your honest prediction.

> You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until

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.

Could it be that sharing conservative ideas is against Reddit's community guidelines?

There are other subreddits with primarily right or moderate leaning communities and comments in those get deleted all the time with moderator messages saying they risk the entire subreddit getting taken down by Reddit simply for sharing basic conservative views.

I've often posted on the internet at 4am local time before. How did you establish the posters were Russian or Iranian, other than by time zone? (4am London is working hours for around half the world population.)

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...

On a related note, leaving my gripes with one guy aside, a lot subreddits are also just blatant marketing fronts, with the full blessing of the mods.

/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 an interesting idea!

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?

All these sorts of bans are ridiculous. I got banned from a EU sub because I said my mother was polish, then someone doxxed out more info about me, and then I got criticism for not being a true Pole. This came only from me saying my mother was Polish. Fucking lunatics.

I think maybe this is a feature rather than a bug.

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?

The split subreddits have better information, better curation and better flow. People who are otherwise in agreement debate precise points carefully and in detail. Both are available on the same internet so anyone who wants to can read both and make up their own mind.

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.

No, the biggest one is r/india as it is the subreddit for the largest country in the world with moderators being from an adversarial country and any positive news about the country always being removed while constant critiques and hate allowed

Exactly this. They had full control over both bitcointalk and /r/bitcoin. A few persuasive individuals circumvented the design and censored all discussion against it. It turns out that 51% attacks don't matter if you control social consensus. You control what engineers get to participate. What the project direction is. What views are considered "credible" -- credible enough to be "worth posting." Then with the other hand you wave away opposing ideas and accuse those who disagree with you of your own bad deeds. Eventually, over time the original is replaced and there's no longer anyone around to remember it.

First thing I did after opening this thread was ctrl+f r/bitcoin. I was already familiar with large scale social manipulation in politics, but would never imagine such a thing could happen in a bitcoin subreddit, that event was eye opening.

Could you be as kind as to point out where I'm _only_ taking issue with the moderation of other subreddits?

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

I think the argument here is guilt by association.

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.

Does r/conservative ban you for posting in some other sub?

Fair point, I barely comment on that sub so my experience is limited.

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 already suspect this, but your expectations are out of line with the actual game/meta game/propaganda model there.

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.

Not really. There's few places on Reddit where you will be banned for expressing liberal opinions.

/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.

I don't really have a problem with that. The scope of the sub is:

> 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.

I'd ban you too. Unless there is something new and news worthy, you'd be trolling.

Depending on how you wrote or worded it, that IS instigating violence.

"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.

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Could you point out what exactly you find confusingly one-sided? Happy to update the list of examples if it enhances the quality of my post but when writing it I could only draw on personal experience.