[afavour]

> The mods really have no reason removing posts, outside of clear violating posts that may break laws, since the users can choose what they want to see with the upvote and downvote button.

I have to disagree. My counterpoint would be the AskHistorians subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/

Admittedly, I'm a history nerd, but it's probably the most interesting subreddit I've found yet. And it's full of deleted comments, because they have a very strict criteria about what can and cannot be posted. The system absolutely works for them. I'm not saying every subreddit should be organised the way theirs is, but I'm glad they are able to do what they do.

IMO, transparency is good. By all means make a public log showing what admins have done. But don't limit what they can do.

[fakedang]

Thousands of data points suggest GP's claim, and you counter it with one example?

/r/AskHistorians is one of the more unique subreddits, in that it has evolved to become what reddit envisioned a subreddit to be. But running counter to that are a thousand other country subreddits, where if you don't hold a hard line (lefty) view to politics, you will get banned. I have seen Labour shills with premium reddit accounts allowed to post content on r/uk that's downright against the rules, but hey, apparently agreeable to the majority of redditors, so it stays. Likewise I just assume that all of the country subreddits are internally influenced directly by political parties themselves. I have seen fake news being spread by all who have a vested interest (such as Armenians during Nagorno Kharabakh on r/Europe) and mods not even lifting a finger. We all know how r/Conservative and r/The_Donald mods just kicked out people who put forward views that were marginal to the rest of the sub. And why do subs like r/Sino, which openly peddle fake news, even exist? IMO reddit site moderators are largely sleeping and only wake up if something hits the newsstands.

Moderators should be empowered with the ability to censor and delete/flag comments, and to ban people with repeated infractions. But to ban somebody from a country sub and/or letting mods ban people with one or no infractions, while selectively applying the rules? No way. They should not even get filters imo. If it makes their job harder, then so be it.

That being said, one sub that I've found really nicely monitored is the r/casualuk sub. Politics is a strict no no, and they have some sort of bot to filter out such content based on keywords. The mods aren't some silent grandstanding keyboard warriors but people actively involved in the community who actually go so far as to organize real world events.

[afavour]

"Thousands of data points" sounds awfully scientific. Can you show me the dataset? Or are you using the word "data" in a more abstract sense here?

I'm not well versed enough to know if what you say about /r/uk or /r/europe is true, but I'm quite sure /r/askhistorians is not the only well run subreddit on the site. You're just picking examples of subreddits you say are badly run and using them as evidence that all other subs should suffer because of them. Doesn't sound scientific at all.

> They should not even get filters imo. If it makes their job harder, then so be it.

> That being said, one sub that I've found really nicely monitored is the r/casualuk sub. Politics is a strict no no, and they have some sort of bot to filter out such content based on keywords.

You don't see the incoherence in these two statements? It sounds a lot like your actual complaint here is that you don't like perceived persecution of your personal politics, and if moderation doesn't touch that then you have no problem with it at all.

[fakedang]

I was using data in the abstract.

AskHistorians is still a niche sub for history nerds, and is well run, like most of the niche subs. I don't disagree, reddit is my goto for niche topics.

But if you look at all major country subs, or major subs such as politics, news, world news, etc., all are badly run, with a hard bent to the left.

> It sounds a lot like your actual complaint here is that you don't like perceived persecution of your personal politics, and if moderation doesn't touch that then you have no problem with it at all.

Ah, how nice to toss baseless allegations at me. For one, I do stand aligned with most subs' political views. But I also stand for letting the other side state their views politely without demagoguery. I do not agree with subs brigading users who come from a different political shade, and have even taken the hammer from the mods for pointing out their hypocrisy in implementing the same. It doesn't take an idiot to see how neutral country subs have been taken over by a lot of far-left or far-right premium accounts, presumably paid for by party funds (I know a bunch of r/uk mods who are part of Momentum, the far-left branch within Labour, for instance). There isn't a place for centrist leaning folks on reddit anywhere on the main subs.

Not to mention the effective dictatorships that mods run, regardless of political leaning: you call out a mod for partiality and/or bias or bad behavior, instaban.

[tomcam]

A gentle correction. You and I view them as hard left, but they seem to regard themselves as centrists. If I am correct, they feel they are doing a public service. I prefer vigorous debate but they feel that certain views are so destructive that they should not be aired publicly.

[ohgodplsno]

> But if you look at all major country subs, or major subs such as politics, news, world news, etc., all are badly run, with a hard bent to the left.

Not exactly the left's fault if the right on the internet tends to be, you know, literal nazis and people calling for hatred. If /r/Conservative is representative of the average right wing user, yeah, it's normal they're getting banned, as they are absolutely incapable of reasonable discourse.

You also conveniently forget the local subreddits absolutely overrun by the far right. /r/canada was so bad that /r/onguardforthee had to be created. /r/metacanada regularly calls for eugenism. /r/france has the far right coming out of the woods every day.

[fakedang]

In fact, I don't disagree with you. I stated that too, that subs are literally being taken over by either far-right but mostly far-left trolls. I specifically included far-right hijacking to take into account what happened to r/France and r/Canada.

I've seen libertarian folks being hounded out of r/conservative just as much as I've seen centrists being hounded out of r/politics. Not to mention, most comments seem like they were written by people with zero world view, and who haven't gone anywhere beyond a 100 miles from home, regardless of political leanings. Reddit general (I.e. Reddit minus the niche subs), the subs that come on Popular, is basically a diorama of the lowest possible denominator of man.