The reason Reddit is so heavily moderated is so that it stays a good place for discussion. Those rules are often in place because of prior bad experiences.
I think that’s the surface purpose, but in practice it’s not a good place for discussion because of the heavy moderation.
I spend less time on Reddit and less time discussing because some subs ban or restrict based on seemingly arbitrary rules and they vary from sub to sub so unless you really dig into a sub’s rules you won’t know that you’re not allowed to “have your words cause harm” by criticizing an idea because that sub has a rule and bans.
I don’t think this is conducive to good discussion because it directly removes people with good intentions from the discussion and discourages speech that may trigger a mod to make an arbitrary ban.
The reason Reddit is so heavily moderated is because despite receiving more than $100 million in quarterly revenue, they refuse to pay full time moderators. And the only people willing to do that work for free are crazy, terminally online NEETs who want to push their political agendas.
Reddit and up until Musk also Twitter are heavily left leaning with all it comes with like progressive opinions over conservative etc., I don't think they are even hiding it
it's very difficult to have civil discussion on Reddit if you go against official Reddit hivemind, but yeah there are smaller subs where even conservatives/centrist/right can discuss
being unable to fight the zeitgeist isn't really a moderator issue, and it's an explicit feature of reddit, and also Hacker News.
The reality is that if your opinion, no matter what it is, is disliked enough to overcome the default positivity bias (upvotes exist in higher frequency than downvotes), you will be democratically silenced.
This often affects the framing and scaffolding of your comments more than the core content, and encourages a style of writing that inherently seeks mass appeal.
There's something about the average highly upvoted reddit comment that just feels like a reddit comment, to the point that you can even ask ChatGPT to generate a highly upvoted reddit comment about "X" and it does a pretty good job.
Comments
The reason Reddit is so heavily moderated is so that it stays a good place for discussion. Those rules are often in place because of prior bad experiences.
I think that’s the surface purpose, but in practice it’s not a good place for discussion because of the heavy moderation.
I spend less time on Reddit and less time discussing because some subs ban or restrict based on seemingly arbitrary rules and they vary from sub to sub so unless you really dig into a sub’s rules you won’t know that you’re not allowed to “have your words cause harm” by criticizing an idea because that sub has a rule and bans.
I don’t think this is conducive to good discussion because it directly removes people with good intentions from the discussion and discourages speech that may trigger a mod to make an arbitrary ban.
The reason Reddit is so heavily moderated is because despite receiving more than $100 million in quarterly revenue, they refuse to pay full time moderators. And the only people willing to do that work for free are crazy, terminally online NEETs who want to push their political agendas.
That's an unreasonably optimistic take. In many subreddits, moderation is just for enforcing the moderators opinions.
Can I ask those replying, which moderation rules would you choose, in general?
Reddit and up until Musk also Twitter are heavily left leaning with all it comes with like progressive opinions over conservative etc., I don't think they are even hiding it
it's very difficult to have civil discussion on Reddit if you go against official Reddit hivemind, but yeah there are smaller subs where even conservatives/centrist/right can discuss
being unable to fight the zeitgeist isn't really a moderator issue, and it's an explicit feature of reddit, and also Hacker News.
The reality is that if your opinion, no matter what it is, is disliked enough to overcome the default positivity bias (upvotes exist in higher frequency than downvotes), you will be democratically silenced.
This often affects the framing and scaffolding of your comments more than the core content, and encourages a style of writing that inherently seeks mass appeal.
There's something about the average highly upvoted reddit comment that just feels like a reddit comment, to the point that you can even ask ChatGPT to generate a highly upvoted reddit comment about "X" and it does a pretty good job.