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by Sunspark 1482 days ago
The downvoting thing is interesting.. I fairly often upvote comments with 0 if they haven't said anything bad or objectionable just to make things more fair.

The mods on subreddits are a problem too. There is no recourse. If they decide to ban you for any reason, that's the end of it, even if no rule has been broken. If you message modmail to ask for more information, they can just mute you from messaging modmail.

1 comments

"The mods on subreddits are a problem"

An absolutely site-killing problem. If you actually try to pursue specific topics on subreddits, you find they're administered by a bunch of babies wallowing in their little sandboxes and throwing tantrums for no apparent reason.

No election campaigns either, they are all dictators-for-life unless reddit head office decides they need to be involved.

This is the same issue IRC has. In the old days, if you were lucky, sometimes you could unseat a tyrant, but modern IRC channel ownership is enforced by the server itself.

This is part of why I like Twitter, even though I haven't been active on it in some time. People have to opt-in to you on Twitter. It's impossible to be a tyrant on Twitter, you cannot compel people to pay attention to you there. The disadvantage of Twitter of course is that it's full of bots so you have to put together your own curated lists of people that seem reasonable. I don't even look at the home feed.

> People have to opt-in to you on Twitter. It's impossible to be a tyrant on Twitter, you cannot compel people to pay attention to you there.

You can't "compel people to pay attention to you" on Reddit (or HN, Facebook, etc) either

Mute/block/ban exists on pretty much every social media platform (with the possible exception of HN (at least - I've never seen it hereon))

The way reddit implemented the block is very interesting also.

If you wish to control a conversation in some sort of strange manner, all you need to do is state something outrageous and plainly wrong, and then block the other person arguing with you. It makes you look like you got the last word because they can't respond and your comment stays up.

It's kinda similar to Facebook - I block Joe Schmoe, but people who haven't blocked him (or me) can still see whatever it is he wrote