
Redditors with absolute powers - ingve
https://denisbider.blogspot.com/2018/07/redditors-with-absolute-power.html
======
ve55
It's funny that this post doesn't mention some of the worst offenders in this
area. There are large subreddits where it's explicitly against the rules to
debate the validity of topics with participants, and many others where you may
find yourself automatically banned by a bot if your post history shows you
have posted in certain other communities.

The reality of Reddit is that a handful of semi-anonymous Internet users
control the news flow to millions of individuals. Even when this isn't the
case, the best you can hope for is that it is instead controlled by upvotes,
bots, admins, and algorithms, which is not much better.

The comparison to policing is a bit lacking, as censorship is a different
topic, and obviously officers don't 'kill people at random', regardless of the
justification (or lack thereof) of a case, randomness is not the correct word
to use here.

Although this post has a good general point, it could use a lot more evidence
and some numbers to better illustrate how bad the situation really is.

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codefined
I'm the manager of several Reddit communities and a few gaming communities, so
far I've banned ~3,400 people from using these services for periods of time
ranging from one day to 1,300 permanent bans. In this time I've met with a
fairly large number of other people in a similar position to me.

The thing almost all of them have in common is that you have to try to be
harsh in order to be able to curate a kind community that people actually want
to be a part of. When I see you're replying in an equally harsh way to the
first person I personally see you as being bad as that person. So what if they
started it? That's an argument that small children use.

Reddit is a really toxic place, as are a lot of the games that I host servers
on. It really easily goes to people being rude to each other which kills the
mood for everyone involved.

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akerl_
It seems like a lot of the bans take the form "I said something reasonable ->
Somebody responded offensively -> I replied offensively". This feels at odds
with "by simply going about my ways, communicating like a reasonable – but
sometimes passionate – person"

Without any citations, it's hard to tell how much of this is excessive
moderation, but having somebody else break the rules doesn't provide
justification for "responding in kind".

~~~
zaarn
I agree on that. If someone where to do that on a subreddit I moderate (or
Discord) I'd ban both offenders fairly quickly.

Attacking someone is bad but if the other party then flies of the rails and
becomes aggressive, that's not behaviour I want to see.

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notafraudster
So, in several years, the author has been banned from 5 subreddits, for in
order: insulting another user, insulting another user, insulting another user,
insulting the entire community, and reposting an off-topic thread after a
moderator told them not to. And then two blog posts down is a post complaining
that moderators of a popular subreddit didn't want him to insult fat women,
which he calls "censorship" (said blog post also includes a NSFW lingerie
photo of his wife...).

Yikes.

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SirensOfTitan
I think Reddit really missed the boat on a ton of really interesting product
problems, particularly around community. Their product organization over the
past 10 years has really just produced an awful, slow redesign and really
cookie cutter answers to how community moderation and curation ought to be
done.

Questions like: 1\. How do you moderate a community with less central
authority? 2\. How do you make large communities still feel warm and inviting?
3\. How do you make money without having to resort to censorship or invasive
advertising?

It seems like Reddit over the years has answered all of these questions as:
become like Facebook. One of the bigger reasons I’ve gotten super excited
about blockchain over the past couple years is that the community is really
thinking through how distributed governance might be able to work. I wish
Reddit thought about that more too.

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thatwasunusual
No links to the "discussions" in question, so it's basically only the author's
word we should trust. I don't.

~~~
hnuser1234
I have to say I'm inclined to trust them, because I've had the exact same
experiences. Definitely been harassed by moderators before, been let loose
when groveling, and been banned for standing up for myself despite being
civil. Of course, it would be nice if the comments were linked.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _I have to say I 'm inclined to trust them, because I've had the exact same
> experiences_

Could you provide some samples? It’s difficult to contextualise this as an
outsider.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Anyone can create a subreddit. Boom, you are now the lead mod.

Not hard to imagine that some mods are less than stellar examples of mod
behavior.

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phreack
Responding in kind to offensive trolls is absolutely detrimental to an online
community, and should be a bannable offense. Although warnings should be given
first to first offenders before full bans. However, even though this post is
not a very good example, reddit does have a problem of overly petty and power
hungry mods on major forums, some of which do shape large parts of public
opinion.

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AndrewKemendo
As a moderator to a few subs, including one that I had to make private because
it had too much spam, there is really no incentive for a moderator to be
lenient or use their "powers" conservatively.

No moderator is getting paid (as far as I know) or gets any tangible benefit
from it, and anyone who is breaking the rules, is generally just a pain in
some respect - even if it is just offending the sensibility of the moderator.

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arprocter
Surprised he doesn't mention there are whole subs which will ban you just for
commenting in other ones they don't approve of

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DoreenMichele
_Raised issue with other mods. They did not try to be impartial and responded
like a clique. I had to block them individually because they kept harassing me
in private messages._

Does anyone know if Reddit has a mechanism for addressing this type thing in
specific?

~~~
cecja
For what? There was a ban given to a user, that user spammed all moderators of
the channel and they told him to fuck off. Imagine you just shoved one out of
a party and he is drunk and knocking on your door and screaming what do you
do? You are not wanted in a community there is nothing to resolve. Get over
it.

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timonoko
At least they do not use IP-bans no more. I got one from /r/russia just by
recounting the Finnish view of the winter war. IP-ban was interesting
experience. First they banned the precise address, then the whole city block
(of cable provider). I tried very hard to get the whole country of Finland
banned from Reddit, but unfortunately failed.

Ouch. I am banned once again:
[http://www.reddit.com/u/Timo_Noko](http://www.reddit.com/u/Timo_Noko).
Reason: multiple accounts, some of which were used in groups, which had banned
some other aliases, which look little bit the same as mine, so it must be me.
Or something, you just cannot keep count of throwaways.

And yes this the last post I made and obviously the last straw in the series
of relentless shitposting:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Kayaking/comments/8zu861/coast_guar...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Kayaking/comments/8zu861/coast_guard_helicopter_tried_to_save_me_because_i/)

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kaffee
This is a reasonably good post, I think. Worth reading if you're interested in
reddit community governance.

One thing that might make the solution marginally better would be a public
record of bans with a brief note about the reason.

edit: fix typo

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emilfihlman
I'm very glad someone is speaking up about this. No moderator should have the
possibility of permanently banning someone. A timeout (say a year at maximum)
is plenty enough.

~~~
cecja
It is their community. If you are a shitty guest I throw you out of the house.
It is their right to do so.

~~~
marcelluspye
It's not though; it's Reddit's community. They give moderators the ability to
do whatever they want with subreddits, but can (and not often enough do) get
involved when particular subreddits bring them bad publicity. So many of
Reddit's moderation policies were created when the founders expected Reddit to
be used very differently, and are sometimes absurdly simplistic.

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nickodell
>My experiment, such as it is, consists of how many bans I can collect by
simply going about my ways, communicating like a reasonable – but sometimes
passionate – person.

I've spent lots of time on reddit. I have never been banned or warned for my
posts. Is it possible the author is just an asshole? Maybe the communities in
question have reasonable rules, and he's signaling that he does not care about
those rules.

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dijit
Without context the bans could very well have been warranted.

I'm going to divulge my experience; I am the closest thing to "god" to a small
IRC community, I could ban with impunity- but why would I do that? It only
serves to either stroke my e-peen of how much power I have (thus- making
people dislike you and more willing to go somewhere else) - or I have a
legitimate grievance.

There are people in this world that when you try to treat them charitably, if
you have some perceived authority over them they do _not_ see you charitably.
There are people who /really/ wish to test the bounds of tolerance and
patience and there are those who are e-masochists, genuinely trying to illicit
bans and grovel about it (if you unban, then they do the same thing again or
worse despite claiming they would not).

SO, my position towards the author is one of skepticism, Reddit does indeed
have over-zealous moderation in some forums, I really don't doubt that- but if
you're a mod of a popular sub and you hand out bans so liberally then
eventually you'll push people to another subreddit or platform. Entrenchment
to a subreddit basically doesn't happen because it's so easy to pop up
something new.

~~~
Fnoord
Its a bit more complex than this: greater goods are protected. For a shop
owner, that's money. For a site owner, that's ad views, Yet, a greater good in
a religious subreddit or website could be a certain religion or certain
religious views; ie. competition from different religion or atheism. With a
cryptocoin it could be competition from fork or different cryptocoin. My last
example is an software-related e.g. an OS; Halloween documents / "Linux is
cancer" comes to mind. In short, its to protect the interest of a person or
group.

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noncoml
Think of moderators as shop owners, they reserve the right to refuse service
to anyone.

When you enter their shop you accept their authority and the fact that you can
be thrown out at any point with any explanation.

~~~
emilfihlman
This is 100% not the case with real shops, you cannot be thrown out simply
because the owner wants to.

It's also still not right.

~~~
noncoml
I am pretty sure that this is the case, at least in the US, with some
exceptions(discrimination laws).

> It's also still not right.

No, it is not right, but just like a shop-owner, a forum moderator will not
ban you randomly because she has an interest running a popular forum.

If one gets banned from a community(online or not), in most cases it's because
they didn't adhere to the written or unwritten laws of the community, or
pissed off someone high in the pecking order. Communities are not democracies,
but my guess is that even if they were, a big majority of those who get banned
would be ostracized anyway.

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merinowool
What I learned is that most aggressive mods are with left leaning views and
won't let "other side" to be read. Irony is that they think they are the
guardians of free speech. That created vacuum on the internet which can be
exploited.

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cecja
So... reddit is like every forum on the internet before, if the people who are
running or administrating it do not like you, you get banned. The title is
clickbait shit as well.

~~~
stale2002
Surprising as it may seem, it is possible for someone in a position of
authority to disagree and even dislike someone else without stooping to using
the powers of their authority position against those that they dislike.

In the real world this is known as "being a mature individual".

~~~
cecja
Stating the obvious doesn't make it real. Go and look at the OPs post history.
In all his comments he is hardly critical with everything said in the
discussions he takes part. In most of them he is hardly discussing the topic
in a productive way. He is contradicting ideas without bringing his own all
the time. If I would run a community and see someone like him slip up I would
gladly swing the ban hammer as well. Nobody needs people like this in a
community.

PS: Read the second paragraph and you know with what kind of person you are
dealing with.

~~~
stale2002
Perhaps the author was being unreasonable. I see no evidence pointing in
either direction.

But that is not the point I was making.

The point I was making is that if the only argument someone has to defend them
there actions is "according to the law, it is my community so I can ban anyone
for any reason", well that's a bad argument.

People in positions of authority can and should be criticised. Yes, they
should still be criticized even if their it is there "right" to do whatever is
is that they are doing.

I would also even argue that anyone who only defends themselves by saying it
is their "right" to abuse their position of authority should be criticised 10
times harder.

Because if THAT is the only argument that they can make, well that must mean
every other defense is even worse.

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fooker
This seems rather widespread in reddit.

For example, for the last two years, the moderators of r/india has been
banning right wing users with impunity, converting that subreddit into a funny
echo chamber.

There isn't really any easy solution for this.

~~~
cecja
The problem is there is no solution needed. The moderators opened a subreddit
called /r/india and had a vision for it. They are now enforcing it. You may
have different opinions but you were to late to open it yourself if you want a
subreddit going with your state of mind open it.

~~~
fooker
Replace subreddit with country and your argument becomes rather xenophobic.

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petraeus
Solution: don't go on reddit

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iandanforth
TLDR: Excessive concern over dominance can ruin your enjoyment of social
interactions. People who share this concern probably shouldn't be put in
positions of power.

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throwaway1909
tldr; author is angry for getting banned from a few subreddits, mostly for
"replying in kind" to things people said that offended him. He equates
moderator power to that of cops that "throw flash grenades into cribs" and
kill with impunity, but ultimately muses that moderators are more powerful
than cops because they lack administrative hassles. Based on the language in
his post-- I don't blame the moderators for banning him.

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tptacek
This is not a good look.

