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by swarnie_ 1799 days ago
I think Reddit might be fundamentally flawed because of its voting system and its need for high moderation to make it workable. Mods influence so much power over what people are and aren't allowed to talk about. You use the example of CasualUK which is indeed a very good if slightly "police state" sub but it only exists because the other UK subs became unviable.

The old defence has always been "if you don't like it go away and make your own sub", unfortunately with so many obvious subs being squatted its difficult to get exposure to newer communities.

From memory we have:

/r/unitedkingdom - Mostly teenage lefties, often resembles a 6th form common room, mostly dislike the UK.

/r/ukpolitics - Similar to above, slightly quicker on the banhammer.

/r/england - cybersquatted and shutdown for years by a power mod, just opened back up but the power mod won't give top rank over to active mods.

/r/scotland - A borderline anti-English hate sub, harsh group think in most threads.

/r/baduk - The less said the better.

I don't know what the solution is because as i said, reddit is flawed at a base level. The only positive change i can think of is to cap active participants in a sub to a specific small number.

2 comments

>/r/ukpolitics - Similar to above, slightly quicker on the banhammer.

I'm really sad about what happened to /r/ukpolitics. Back when it had 20-30k subscribers it was genuinely full of political anoraks and I'd often feel I'd learned something because you had the full spectrum represented there. They'd argue but people tended to know their shit a lot more, and obviously rubbish arguments were much less common. It's far more successful on paper now, but it's also enormously less interesting for me.

Maybe I'm just not the intended audience any more, I'm the sort of person who'd rather see an anarchist and a Thatcherite get into a verbal knife fight than the beige, very mainstream discussions that go on there now.

> I think Reddit might be fundamentally flawed because of its voting system and its need for high moderation to make it workable.

Perhaps. Or perhaps it's groups of people that are fundamentally flawed.

> The only positive change i can think of is to cap active participants in a sub to a specific small number.

Which would break a significant number of use cases of reddit.

Whatsapp groups have no voting, typically pretty limited numbers of participants but can be hot flaming piles of garbage and a huge source of misinformation spreading around the world.

> Perhaps. Or perhaps it's groups of people that are fundamentally flawed.

This is totally all there is to it. Also individual people for that matter. There was some twitter thread that was linked here recently that totally reminded me of a clique of vicious adolescents backstabbing someone in middle school. A side of humanity I hadn't seen in decades.