Comment by LexiMax
5 days ago
> 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.