[qwerpy]

I got banned from my local subreddit for saying “as an Asian we actually tend to like cars from this brand” in a politically charged post about a certain car brand. Didn’t seem very spicy to me. “If you support this brand you’re supporting Nazis” was allowed and upvoted, of course.

On the bright side that was the impetus for me to finally stop giving my valuable attention to that site.

[mangodrunk]

I have mostly come to the same conclusion. I don’t go on Reddit much these days and hacker news as well. When it comes to political discussions dissent is typically challenged with various means other than debate.

[phillipcarter]

You almost certainly are lying and were not banned for saying that.

[qwerpy]

I wasn't banned from the whole site but I definitely was perma-banned from the local subreddit. That's how reddit works. Moderators get to moderate as they see fit, and short of some egregious terms of service violations, reddit admins won't interfere.

[1234letshaveatw]

I was also quickly banned from participating in my local sub. It is a shame that the local subs are the ones that are the most over moderated- they are effectively isolating those in the community that don't have an "acceptable" viewpoint on any given topic

[pessimizer]

> the local subs are the ones that are the most over moderated

The local subs are by nature ghost towns, and the first people to get them rolling will often establish some weird culture that will never be uprooted.

I disagree, though. The most over-moderated are any having to do with any product or service (especially particular websites or pieces of hardware or software), liberal-left subs, or subs related to any industries that are dominated by particular companies. This happens because companies make sure to control the modding of (what they consider) their own subs.

In the case of liberal-left subs, the Democratic Party has prioritized controlling all political discussion amongst the people whose votes it feels entitled to post-2016, when H. Clinton's campaign press released that it was assigning a budget of millions to "Correct the Record" anonymously online. In that year, the party apparatus was indistinguishable from Clinton's campaign organization, and those people continue to do the same thing except the budgets have gone way up. This was also when the Democrats and the CIA/FBI started to become mutual admiration societies (which I think has worn out to a certain extent after Gaza and ICE) but you can see how the personnel and tactics diffused over the past decade until their effects became overwhelming today.

Might be better to say that the local subs are the most organically over-moderated, but even then sometimes that first little clique that gets them rolling are actually connected in their local area, and engaging in the same kind of thoughtful, collaborative, profit-motivated manipulation as above.

[alex1138]

It's also just that Reddit is the most centralized decentralized thing ever

Especially considering... look what Huffman did with Apollo and other third party extensions. The man doesn't give a fuck. How hard is it to brigade Reddit? Compared to if we had 20 different forums for (say) Austin Texas as opposed to the one with 6 mods that will ban whatever you post on ideological grounds?

[1234letshaveatw]

Go take a gander at the sub for the most conservative leaning town you can think of. You will be surprised at how busy and “organically” left leaning it is.

[pessimizer]

Why in the world would you say this to a stranger about the account of a completely mundane event? I've seen people banned from subreddits for e.g. mentioning the wrong brand names, and even worse, been happy that they were banned because those brands were not the subject of the subreddit (and were a constant distraction because mentioning them was something provocative and easy to post if you didn't really know anything about the subject.)

And you think that "asian people like this brand of car" is something so obviously impossible to be banned for that you would denigrate a stranger with zero evidence, under your own name. I'm honestly shocked by people's bravery sometimes; if this is a professional account, people reading it who know you might think less of you (and will never mention this to you.)

[busterarm]

It's also funny because the statement isn't even controversial and people still get insanely ass-mad about it.

Also consumer car buying by ethnicity is tracked data and billions of dollars in investment & marketing are allocated from this metric...It's an absolutely ridiculous thing for anyone to feel a certain way about being stated.

[nonethewiser]

He said from a subreddit, not the whole site. There is a much lower and more variable threshold for banning from subreddits. Its very believable. People get banned from subreddits for being subscribed to different subreddits. Hence the “echo chamber.”