
92 of top 500 subreddits controlled by same 5 people - DeusExMachina
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/pointing_out_how_much_power_few_people_have_gets/
======
hombre_fatal
Little known fact: you can take over any subreddit if the creator/mods haven't
had had public activity in 60 days.

How? Just ask:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/](https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/)

I took over some big subreddits this way and I've had big subreddits taken
away from me because I forgot to log in and comment on the account I used to
create it. Even though I was active on a non-creator/non-mod account. It's
actually how I found out about the "feature".

A very poorly implemented feature given the potential value of subreddits and
all the work it takes to grow one.

So if you run a subreddit that you care about, remember to assign some active
mods even just to avoid someone taking over your subreddit.

~~~
dTal
It seems to me like some people made it their business to "hack" Reddit with
automated scripts. Taking over subreddits, promoting content to the front
page, that sort of thing.

Once they got good at that, they had a saleable product, as well as a
worldview that treats online discussion as a resource strata to be exploited
and shepherded, not nurtured.

Here's a comment thread about "Gallowboob" which documents all this to a T:
[https://snew.notabug.io/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/...](https://snew.notabug.io/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/pointing_out_how_much_power_few_people_have_gets/fqgw86e/)

~~~
streb-lo
I find it crazy people care about this.

A guys takes over some subreddits... unless you're a Reddit admin who cares?
There's so much content on the web just avoid the stuff you don't like.

~~~
tasty_freeze
Governments have the resources to dedicate people to doing things like this.
Once they have the ability to shape discussions, they will.

Russia doesn't care if Black Lives Matter or not. They promoted inflammatory
postings on both sides of the issue simply because chaos and weaking public
trust is a goal for them. Sure, you might not care about the issue and don't
visit those subreddits, but it still affects you because the community you
live in.

~~~
scottlocklin
I will never cease to find it hilarious adults are afraid of Russians (as
opposed to "Russia") posting on Reddit or Twitter, or buying a few ads on
Facebook or whatever. Not, say, Israelis or Saudis or the Mujahedin-e Khalq
buying congress and actively bribing our politicians: Russians posting on
Reddit.

~~~
tasty_freeze
I didn't say it was only Russia. I wasn't writing a dissertation, and picked
Russia as the most obvious and document example.

Also, countries don't post, people do. It is a well documented fact that
Russian had a full time time operating thousands of fake accounts. Russians
are posting those messages and spreading memes, but it it is in their official
capacity of Russian agents that they do it.

I'm not worried about random Russian citizen posting their thoughts.

~~~
scottlocklin
>Russians are posting those messages and spreading memes, but it it is in
their official capacity of Russian agents that they do it.

I realize it's a popular, even government approved conspiracy theory, but it
seems more like psychological projection (the US is absolutely doing such
things, and has been long before the internet existed -for example[1]) rather
than anything for which there is actual evidence.

Whether or not Russian agents are posting official FUD on Reddit is kind of
irrelevant. The idea that anything on Reddit (or twitter for that matter)
matters _at all_ is what is so bloody funny about it.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Italy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Italy)

~~~
tasty_freeze
Saying that the US intelligence does these things in not way refutes the point
I was making. "Your honor, yes, I'm covered in exploding ink-pack stains, but
Bonnie and Clyde have stolen from lots of banks."

What aren't you willing to dismiss by invoking the magic words "conspiracy
theory?" Is this just a joke?

[https://intelligence.house.gov/social-media-
content/](https://intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/)

Reddit, along with twitter and Facebook, were hugely influential in the
election, if you you think it is "bloody funny."

~~~
scottlocklin
>What aren't you willing to dismiss by invoking the magic words "conspiracy
theory?" Is this just a joke?

Lol, well, I'm definitely willing to dismiss the idea that reddit, twitter and
facebook are why Trump is president if that's what you mean. I suppose Obama
won the 2008 election because of some dank memes posted in 4chan, and Bush won
in 2000 because of funny things some weeb posted on Usenet.

As far as why people continue to say it: as I said, it's projection. The US
has done 1000x worse than whatever imagined ridiculously effective Reddit
posts the Rooskies have done. The fact that adult humans with day jobs who are
somehow able to feed themselves without choking to death on their tongues are
able to believe in such nonsense will never ever cease to amuse me.

If you actually believe such things, you really need to learn how to count.

------
yosito
We need more alternatives to Reddit with different moderation practices that
allow competing narratives to surface. I used to view Reddit as "what's
popular on the internet?", but it's definitely become more "what's the
Approved Narrative?" these days and though I do think there's plenty of danger
content that calls for violence or is some other form of abuse, it's
frustrating that there are many subs in which questioning the Approved
Narrative will get censored.

I think content moderation could be done by the community flagging problematic
content. Flagged content could be temporarily hidden, with the reason it was
flagged. The OP could then write a short defense of the content, and then a
"jury" of randomly selected users (who are over 18) could vote on whether to
permanently remove the content or to allow it. Content couldn't be flagged
again for the same reason if the jury had previously approved it. There would
be a public record of content removal decisions, and perhaps even a restricted
way to somehow request the removed content as a matter of public record,
without surfacing it into public view.

Obviously, there would need to be some experimentation to get a better system.
Which is my whole point. I wish there were more systems experimenting with
this.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
Is there a Tor alternative to reddit?

~~~
jerheinze
There's raddle.me (although I'm not a fan of it) which has an onion service
running: [http://lfbg75wjgi4nzdio.onion/](http://lfbg75wjgi4nzdio.onion/)

------
mcint
The controversial image in question:
[https://i.imgur.com/neT3jv5.png](https://i.imgur.com/neT3jv5.png)

~~~
s_dev
It's controversial because people are now wondering if money is involved.
Getting mod control of that number of subreddits doesn't come about for being
dilligent and helpful.

~~~
drevil-v2
I think it is vastly more insidious than just greed. I think it is about
controlling the zeitgeist. Propagation of authorised memes.

~~~
blaser-waffle
I believe that was an explicit conceit of the site: they're not making money
via ads or "gold", they're shaping perceptions.

------
jokoon
One thing I constantly realize is that commenting is broken on reddit, for one
simple reason. Once a thread is popular enough, and reaches a high amount of
comments, any new comment is going to be drowned by upvoted ones.

The algorithm should decrease the value of old comments even more. There's
already a formula, something like

position_score = score/(age^2)

Unfortunately the more a comment is upvoted, the more it's visible, so it's
snowballing upvotes faster than the 1/age^2 can decrease its position.

Also the more a thread is popular, the sooner it should be locked.

~~~
hombre_fatal
I think a big upgrade for both HN and Reddit would be so simply collapse all
child comments by default and only show top-level comments. That way every
person doesn't have to scroll past the first thread to find the second top-
level discussion.

I don't think threads should be locked, though. There is nothing on Reddit
more annoying than not being able to reply to someone because of an arbitrary
decision (like a mod locking the entire submission). There are better
solutions. But it just seems silly to shut down discussion when people want to
have it on a social site.

Even sinking a thread to the bottom is better than locking it.

~~~
apexalpha
One website that I think has nailed comment moderation is the website
Tweakers.net. A Dutch tech website and forum.

On Tweakers you (as a user) can apply for mod rights and it allows you to rate
each comment from -1 to +3.

+3 = must-read

+2 = informative

+1 = on-topic

0 = off topic

-1 = spam / insult

There's an alogrithm that gives your rating more weight if they
(retroactively) allign with what the supermods (employees of the site) rate
comments.

On Tweakers you almost never read insults and "and my axe" repititive comments
because they are hidden by default, and the +2 and +3 comments automatically
get places at the top.

This has so much over a simple +1 / -1 system. I wish more website would think
about their comments systems and how they can achieve a good incentive and
moderation structure for informative comments to be lifted up and unwanted
ones down.

Tweakers is Dutch but to get an idea here's a news thread with a lot of
comments:

[https://tweakers.net/nieuws/166988/](https://tweakers.net/nieuws/166988/)

~~~
Angostura
Similar to the excellent Slashdot moderation system. Moreover on Slashdot you
couldn't just moderate at will, occasionally you would find yourself with 5
moderation points to spend upvoting or downvoting 5 comments.

Even more occasionally you would find yourself with some 'meta-moderation'
points - where it displays some moderation decisions and asks whether you
agree/disagree that this was good moderation

~~~
jon-wood
Slashdot's moderation has still yet to be beaten IMO, when up/downvoting a
post you had to specify why you were doing so from a defined list, including
things like Funny, Informative, Flamebait, and Trolling. Then as mentioned
meta-moderation would occasionally ask a user to review those votes, asking
the question "Was this post funny" for example. User's who's moderation points
were upheld in meta-moderation would be more likely to get given more than
someone who flung them out at random.

The real genius of the system though was the amount of configurability
attached to those topics. Each user could define what those categories meant
to them, so if you only wanted the serious stuff you could say Funny didn't
get a +1 boost when displaying comments, and give it a -1 instead. Or -5 if
you really hated Slashdot humour. In the other direction lovers of a good
flame war could boost comments flagged as flamebait up in the sorting order.
This also extended to relationships, where you could flag people as either
friends or foes, allowing you to make sure you always saw comments from people
who's comments you enjoyed, and squash anything by people you just didn't
like.

All of that was an absolute nightmare for performance I'm sure, which is
probably why we don't see it these days, but it was a thing of beauty.

~~~
uabstraction
Another great thing about the Slashdot moderation system was the "overrated"
and "underrated" tags. A comment could get moderated as "-1 Flamebait" then
get moderated as "+1 Underrated" all the way up to "+5 Flamebait". My personal
favourite quirk of the system.

------
Lammy
I assume their goal has been to avoid another 2015-style "revolt" of main
subreddits shutting down to protest admin/company actions:
[https://www.wired.com/2015/07/reddit-
amageddon/](https://www.wired.com/2015/07/reddit-amageddon/)

~~~
koheripbal
I suspect it's about pushing paid content as part of a revenue mechanism.

All advertising platforms consolidate over time.

~~~
OGWhales
Considering gallowboob openly admitted to landing a job off his ability to do
just that, I would say that is likely. People don’t realize how much influence
things like memes or other seemingly innocuous posts can have.

------
Thorentis
Change the base URL to ceddit.com to read all the censored comments (that site
scrapes them as fast as it can). One of the comment that was deleted:

"Reddit defiantly needs to restructure their moderation teams."

Wow. Reddit really is just a pile of rubbish now. So glad I found HN.

~~~
nickalaso
The problem on Reddit is the problem of all social media. HN is better simply
because it is too small to be targeted by the bigger more well funded PR
campaigns.

Also, it probably helps that this community is not particularly
demographically diverse compared to the average. There is less value to a PR
company in sockpuppeting here, unless they are specifically trying to reach
tech workers specifically.

~~~
Traster
The problem on reddit isn't the fact that they're succumbing to PR campaigns.
The problem with reddit is that they have by far the worst monetization
strategy. Facebook probably has the best. So reddit runs this site, making
basically no money. Then people act surprised when someone comes along and
goes "Oh, I can totally monetize this". As a result the monetization is
happening covertly. This means all the incentives are mis-aligned - because
the people making money from the site aren't the same people who are running
the site. Should moderators be vetted? Probably. In fact they are on the most
controversial sub-reddits. Are they vetted? Well not as a general rule,
because that would cost money, and the people doing the vetting aren't making
any money.

The perfect example of this was /r/wallstreetbets. Its sole purpose was to
funnel money into some weird crypto trading company simply because one of the
moderators decided on it.

------
detuur
If you want to get an idea of what exactly these mods use their powers for,
here's a website that preserved the comments on that page before they got
deleted by the mods:
[https://removeddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/p...](https://removeddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/pointing_out_how_much_power_few_people_have_gets/#)

~~~
spangry
57.7% of comments removed. Huh.

------
lucideer
Looking at recent comment history for the user who posted this is also eye-
opening [https://www.reddit.com/user/rootin-
tootin_putin/](https://www.reddit.com/user/rootin-tootin_putin/)

~~~
koheripbal
Discuss the message. The messenger is irrelevant.

~~~
dTal
The message is "there's something fishy at work". The person is being banned
from huge chunks of Reddit for saying this. It is very relevant.

------
kge32
Reminder: If you swap out the 'r' in the 'reddit.com' URL for 'c' (meaning
censored), you can read the deleted comments.. Nowadays that's a must when
reading "controversial" threads on Reddit.

In this case: ceddit.com ->
[https://snew.notabug.io/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/...](https://snew.notabug.io/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/pointing_out_how_much_power_few_people_have_gets/)

~~~
update
note, this also works if you add 'move' in between 're' and 'ddit' (i.e.
removeddit)

so:
[https://www.removeddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitw...](https://www.removeddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/pointing_out_how_much_power_few_people_have_gets/)

good to have backup services.

~~~
stockavuryah
it's useful to check both, they do not work the same way

------
keiferski
The inadequacies of Reddit make me miss the message board days of old. Around
2001, I was active on a niche message board for a Gameboy Advance game. The
board was only vaguely about the game itself; most topics were just random
news and conversation. At its peak, there were probably a few hundred posters,
tops, but everyone had an avatar, a screen name and a recognizable identity. I
never met any of these people in real life, but nearly two decades letter, I
can still remember the various screen names and personalities. This sort of
thing just doesn't exist anymore, simply because the subreddit version of X
would destroy a (non-Reddit) budding community before it had a chance to grow.

Reddit is a reflection of the broader societal trend away from local or small
communities toward an anonymized, faceless megacorp one, replete with all the
problems that usually entails. I hope that somehow we can get back to the
human feeling of the early internet.

~~~
djhworld
I miss forums too, I really like reddit for finding interesting stuff, but the
community aspect isn’t there so much.

Back in the late 90s early 00s I was a member of a forum for a chain of video
game stores in the UK, it was an amazing community. The store went bust in ‘05
and one guy created his own forum software where most of the displaced members
flocked to.

That forum is still going, although there’s probably only 10 or so regulars
left - but we still talk on it every day. I’ve even met a few of them in the
real world.

EDIT: I think you've hit the nail on the head, the thing that was so great
about forums is, while the original point of the forum was to bring together
people with a like minded interest (video game(s)/whatever) - the forum would
also have separate boards to discuss cross over topics or something completely
unrelated. This meant you were talking to people who you might recognise from
other areas of the forum and share other common interests, so could build that
sense of community.

Whereas reddit just feels more siloed, I wouldn't recongise anyone who visits
subreddit X who also happens to be on Y etc

~~~
marcosdumay
The best part of forums was that they didn't have much temporal dependency.
People posted things there, and it was expected that other would reply days or
months later. It made for a much more calm and lively discussion.

When Reddit puts something on the hot tab, there's one hour or two for anybody
to say what they want to say, no time for anybody to reply, and it's gone. HN
is slower, but not very different. It's a completely different kind of site.

~~~
zentiggr
Also my lamenting the loss of newsgroups for just that effect.

Used to be in alt.callahans and I can't imagine how many threads I just
collapsed and moved on because I knew that conversation wasn't a topic of
mine. And still managed to ping in at least a few dozen messages of varying
size/quality a week.

~~~
intended
Eternal september is more powerful than any form of site design or BBS format.

------
fareesh
If you were a frequent visitor of r/politics in 2015 and 2016 you will have
noticed something very strange in the front-page posts and top upvoted
comments, which seemingly happened overnight during the days of the DNC
Primary. It was like watching a mask slip.

As an experiment I'm going to leave this comment ambiguous because I want to
see if this description alone is relatable to users who were frequent visitors
at the time.

~~~
nerdponx
Yup. I wasn't a frequent visitor, but r/politics always seemed like a level-
headed intellectual political forum. After the 2015-2016 election the tone
totally changed. For the most part, it changed to favor politics that I
prefer, but it's hysterical and anti-intellectual and not a place I want to
get information from or be associated with.

~~~
irishcoffee
It was never level-headed or intellectual.

------
mothsonasloth
The problems with Reddit I'd like to add

* Bots and sock puppets pushing agendas

* Reddit counter culture movements and backlashes. Seems to be bipolar with pro China / anti China every day of the week.

* Reddit nice guys who have account names like "Iliketitties" or something really depraved. Along with all the other hypocrites

* Reddit Admins and big personalities driving content trends on the site e.g. (/u/gallowboob)

* Recycling of posts / knowledge, since there are always new people joining. You get things like "TIL that bananas are sterile" trending once every month. Which is frustrating for veteran users

* Reddit arm chair generals/economists/politicians. The points system rewards trendy content and doesn't necessarily mean quality. Unlike points in Stackoverflow, there is some degree of confidence in the users competency.

* The fact that Reddit is mainly populated with technologically proficient people, who probably have some sort of issue, whether it be mental, psychological. Sure we all suffer from our demons but the amount of stuff I read on there makes me cringe at times.

* The "Reddit Contrarian", waiting to snipe your post with their immense intellect

Sure there are many more that could be extrapolated to any other social
network.

~~~
mplanchard
Folks are replying to you saying that HN has the same problems. I don’t
entirely disagree with them, but I do think that Reddit is much worse.

It may be the more conscious moderation style on HN, but it’s much more likely
you’re going to get interesting content and thoughtful discussions here than
on most subreddits, particularly those that show up on r/all or r/popular.

HN definitely has issues with performative intellectualism and people being
unnecessarily argumentative, but I don’t think equating it with reddit is
accurate.

~~~
alden_penny
HN is more of an echo chamber than reddit because the moderation can be
effectively done by just dan and there's no subreddit niches on HN to allow
diversity of opinions.

~~~
buzzerbetrayed
If you had said something like that about u/gallowboob on a top subreddit on
Reddit, your comment would have been deleted within minutes.

The fact that your comment here isn’t deleted is a testament to how wrong your
comment is.

~~~
alden_penny
Sample size 1, great argument buddy. Go look at all the comments that get
flagged every day, not for being inflammatory, but just for being unpopular.
And unlike reddit you can't even read them on HN after they die. They're so
afraid of dissenting narrative enough downvotes means deletion.

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alden_penny](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alden_penny)

Set "show dead" == "yes".

(For other users: your own account page.)

------
irrational
One of those mods is a moderator over 240 subs (I didn’t look at the other 4).

How in the world can anyone have time for that? That is beyond a full time
job.

Is there a way to see a list of moderators and how many subs they moderate?
Who moderates the most subs?

~~~
axqa10
Perhaps it is a group of people with a full time job?

Manipulating opinion is important these days. Mailing lists and Usenet were
free, most web forums are subtly (or overtly) censored.

~~~
enumjorge
I see this opinion often yet people who share it don’t explain how exactly a
complete lack of censorship is supposed to ward against manipulation. It also
ignores the flip side where a lack of moderation can help misinformation to
spread faster than it would otherwise.

~~~
nickalaso
Misinformation is different from censorship.

I would personally rather have to sort through misinfo myself, rather than run
the risk of having truthful information hidden from me.

~~~
CathedralBorrow
Couldn't these two situations be viewed as the same thing? You can hide
information just as well by surrounding it with misinformation.

------
dTal
Just for fun, I went to the front page of Reddit and clicked on the usernames
of a few of the top posts. The very second one was "peke_f1"[0], with a post
about an F1 announcement. Checking his post history reveals that he is very
unpopular for somehow always managing to get the karma for large
announcements, with someone accusing him of being "Gallowboob's karma farmer".
Indeed, someone actually beat him to it this time - and yet his post is the
one on the front page, and a post pointing this out has been removed [1].

So I assume that even many subreddits not obviously controlled by "central
management" are still part of the hierarchy.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/user/peke_f1/](https://www.reddit.com/user/peke_f1/)

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/gjip7f/congrats_u...](https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/gjip7f/congrats_ukcollantine_on_winning_the_first_karma/)

~~~
jdhawk
Whats the message board equivalent of /r/formula1?

I'd love to get into a more niche community.

~~~
stephenheron
I quite like the Autosport forums:
[https://forums.autosport.com/forum/2-racing-
comments/](https://forums.autosport.com/forum/2-racing-comments/)

Or if you are more into the technical side of things:
[https://www.f1technical.net/forum/](https://www.f1technical.net/forum/)

------
tayo42
I realized recently Ive spent a ton of years being a reddit user. Somehow
that's where I settled. Politics, covid19, and memes have really been making
me rethink where I spend my time on the internet, its stopped being fun. I
think the person that posts on reddit has changed. I thought it might be an
interesting thing to reflect in a longer format blog post thing, but not sure.

there really is a toxic undertone to a lot of subreddits. Even the niche one's
have some crazy people wandering in.

My problem is i don't know what to really replace it with. I don't think the
alternatives are great. Forums seem deadish, the format isn't great to use on
mobile. Reddit is nice to use in an app, makes it easy to post and read. It
almost feels like the social web has run its course.

~~~
Trasmatta
It's weird how the sense is community that existed on forums just doesn't
exist on Reddit. You just don't have the same connection to the other posters
that you would on tight knit forums. You might as well not even have
usernames.

It's a bit different on smaller, more focused subreddits, but not by much.

I used to think that Reddit was a better place to be than Twitter or Facebook,
but now I'm not so sure. I've definitely had a harder time cutting it out of
my life than those other two, even though I think it's had a pretty bad effect
on my mental health.

~~~
hunter2_
I think a part of this is how forum members tend to populate
avatar/signature/location/etc and the interface shows it prominently. On
reddit you just see a username and occasionally some flair, so you rarely even
realize that what you're reading was written by someone you've read from
before.

~~~
Trasmatta
Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. I think the other part is that
discussions don't live for longer than a day or two. Things fall off the page
and everyone moves on to the next posts. (Same deal here on HN of course.)
With forums, you have long living threads where you engage in discussions with
the same people for months or even years.

~~~
hunter2_
True. Reddit has several sort options, and none of them remotely facilitate
the "necro bump" that a single forum post can achieve.

But when you're searching for a quick answer (rather than browsing/debating)
there's nothing better than upvote sort (see also: stack exchange) which far
exceeds any chronological sort forums have.

~~~
Trasmatta
Yeah, I frequently find myself doing "site:reddit.com" when searching for
answers to random things.

~~~
piva00
I'm the same! Or to search for reviews of some obscure gear of one of my
hobbies, find recommendations on specific tastes in literature/movies,
discover similar art to some artist.

Whatever needs some human knowledge and thought I add a `site:reddit.com` to
my search and try to gauge from there.

Product reviews are also much more trustworthy (and sometimes more in-depth)
from a collection of reddit posts than anywhere else on the internet.

~~~
hunter2_
That certainly seems true now, and hopefully it will be for a good while.
r/HailCorporate is good at spotting ads/shills but it's not a perfect science.
Given the way AI-authored blog posts are getting incrementally more
convincing, this could become a serious issue.

------
LeoPanthera
This is the image in question that is being blocked:
[https://i.imgur.com/neT3jv5.png](https://i.imgur.com/neT3jv5.png)

It shows which subreddits, and their popularity rank, are moderated by 5
people who are moderators of the most subreddits at once.

------
INTPenis
If you control the top subreddits then I doubt you're actually moderating
them. You're in fact just a manager over these subreddits. It's a hierarchical
management structure with 5 people at the top of certain major subs.

Which makes this even stranger because why would these people want to be at
the top? What's the motivation? Either pure power, or money.

~~~
koheripbal
Money, clearly. There's another comment that links to one of the people IRL
and he's the head of a social media marketing startup.

~~~
tobias3
Would that be legal in the US? (Intentionally deleting/promoting material as
moderator without disclosing that you have been hired to do so and marking it
as advertisement)

~~~
anon73044
Reddit is a "private" platform, mods are free to do as the please so long as
they don't breach the terms of service. In this instance I'd say the T.o.S.
needs a major overhaul.

~~~
baq
it's private in the sense of ownership but it most certainly isn't private in
the sense of impact on the public. same deal with other social networks like
facebook. i don't see that much difference between a publicly and privately
owned psy-ops weapons which open social networks have become.

~~~
anon73044
I don't disagree, we just don't really have any laws that protect free speech
on the internet

------
stevenjohns
A less known fact is that /r/The_Donald was created and moderated by a group
loosely called “Nolibs” that have been pushing pro-Israel, pro-police
propaganda for years through thousands of sock puppet accounts. They were in
control of various subreddits and were heavily agenda driven.

It all fell apart for them a year or two ago though when they had internal
problems and one of them came clean.

Their antics were closely followed on the subreddit /r/NoLibsWatch.

Some reading can be had here[0] about one of the members who eventually went
to jail/psych ward over a bomb plot, with his stated goal being to start a
religious war.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/4gx9ct/com...](https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/4gx9ct/comment/d2lqglo)

~~~
appleflaxen
Your post led me to an incident of accidental outing of US propaganda in 2017:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit_has_removed_their_blog_post_identifying/)

Summary: it looks like Reddit posted on their blog about the "most reddit-
addicted cities", and Eglin Airforce Base was near the top. It didn't take
long for people to allege that it's due to sock puppetry and propaganda coming
from the military, which was legalized in 2013.

[https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-
propaganda-...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-
ban-spreads-government-made-news-to-americans/)

At which point the blog post was changed to remove all mention of Eglin.

Propaganda to US citizens seems like a terrible use of tax dollars at best,
and an incredibly dangerous tool in the wrong hands at worst.

~~~
hactually
The scary part... Each of those reference pages are dead apart from the
journal article which has direct implication

------
nsilvestri
There is no conspiracy here. Anyone saying there is simply doesn't understand
the dyanmics of moderating large subreddits. Moderating sucks. It's thankless
volunteer work babysitting a bunch of children and adults acting like
children. The biggest subreddit I manage has 6000 subscribers, 1000x smaller
than some of these, and I've had to ban people for harassing users, being
racist, and posting NSFW content when one of the rules is literally don't post
NSFW content. It's not a fun job. It's janitorial work. Voluntary janitorial
work. It's not easy managing a community of several million users. I doubt
many of you would actually want the responsibilities it requires to do at
minimum a decent job of it.

In regards to the users in the OP, I've personally talked to cyXie,
Gallowboob, awkwardtheturtle, and siouxie_sioux, and they all seem to be nice
people who simply enjoy participating on reddit [1]. I don't necessarily agree
with all the things they do or decisions they make (particularly in regards to
moderation) but it really is not malicious. If you start moderating one big
sub it means you can be trusted at least enough to do it for another sub. If
you think this alone is evidence of a conspiracy then you don't have enough
experience with content generation on reddit.

[1] My source is anecdotal; I have several hundred thousand karma so I run in
some of the high-karma circles.

~~~
stronglikedan
> My source is anecdotal

From my anecdotal source, I've been banned a few times, and only once was it
justified. The other times, the mods not only could not tell me what rule I
violated, but resorted to insults just for my asking. There's entire
subreddits dedicated to this type of piss-poor and outright abusive behavior
from the mods. I'd wager that, from the perspective of the average user, the
mods are the "bunch of children and adults acting like children". To me,
they're like the DMV or TSA - small people who "volunteer" just for a small
amount of power to make themselves feel like big people by abusing that power.
Unfortunately, thus far, I have very little evidence to the contrary.

~~~
valuearb
I got permanently banned from r/space for posting a funny comment. It didn't
demean anyone, and I didn’t even know the sub banned jokes. Total power
tripping there.

------
duxup
The moderator system on reddit is a pain.

There is certainly a scratch my back and I'll scratch yours across subs so you
get moderators who don't really even know the sub.

Absentee moderators is common as subs drift off topic/ don't filter spam and
etc.

~~~
technion
"Actually not bad" subs often include the per-language subs.

/r/ruby still has jamesgolick as a mod. ref:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8804624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8804624)

~~~
bibinou
Might be a tribute.

------
Havoc
Reddit is increasing feeling “captured”. Bit like big data influence on
politics. You can’t see it but sense it’s there anyway

~~~
casefields
Reddit used to truly feel like the front page of the internet. My siblings
would never send me cool things because I had probably already seen it. More
often than not, they were right. Now, that's not the case.

------
cameronfraser
Remember when the reddit CEO edited a post that was critical of him and then
came out and admitted to it?
[https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-
stev...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-steve-
huffman-edit-comments)

~~~
fergie
Given the state of r/The_Donald at the time what spez did was kind of funny,
and I would like to think that any self respecting HNer would do something
similar in that situation.

~~~
luckylion
If you think of reddit as a service to the public and not your personal troll
site, doing that kind of thing is terrible. It's like the CEO of a utility
company shutting down electricity to people they have a private disagreement
with. It hurts society if you let that pass (or encourage it), as you now
_need_ a competitor to enter the market or you'll have to submit to whatever
private wishes the CEO has.

~~~
vertex-four
Reddit is not a utility company - people do not organise their lives through
Reddit like they do Facebook etc. It's, at best, a sometimes vaguely
informational entertainment site.

~~~
luckylion
The same applies to information websites, imho.

Of course, in the end Reddit doesn't want to be a utility, it wants to be a
cash grab. And it's fine to do whatever if your only goal is to get as much
money as possible with no concern for anything else.

------
olliej
They deleted the original post from the first reddit, then locked this version
so that people can't comment.

I'm curious if they're reddit employees (in which case you could imagine
reddit choosing to have mods on the more popular subreddits), or just internet
randoms.

That said the original post seems perfectly reasonable so shouldn't have been
deleted - if the goal was to avoid conspiracy nonsense they just Streisand'd
themselves by "proving" that they want it to be secret.

------
guevara
Such a cringe website; like ResetEra for the masses. There are probably only a
handful of subreddits that are alright i.e. not full of living bots.

Everything else is just groupthink and tribalism, just look at r/politics or
r/news. What's worse is that even neutral subreddits like r/gaming are prone
to the mods a.k.a janitors being pissy and deleting anything that doesn't
conform to the status quo (looking at you r/TheLastofUs).

And surprise surprise, the post got removed. xd

~~~
d3nj4l
IMO, reddit is the last remaining place to find genuine, user opinions on
products. I've taken to adding "reddit" to all my google searches when I'm
researching which product to buy; for example, I typed "DT 770 reddit
headphones" in google when I was looking up which headphones to buy. Reviewers
rave about that pair, but looking up real user experiences of them made me
decide they weren't for me. Over time even that's becoming less useful, as
memes overtake the platform and you can't find people talking about more niche
products, but that's still the most useful any social network has been for me.

~~~
taurath
Try to find advice on buying a hot tub. 99% of posts are hot tub dealers.

~~~
d3nj4l
Dealers have crowded a lot of the markets, yeah. VPNs are another one, if you
look for VPN advice you're very likely to find people trying to get you to use
their referral code or lying about things.

------
honksillet
Comments lock, post remove. Seriously. To hell with Reddit.

------
hckr_news
Those "people" are effectively corporations. They make their money off reddit.

~~~
bityard
how?

~~~
dylz
There are numerous cases of affiliate link bullshittery, banning
"competitors", letting a certain few brands not be removed for spam, etc.

------
schkkd
Reddit serves its purpose well. It's a honeypot for lazy emotional people:
reddit offers them space to procrastinate and gets to influence them in return
(ads, politics).

~~~
ryanwaggoner
You’re just describing all advertising-supported media, from TV to magazines
to large swaths of the web.

Do you honestly think HN is in a different category? Why do you think this
site exists? And how many billions of collective hours of procrastination have
been spent here?

Granted, this site is relatively well-moderated and high signal to noise,
especially for its size, but so are many subreddits. The top subreddits are a
dumpster fire but there are thousands of smaller niche subs that are
delightful.

------
fnord77
wish there was more transparency about the moderators, especially on the news
and political subs.

~~~
ShorsHammer
Publicmodlogs is a bot that cleanly and simply reports the actions made. Many
subreddits refuse to add it.

Apparently it's a touchy issue.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/publicmodlogs/](https://www.reddit.com/r/publicmodlogs/)

------
wyxuan
Controlled is a strong word that doesn’t quite describe it very well. For
example, while gallowboob is a mod of r/til he isn’t active as a Mod and
doesn’t “control” like the word implies. Also there’s a large mod team that is
behind something like TIL that isn’t just this group of 5 ppl.

------
Markoff
Here is the complete list in good quality.

[https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png](https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png)

Mirror [https://imgur.com/a/rjE8YuW](https://imgur.com/a/rjE8YuW)

------
bluedays
You can vote for content, but you can't vote for moderators. Seems counter-
counterintuitive.

------
mproud
92 of the top 500 are controlled by the same 5 people? Let’s do the math.

So that’s about one fifth. Divide by five, so each of them is averaging 20 of
the top subreddits.

Is that a lot? Do these people work together? I need more context before
assuming a strong opinion.

~~~
quantummkv
Yes. They do actively work together to shape discourse across subredits. I
have seen it happen myself on /r/worldnews a lot of times.

Consider if you are a big/rich autocratic nation state (read China, Saudi)
that wants to censor and shape discourse outside their borders. You just buy
these 5 people and boom, you get instant powers to shape and censor the
discourse on the most viewed forums on Reddit and the wider internet.

~~~
knolax
Reddit constantly hates on Russia/North Korea/Saudi Arabia/China/Israel/India
to the point that I've never seen a positive post related to those countries
and have seen nothing but negative circlejerks whenever they're mentioned.
Despite this, it seems people are convinced that these countries are secretly
censoring Reddit and bring it up constantly. It's a disturbing denial of
reality.

------
ohyeshedid
This is particularly interesting now that they're launching their cryptocoin
and community premium features.

~~~
ilaksh
Is there a link, I didn't know about that.

~~~
ohyeshedid
[https://www.reddit.com/vault/](https://www.reddit.com/vault/)

~~~
runawaybottle
That link insists I install the app. I like switching between browser tabs,
not apps.

------
remarkEon
Basically, manged social networks like Reddit are all terrible. You get
unsocialable people who eventually join, and then that begets moderation,
which begets misbehavior, which begets more extreme moderation.

Ad infinitum.

What my experience is is that everyone who has seen this on reddit (or
facebook or twitter) is doing is just making their own curated network on
Discord or something. Slack, even, since the free version is pretty okay. I
suppose that just moves the problem to the hosts of the channel but honestly
it cannot be worse than reddit since there wouldn't be any corporate
influence, which this post seems to strongly suggest is happening at scale on
reddit. You see this a lot already, with youtube personalities and devs even
saying "join my Discord!" in their videos and on their blogs.

Frankly, this is a good step forward ... but my comment about corporate
influence is a little tongue-in-cheek, since eventually those companies
(Slack, Discord, etc.) will face pressure (from their owners and investors,
from powerful outsiders) to police the content that exists within their
platform. I have no idea how to solve this problem. I don't like the idea of
any network being vulnerable to the whims of some corporate overlord, so if
anyone can figure out how to do a distributed social networking protocol that
would be very nice and I'd sign up immediately.

~~~
enumjorge
There’s already decentralized social networking. Mastodon comes to mind.

~~~
throwawaysea
In my opinion Mastodon lost its only value proposition (to be censorship free)
when people started hunting for ways to block Gab, with ruthless social media
harassment against admins who refused to block instances. They also adopted a
'server covenant' ([https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/05/introducing-the-
mastod...](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/05/introducing-the-mastodon-
server-covenant/)) that automatically takes political stances that are
incompatible with open discourse.

~~~
free_rms
That's pretty brutal.

Why do they have so little faith in their own concept? Independence but only
on our terms?

------
avainlakech
I deleted my reddit account over a year ago and I swear it was one of the best
decisions I’ve made in a long time. I don’t even lurk. The closest I get is
clicking on a google search result that takes me to reddit.

------
johnnydoe9
Not just the moderators the people who post the articles are the same as well
look at bunyipouch on r/movies basically every post on hot is by this one
account.

------
thwr34234
Wikipedia is not too far from this. The place is controlled by toxic 'ministry
of truth' creatures who admonish you for every goddamn thing.

------
beart
The information in this thread is the final nail for me. I just uninstalled
reddit from my phone and will delete my account when I get back to my PC. I
have known about some shady stuff with reddit before, but reading through here
somehow made it click that even as mostly a lurker, I am being used and
manipulated.

------
6nf
Hmm why is all this being deleted? Reddit mods seem to be involved? It's hard
to tell what's going on here.

------
amateurdev
Genuine question: Do Reddit mods get paid for being mods? Someone here posted
a link to all the sub-reddits in question. These see so many posts generated
all day. Im actually curious how someone has so much time to go through them.
Is being a mod their full time job? Or more of a side-hustle/interest?

~~~
commandlinefan
There's a conspiracy theory that the mods of the really active subreddits get
paid to promote particular sorts of content - not by reddit, but more like a
sort of "sponsorship" sort of thing. The alleged sponsors range from
corporations to the Chinese government.

------
adultSwim
Many sub-reddits are captured by a company and push recommendations towards
only their products

------
oldsklgdfth
I have a bookmark to /r/random. When I'm too bored to process information I
just click on that like it's roulette and I find something interesting.

Personally, it's the digital equivalent of chatting up the guy in the bar
stool next to you.

------
ptman
So, where are the federated distributed alternatives to reddit? I only know of
lemmy [https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/)

------
jsilence
Looking at all those problems and issues with social media platform one could
come to the conclusion that the real issue is not with the platforms but with
the entity using it.

------
hajderr
Reddit is good and reflects people inner attitudes. You just don't get to see
that in real life so be happy about someone exposing them on the web

------
kaustyap
I miss yahoogroups days around 20 years back. It felt like close knit
community at that time.

------
afrcnc
Yes, that's what being an admin looks like

------
wintorez
This is not such a high percentage.

------
qqwe22
Some of this powermods are pedos

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
I was active on digg v 1

When digg went to v 2, I bailed to reddit

Active for many years.

Reddit went full retard years ago

Now I’m lost and wake up in 4chan sometimes

I hate myself

~~~
anon73044
4chan suffers from the same thing too these days. all of the major boards have
had curated content since moot left

------
thedudeabides5
I mean quarantining /r/wuhan_flu was the signal for me that it is no longer a
friendly space for free speech.

Whether or not you think Trump acts like a drunken sailor, the fact is the
quarantined an entire part of the website because it hosted people talking
about what’s now on the news _every day_.

------
givinguflac
Who cares, its Reddit

------
JSavageOne
Not surprising. Subreddits are basically like totalitarian institutions. I've
been banned, or even worse shadow banned, for the stupidest most nonsensical
stuff. Everytime I've responded to the message asking me to respond if I
wanted to contest my ban, I've never gotten a response. The worst are those
ultra-strict subreddits that act as "safe spaces", censoring any dissenting
discussion that challenges whatever propaganda the mods are trying to peddle
(the most ironic are probably /r/socialism and /r/latestagecapitalism).

A lot of people will say "yeah that's unfortunate, but Reddit can do whatever
they want because they're a private company." I don't quite agree with that.
When you have 430 million active users (that would make it the 3rd most
populous country) and market yourself as a "community of communities", and
your site is the go-to for people looking for discussion, I think your site
needs to be held to a higher standard. If /r/economics with its 810k
subscribers automatically censors comments that don't conform to its handful
of mods' neoliberal agenda, that's a real imbalance of power that has serious
consequences, not just within the Reddit community but to the world at large.
If /r/politics with its 6.1m subscribers is censoring viewpoints that don't
align with its agenda, that has serious implications. Humans are unfortunately
extremely susceptible to hivemind bias.

In any case, Reddit is generally not the best place for meaningful discussion
ever since ~2009 or so when it devolved into a watering hole for memes and pun
threads (thankfully the pun thread thing died). Top comments seem to consist
of 1-2 sentences of sarcastic jokes. The default subreddits range from the
internet equivalent of junk food to outright propaganda. HN is great, but it'd
be nice to have some alternative places to go to discuss the more non-tech
things (eg. politics/economics) and niche topics.

------
cmonnow
what are those top 92 accounts ?

------
dredmorbius
Woozle, a friend on Google+ noted some years ago:

<quote>

The Epistemic Paradox

Our present epistemic systems are undergoing kind of the same shock that the
online community underwent when transitioning from BBSs and Usenet to the
commercial web to social media.

We were used to a very high content-to-BS ratio because it took a certain
amount of intelligence and intense domain-interest for people to be there in
the first place -- and we've now transitioned to a situation where many people
are there more or less accidentally and (the worst part), _because of a high
percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to
be had by influencing the discussions that take place._

 _Science is much the same._ For a long time, it was this small thing
operating off to the side; only elites could afford to indulge in it, and
their discoveries affected very few -- so the truth value could remain high
because there was relatively little to be gained by distortion. People's lives
were largely governed by things that had been around long enough that the
culture had evolved to deal with them more or less reasonably, so they didn't
need advice from domain experts to provide accurate information -- and where
expertise was needed, it flowed from parent to child and from master to
apprentice as part of a cultural process that everyone understood.

Obviously that's not the case anymore. The culture can't keep up.

This is sort of a reiteration of the last paragraph of my previous comment:

"the actual problem is (1) the increasing complexity of our society, requiring
ever more knowledge to discern truth from anti-truth, and (2) anti-information
being actively injected into the system by those who seek to manipulate public
opinion."

But I wanted to highlight what I think is happening when people decry the
death of expertise as this article does: it's sort of a form of retro-voodoo:
'in order to have the reliable information we once had, we need to restore the
old forms'. Bring back BBSes and usenet, and we'll have civil internet
dialogue again. Trust experts, and we'll have valid science again.

 _It doesn 't work that way._ The external conditions have changed, the
bandwidth needs are higher and the noise-rejection needs are greater. The old
systems are failing under the increased information demand (which we can't
just wish away, nor would we want to) -- _and so we need new processes that
are better able to deal with that heavier load._

</quote>

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_epistemic_systems_gain_social_and_political/)

The sentiment is similar to what earlier media theorists have noted: Shoshana
Zuboff's eponymous three laws, Elizabeth Eisenstein on the social impact of
the printing press, Noam Chomsky and Ed Hermann in _Manufacturing Consent_ ,
Marshall McLuhan, Hannah Arendt, the Frankfurt School, George Seldes, Walter
Lippmann, Edward Bernays, back to Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and before.

Opposition to this notion tends to run to one of two, or often _both_ ,
contradictory arguments:

1) What does this matter, it's just an Internet discussion. (e.g.,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23183381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23183381))

2). Free speech is supreme, all censorship is bad. (e.g.,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23177185](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23177185))

(Both examples from this very HN thread.)

The problem is, you cannot have it both ways: either free speech _is_
paramount, _because it changes things in the real world_ , or allspeech is
meaningless _because it has no effect_. Once you move off either pole, you're
in a land where 1) speech matters and 2) careless, indifferent, or malicious
speech has deleterious consequences.

Even John Start Mill, in "On Liberty", directly addresses this: "the dictum
that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant
falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into
commonplaces, but which all experience refutes...."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23068118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23068118)

You _cannot_ build a large-scale, significant communications system without
moderation any more than you can create a large-scale city without sanitation
and public health systems, or a global rapid transportation network without
commensurate epidemiological detection, management, and controls.

In all, the lack leads to the same consequence: a cesspit of disease,
infection, and death.

This is why the nintth and ultimate mechanism of technology is hygiene
factors.

(See in part;
[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5rnjg0/state_o...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5rnjg0/state_of_the_lair_2017/))

------
progre
Does anyone have a tildes.net invite by the way?

------
throwaway122378
Remember when an entire community was wiped off Reddit because of their
political views

~~~
LeoPanthera
"For political views" is what they want you to think, but it was actually for
threatening, harassing, and abusive behaviour, and for the mods of the sub in
question not dealing with the problem.

Anyone pushing the "political views" story knows that, of course.

~~~
eska
The_donald was removed because it supposedly called for violence against the
police. This was not true at all, but is still a regular occurrence on
subreddits like news and politics, without mods ever blocking such posts and
comments.

You should also take a look at the leakrd conversations by mods and admins
scheming to frame them.

No matter your political beliefs, you should be alarmed by this.

~~~
valtism
T_D was not removed, nor is it removed now.

~~~
s1artibartfast
Just went and checked. Looks to be effectively shut down. 750,000 subs and
literally 1 allowed post in the last month.

~~~
raverbashing
Maybe they failed to update the bots to work around the quarantine page

------
JPKab
Reddit is awful, and has been for years.

Like most HN folks, I have a few narrow interest subreddits I go to on non
controversial subjects.

The rest of the site is just groupthink tribal warfare for bitter professional
victims.

~~~
apatters
Why do people use Reddit for political or controversial discussion? I think
everyone knows by now that it's a circle jerk. There are plenty of other
forums out there and you can set one up in 5 minutes.

~~~
arminiusreturns
It is indeed bad, but there are gems to be found. Some of those gems may not
always avoid this issue, but they at least strive to. For example
/r/geopolitics. It's obscure enough and the mods participate well enough that
generally you can find some really good discussion there. There are a few subs
like this, but they are rare and the exception.

~~~
sudosysgen
Geopolitics has really degenerated. It is now dominated by users that post
unending barrages of unrealistic, low-quality "fall of China" articles.

Incidentally, I was banned for saying that China would end up with less deaths
due to the coronavirus than the US, as a result of their stricter
interventions, which turned out to be true. The moderators of that subreddits
decided that it was such an egregiously incorrect point-of-view that it had to
be deleted, and the poster banned.

So no, r/geopolitics isn't really good anymore. It was interesting a few
months to years back, though. But now it's mostly biased, moralistic and
americentric takes with artificially limited debate, with such scathing and
interesting discussion as "Western culture is the best culture, and that's why
the US will be an eternal empire", or "China will be sublimated by the US just
like the US beat Japan". This is a stark contrast to the more realpolitik,
realist discourse of yesteryear. Non-China related threads are better, though.

~~~
101404
And that's the problem of today's Reddit. People get banned for disagreeing
with the mainstream of a sub. Fear of controversy.

~~~
raverbashing
Because for the 1% that have a legitimate disagreement/different opinion,
there are 99% of "new posters" that act like that sub was worldnews or some
other frontpage subreddit

Then it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff and the mods, (as much as
I agree that in some subs are totally going for the echo chamber) have a lot
of work to do.

------
SkyMarshal
A more accurate title might be "92 of top 500 subreddits controlled by same 5
people". From the article.

~~~
__s
Which doesn't seem like that many. Consider:

100% of Hacker News is moderated by the same people

Power laws are a thing, we shouldn't be surprised if 80% of the moderation is
done by 20% of the people (& remember, power laws are recursive)

A lot of the subreddits in the image seem related. Almost as if the people who
create the most popular subreddits tend to create more than 1 subreddit & know
how to effectively run them. We can argue about how effective reddit is, but
"being one of the most popular subreddit" should work for this point

I say this as someone who doesn't frequent the most popular subreddits or
recognize who the mods are. But I do notice moderators tend to receive quite a
bit of flak which isn't always warranted

Which is to say, I'd be interested if there were some citations of other
moderators claiming these mods were injected or whatnot. But this "just
stating facts" 5 people fact doesn't seem relevant

~~~
onion2k
_100% of Hacker News is moderated by the same people_

HN is open about it. That's the difference.

~~~
appleflaxen
isn't reddit open about it? mod names are published on every sub.

~~~
onion2k
The owners of the subreddits in question go out of their way to hide the fact
that they own so many.

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bryanrasmussen
So would that 5 people be the 1% or the 5.4% (5 out of 92)

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Neil44
I find the groupthink on reddit to be impossible to deal with. Many subreddits
have a particular dogma then stick to and if you variate at all you get
downvoted into oblivion no matter how obviously correct you are.

~~~
dr_zoidberg
It even happens on subreddits that aren't as popular. Many years ago I posted
frequently on /r/astrophotography, using very crappy equipment[0], but
focusing on the processing part, even sharing my own python scripts.

Then one mod decided to actively undermine me, even banned one of my posts,
because I didn't use PixInsight (like the rest of "the pros" do). I got my
post back up, but that ruined the subreddit for me.

Funny thing, I grew up, graduated CS/software engineering, specialized in
image processing and lo-and-behold, my techniques, though rudimentary, were
pretty solid.

[0] old binoculars steampunk-ly tied to an old digital camera -- being a
teenager with no income meant $0 budget -- but worked better than you'd
imagine!

~~~
yazan94
Sorry for the tangent, but that sounds really interesting! Would you feel
comfortable sharing more info about how you did the processing?
Astrophotography is a hobby I've been wanting to get into and learn about, but
I can't justify purchasing an expensive camera for just one hobby.

~~~
dr_zoidberg
Well I never formalized it in library or code that has survived to this day.
But in a general sense, what you do is load your images as raw as you're
comfortable working with them, and then define a pipeline that can:

* Stack or integrate: this means turning 100 high-noise images into a single, low noise image. To do that, you need:

* Registration or alignment: this is simply making sure that the stars are placed consistently on the same (x, y) location so that when you stack you don't get trails or blurring. High quality registration can go as far as sharpening your end result if you manage sub-pixel alignment (or you can strecth for super-resolution).

* Post-processing: it can be anything from removing light pollution (important if you're shooting from within a city), remove gradients (airglow, or residual light pollution even if you are far away from a city), sharpening (Lucy-Richardson deconvolution is king here using gaussian kernels, but if you can aproximate a Point Spread Function -or PSF for short- you can get even better results), color correction, high dynamic range processing. Of course, this is an un-ending place.

PixInsight is a great tool, I won't deny that. But I had a great joy in
learning how to program this things, and to me it's a lot more interesting
researching how to do something, learning it and programming it, rather than
having it done by somebody else, clicking a button and moving away.

Luckily for both you and I, Bennedict Bitterli has written a C++ pipeline for
processing with great detail that covers registration, stacking and removing
gradients. That's a great read that you can find here[0]. You can still visit
/r/astrophotography and treat yourself to the wiki if you want something more
down to earth and with less programming involved.

The one thing most redditors there forget is that AP, on a budget, can be as
fun (and frustrating too!) as throwing thousands of dolars worth of equipment
to the problem. If you have a DSLR (new or old, or a mirrorless, or a compact
camera, even some phones have good enough cameras) and a tripod you can do
widefield astrophotography.

[0] [https://benedikt-bitterli.me/astro/](https://benedikt-bitterli.me/astro/)

Edited: fixed a few typos

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fergie
Is this necessarily a problem? Reddit is social media- just as there are
popular youtubers, twitterers, and twitchers, there are popular redditors. You
could argue that popular redditors are actually more benign since the
monetization opportunities are limited, and they seem to be making interesting
communities for the love of it.

------
ponsin
What I find interesting about Reddit is how the community overwhelmingly
publicly writes about how inclusive they are and how important it is to be
inclusive. Yet there are subs that frequently get to all whose main goal is to
exclude and make fun of people such as FragileWhiteRedditor, inceltears,
iamatotalpieceofshit, and TheRightCantMeme

~~~
ryanwaggoner
There is no Reddit community. Reddit is one of the largest and most popular
sites on the web. There’s probably no subculture that isn’t represented there.

~~~
ponsin
That's like saying that there is no American culture because there are 328.2
million residence. I bet that if you swap the residence of Indonesia (273
million residence) with the residence of America, you will notice a lot of
cultural differences.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I should have said "there is no _singular_ Reddit community".

Pedantic notes aside, the point is that it's the least surprising thing ever
to find that some subreddits have one attitude towards $THING and other
subreddits have a different attitude. The site has hundreds of millions of
active users.

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yread
I don't really see the big deal - the most popular subreddits share moderators
(perhaps reddit employees? EDIT: doesn't even look like cyXie is an employee)
- so what? For example gaming has 26 moderators, out of that 1 from this list:

Dacvak (114459) 8 years ago full permissions

synbios16 (28642) 6 years ago full permissions

gamingmoderator (5816) 6 years ago full permissions

mookler (6506) 5 years ago full permissions

Rlight (12185) 4 years ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki

Analtoast (3337) 4 years ago full permissions

delicious_cheese (34636) 4 years ago full permissions

MisterWoodhouse (62091) 4 years ago full permissions

Redbiertje (59120) 3 years ago full permissions

Umdlye (9139) 3 years ago full permissions

MikeyJayRaymond (55501) 3 years ago full permissions

Greenbiertje (150) 3 years ago posts

TonyQuark (76908) 2 years ago full permissions

TurtlesgonnaTurtle (1466) 2 years ago full permissions

relaxlu (7013) 2 years ago full permissions

IwataFan (22448) 2 years ago full permissions

phedre (301354) 2 years ago full permissions

AutoModerator (8074) 1 year ago full permissions

MAGIC_EYE_BOT (399) 1 year ago posts, wiki

wrproductions (35774) 7 months ago full permissions

cyXie (2104178) 7 months ago full permissions

Hawkmoona_Matata (31402) 7 months ago full permissions

leakycauldron (1991) 7 months ago full permissions

LeafSamurai (53062) 7 months ago full permissions

Jackson1442 (13385) 4 months ago mail

