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by staringispolite 4614 days ago
Users do vote: with their subreddit subscriptions (also PMs to moderators, and/or text submissions complaining about policy). I don't get the sense that this was unwanted from the community either.

I don't know if this makes me biased, but I for one welcome fewer low-quality, link-bait, and/or recycled-story articles.

1 comments

> "I don't get the sense that this was unwanted from the community either."

It was unwanted. The mods' announcement was even downvoted to zero by the community:

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1pedlv/concerning_...

But the users are idiots. The users on the thread you linked think that filtering out shitty new sources is some kind of right-wing conspiracy.

r/politics is the opposite of a place you would visit for reasonable political discussion. It was so bad that it got dropped from the list of default subs, and even before that, people created accounts just to filter out stuff from that sub. The sub needed quality control for a really long time, and now it's finally getting it.

> But the users are idiots.

Since mods come from the userbase, what does that say about the mods?

> The users on the thread you linked think that filtering out shitty new sources is some kind of right-wing conspiracy.

Some do, sure. Many others, including ex-mods, see it for what it is: censorship.

A couple problems with your analysis: the population down-voting that post was preselected for those who had not already left/unsubscribed as /r/politics went downhill for the last couple years.

"Censorship" is a biased word, usually chosen by people who don't like what's being enforced. I would perhaps use the word "filtering" and it's perfectly common in a lot of subreddits. I don't think "censoring" is fair because all the same topics and events will still get discussed. The theory being that now, discussion starts with - on average - better reporting.

> "Censorship" is a biased word

Only to someone in favor of censorship.

Filtering is not always bad, especially not when it's done transparently, and in pursuit of a better community. To claim that filtering out those low-quality sites, when there are many higher quality sites covering the exact same topics, in just as timely a manner is somehow equivalent to censoring Google results in China - is just disingenuous.