Comment by Aurornis
5 days ago
> - If you post on /r/conservative you can expect to receive a bunch of bans from unrelated (popular) subs. Doesn't matter what you posted, being associated with that subs "taints" your account enough for some moderators.
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.
It’s not a real subreddit. It’s a moderator-curated echo chamber. 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.
That’s why every thread you view there will have “load more comments” buttons that never load anything: They remove more comments than you’re allowed to see.
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.
I don't see an issue with it, if you are willing to put in the effort to swim in the cesspool that is /r/conservative you don't get to complain when other people find the smell objectionable.
if /r/conservative is a sespool, what is /r/politics? You're just pointing out your bias.
8 replies →
Parent poster isn't saying that r/conservative should be banned for that behavior.
Since that sub's arbitrary ban behavior is allowed, other subs banning people for similarly arbitrary reasons (like people who have been vetted by its mod circle into being allowed to post there) should be permitted.
They say "It’s not a real subreddit". I think its reasonable to conclude that they at the very least disapprove of that behaviour
To more precisely respond: "A eye for an eye leaves the world blind"
6 replies →
Huh? It sounds to me like this is arguing one should be OK with /r/conservative doing it (and joining up, even) but then not OK that other subs do it, too. That doesn't really pass the sniff test, so maybe I'm missing something.
I'm more trying to say, if you find it wrong that r/conservative does it, then you shouldn't do it yourself. Other people's bad behaviour should not be a justification for you own.
When it comes to morality, we can't control how other people act, we can only control what we ourselves do.
Especially when the "retaliation" is aimed at members and not the people implementing the mod policy.
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.
There's heavy moderation, and then there's enforcing propaganda. If you really want to look there during controversial issues, you'll see even long time posters get comments removed when it goes against whatever agenda they want to push. That's no longer a matter of trying to facilitate unpopular discussion.
But that's just reddit in general.
3 replies →
> 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.
>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.
if it's really persistent they can't. Votes are one of the few mechanisms mods have no control over in their sub.
But in general, mods can remove any post they don't like, even if it gets voted against their wishes, as well as ban any users posting such posts. Do that for a few days and that usually wins out.
Platforms like Discord give their moderators much more power and discretion, while removing mechanisms for users for protest them. Despite this, Discord largely succeeds in facilitating social spaces for its users.
The biggest reason why this works is that even though users have fewer recourses against power-tripping mods, it also takes away the moderator's leverage of being the tastemakers of content aggregation that Reddit/HN/Slashdot mods and power users have. Without content aggregation, it's a lot easier for social circles to cleanly split if there are disagreements.
I also think that the fact that Discord servers are opaque works to its benefit. The openness of Reddit leads to a lot of cross-subreddit co-mingling, which invariably leads to drama and conflict. There's a lot less of this happening on Discord - it's not zero, but it's to the extent that posting discord conversations outside of their servers is widely considered "leaking" and Discord actively uses legal avenues to go after dragnet-style log archives.
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.
>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.
Rule 1 of site guidelines includes:
>Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
And given the conservaive mindset as of late in the US against trans people and undocumented workers, you can see the issue you run into.
I do disagree with banning off-sub behavior, though. you can use it to tag users and keep a closer eye on them, but moderators moderate their own space, not the entire site.
> And given the conservaive mindset as of late in the US against trans people and undocumented workers
I disagree that they have the beliefs you ascribe to them, broadly speaking. Again, we are talking about the mainstream. Views held by a very large fraction of the general populace.
6 replies →
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.
>Could it be that sharing conservative ideas is against Reddit's community guidelines?
Sharing conservative ideas is not against reddit's community guidelines. the sitewide guidelines are pretty simple, actually:
https://redditinc.com/policies/reddit-rules
to summarize:
1. don't harrass people on or off-site, nor promote hate
2. no spam or content manipulation
3. no doxxing nor non-consential sexual material
4. no CSAM or CSAM-adjacent material
5. don't impoersonae others
6. label NSFW content
7. no illegal content
8. don't break reddit on purpose
other conservative subs have historically had issues with rules #2 and #8, so I'm sure Reddit is more sensitive to that. In addition, current conservative leaning subs do tend to have more issues with rule 1, even to this day. I imagine what you are seeing are content being pre-emptively removed to prevent potential harassment that can get the sub banned.
To the average reddit, simply being conservative or voting for trump is promoting hate. I guarantee you 100% they think this. Take a /r/all post that is anti trump and read the comments about republicans, they hate them.
2 replies →
This is not credible without evidence.
The evidence gets deleted. Go talk with any of the mods or former mods for right of center-left discussion forums - any deviation or disagreement with far left narratives is asking for conflict. Anything that risks brigading or attention by one of the larger leftist subs will get nuked because those smaller communities can't expend the hours needed to deal with the flood of hate and harassment they get.
If you find that not credible, you haven't been paying attention - reddit is a leftist cesspit echo chamber, and the only way any dissenting viewpoints survive is through having an absurd level of micromanaging and moderator involvement, like r/conservative, or being so small as to fly under the radar and not attract notice.
Centralizing forums to reddit was one of the worst things to ever happen to the internet, in retrospect. We should have stayed diverse and decentralized, and leaned into federation style community links, and made it easier for people to navigate and surface interesting unique communities, independent of the arbitrary politicization and ideological nonsense that infects reddit.
4 replies →
I can testify this is credible. You can prove this by trying it out yourself.
1 reply →
I'm sure you can give us examples of these "basic conservative values" that gets entire subreddits banned off a platform run by a libertarian prepper who admires Elon Musk.
Out of curiosity, what views? I'm trying to understand if Reddit is just ban happy against conservatives or if basic conservative views are really against reddits TOS
Trans related topics are expressly against TOC and enforced unless a subreddit is ruthless in removing any comments that aren't expressly positive and affirming. There is no room for nuance on this topic. Just giving an example.
14 replies →
https://i.redd.it/cw47uodbkhh61.jpg