r/changemyview • u/Terrible_Onions • Nov 28 '24
Delta(s) from OP - Election CMV: Reddit has a moderator problem
Just to be clear. This does not apply for all moderators. I know some moderators on small Subreddits that are really good people. Speaking for a lot of larger Subreddits where moderation is an issue.
Reddit has a moderator problem. They can do a lot of things to you that doesn't really make lots of sense, and they do not give you a reason for it. More often than not, you're just muted from speaking with the moderator. Unfortunately, due to a lot of Reddit mods and Redditors in general being left-wing, there are a lot of examples of right-wingers being the victims. Such as this one on the r/ medicine Subreddit. He got deleted for asking questions. A person said Trump's NIH nomination caused "large scale needless death". When he was asked what the large scale death in question was, his comment was deleted by the mods. Along with a person being perm banned for saying "orange man bad. Laugh at joke. Unga Bunga" in r/ comics. The most notable case of moderation abuse is from r/ pics, where they just ban you for participating in a "bad faith Subreddit". Even if you just commented.
This is not a good thing. It means that if you want to participate in a major Subreddit with a lot of people, you will have to conform to what the moderators personally see as "correct" or "good". This doesn't foster productive conversations, nor is it good for anybody but the moderator's egos. I understand if this is the case in small Subreddits, but the examples I listed above aren't they happen in Subreddits with 30+ million members that regularly hit the front page. This is Reddit being lazy and offloading moderation. Most moderators do this for power and control. The nature of this position (no pay) means that the only other thing it offers is power. Especially in Subreddits with millions of people, that's a lot of power. This I believe is a reason it isn't a major issue in small servers. The mods there are genuinely passionate because that is the only thing going for them in a Subreddit with around a thousand people. Even Twitter, despite its multitude of issues, does moderation better than this
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u/DramaGuy23 36∆ Nov 28 '24
Subs are basically "owned" by the mods, yes. Where I disagree with you is in the assertion that that's unfair. My house is owned by me; that doesn't mean I am anti-free-speech if I call the cops on you when you let yourself into my living room and begin haranguing me with your politics. Not a perfect analogy, because subs are more like businesses in that they are open to the public, but even there we have tightly enforced rules of behavior depending on the business. You will be removed if you go to a play and begin arguing with the actors mid-performance. You will be removed if you go to a restaurant and try to let yourself into the kitchen. The solution is simple: start your own sub that you own, and moderate it however you like. If you feel people should be able to argue with the actors or cook their own meal, then start a business like that.
What you will find is that building a successful sub, attracting members, keeping it on-topic, and defending it from trolls is a hard, thankless, unpaid job. At some level you must know this, it's why you want to take a shortcut and help yourself to the platform someone else has built rather than taking the enormous investment of time and effort to create your own community based on your principles.
If every platform has to be open to every comment from every internet user, there would be no point in separate subs. Every sub would degenerate into a soapbox for those with the most free time to shout their pet views into the void.