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by kristiandupont 1847 days ago
I wonder what kind of community you were hoping to find in Reddit if you think lack of free speech is the problem.

To me, the decline is an obvious Eternal September-like effect. The more popular it became, the more it attracted trolls, people with political agendas and other destructive forces. I think that sort of thing is as inevitable as programming languages ending in feature-bloat. I expect the same will happen to HN, even though I think the mods have done an incredible job so far and even though the atmosphere has shifted a bit I still enjoy the discussions here.
2 comments
read_if_gay_ 1847 days ago
> I wonder what kind of community you were hoping to find in Reddit if you think lack of free speech is the problem.

It doesn't have to be /b/ but in reddit's current form lack of free speech is a problem too. Power tripping mods are banning people for commenting at all in certain other subreddits. Politically inconvenient subs are getting qurantined if not outright banned. Similarly hateful but politically fashionable subreddits have been allowed to stay for years now. Politics permeates almost everything and if you don't share the ingroup opinion then it's not worth commenting. Granted a lot of this has to do with shitty mods and not reddit directly, but they aren't working to fix this either.

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greenwich26 1847 days ago
It's not just mods, reddit itself is at fault. They banned my IP. Now, every time I create a new account, it gets suspended within 24 hours, with a PM from the admins saying "ban evasion". Even if the new account doesn't post anything. This has lasted for around six months, apparently it is permanent.

Obviously I can get around it with a VPN, but it seems most VPN IPs are shadowbanned by default, so you have to wait for every comment to be approved by mods.

The "crime" which earned this sanctioning? Spam, advertising, racism? Nope, I never posted anything like that. It was a sensible and very highly upvoted comment last year in support of the lab leak theory. The initial suspension PM from the admins openly linked to that comment as the reason for the ban.

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newsclues 1847 days ago
Reddit geo blocks a cannabis discussion group for Canadians who don’t buy weed through the government distribution system, in an attempt to coerce them to buy the shitty legal weed.

That’s not free speech or effective censorship.

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