[bnralt]

I highly doubt any of the comments here are from people who want to invest in the IPO and think badmouthing mods will help them.

Honestly, most of the dislike for the way that mods run Reddit is from simply running into the types of things mods on Reddit do. A few examples off the top of my head:

- The current blackout, where for most subs (all the subs I've visited, and every one I've checked), the decision to shut down the subs was made completely by the mods and not the users.

- /r/boardgaming had a bunch of mods that wanted to go into users history and ban them from /r/boardgaming if they didn't like their politics. The head mod objected, the other mods went on strike, then the head mod relented and let them do what they wanted.

- Recently saw a post on /r/centrist where half the posts where a mod disagreeing with people, and when the mod got downvoted they stickied a "you all are wrong and this is why we can't have good things" comment and then removed the whole thread.

- City subs banned any discussion of crime for a while, even when polls showed it the top concern for residents in a city.

- Mods of a large sub saying that users need to spend more time outside, so only mods would be allowed to make submissions over the summer.

- The whole drama with /r/workreform, where it was just created by a normal user after /r/antiwork fell apart. When it suddenly got huge, the user who created it was pushed out and it was taken over by powermods.

- /r/startrek mods banned people who didn't like new Star Trek show, then when those people started their own sub at /r/star_trek, they had the admins threaten to shut down the new sub if any user many any mention of the old sub (despite there being subs like /r/subredditdrama devoted to trashing other subs). Then they later got the entire sub shutdown for spurious reasons.

I could go on, but it's worth pointing out that the latter two are about how powerful mods work in conjunction with admins (many of who were previous mods) to shape things the platform the way they want. This is honestly a much bigger problem for the average use than the API stuff, since dissenting opinion is often hunted down and banned, and any somewhat large community gets pushed to be under the thumb of a small group of (frankly, rather unhinged) individuals.

[mandmandam]

You're absolutely right about all of that - and yet, I'm still on the mods side for this one.

Huffman is and always has been an absolute tool; in fact he's a big factor for much of what you're talking about.

And this is an awful policy, that make giant steps toward a level of enshittification that I won't tolerate.

[jtode]

Suffice to say, there's a lot to unpack in there, and I have a long list of yard tasks to get done. A lot of what you're describing is gonna happen everywhere, it happened on usenet, it happened in web forums, it has always happened.

Now I come from a different viewpoint than you, and I have had a certain kind of view about what you're discussing here as it relates to the internet since way before Reddit existed. One historical example for me was the Seymour Duncan (guitar pickup company) web forum. In theory, electric-guitar focused and the official rules said no politics. That said, it was a nest of late 90s internet right wingers, including the legendary Lord Valve, who you can look up and watch an interview where he's wearing a confederate hat, so.

I spoke up once or twice and got told no politics, while others were ranting about commies.

So might suggest that if you see this is a reddit-specific issue, that might indicate that you have been living in a different sort of bubble.

[easyThrowaway]

"No Politics" is always a shorthand for "No Politics I don't agree with".

[bnralt]

> So might suggest that if you see this is a reddit-specific issue, that might indicate that you have been living in a different sort of bubble.

I never said it was a Reddit specific issue, so I'm not sure why you're reading that into the comment. The discussion here is about Reddit though, and there have been numerous posts here wondering why people are upset with Reddit mods, and saying that mods just keep the place clean, so I listed some examples off the top of my head about why people might not like many of the mods. In the past, when the topic has been broader, I’ve discussed this as an internet wide issue (the people who have the time to live online don’t tend to be the best socialized individuals).

The fact that bad behavior is common on the internet doesn’t mean bad behavior is not an issue.

[jtode]

An issue that has no relevance to the discussion of silos vs fediverse. If anything, the fedi is probably going to allow for slightly more actual free speech in the end; nobody is gonna kick Trump off truth.social, for instance, and people who are into that sort of thing still get to have a community, whatever mainline Mastodon might think about that. I doubt r/the_donald is ever coming back.