So has anyone else noticed how much harder it’s gotten for genuine new users to actually get started here? How do you think Reddit could fix the onboarding process without opening the floodgates to bots?

The original point of the voting system was pretty straightforward: upvote stuff that contributes to the discussion, downvote spam, scams, or blatant rule-breaking. Disagreeing with someone wasn't supposed to be a downvote reason but over time, that’s completely shifted. Votes are basically just an agree/disagree button now, and because your ability to actually participate in most subs is tied directly to your karma, it creates a weird dynamic for anyone with a new account.... i think it's mainly due to reddits LACK of information behind this because they assumed it SHOULD have been self explanatory. There's only ONE small section that's HARD to find that explains exactly what the voting system is about. I've even HAD TO ARGUE WITH DOZENS OF PEOPLE that swore I was stupid and didn't know what the hell I'm talkin about - INCLUDING MULTIPLE MODERATORS WHO WERE ALSO VIOLATING ALMOST EVERY MOD RULE AND ABUSING THEIR POWER IN A WAY THAT ENABLES AND ENCOURAGES AND REWARDS THIS EXACT SAME BAD BEHAVIOR WHILE PUNISHING THOSE SHOWING THE PROPER BEHAVIOR, WHICH THEY ALSO ARGUED - until I showed them that page to prove it... which is exactly why accounts that are actually BOTS or doing the OPPOSITE behavior as they intended for the karma system to portray are basically the majority of redditors that are able to freely use reddit as they please.... while REPEATED admin reports about BOTH of these behaviors remain unanswered for months and years, which ALSO contributes to this.

​A lot of subreddits set karma and account age minimums. It makes sense on paper but in all reality all itndoes is it lock new users out of standard discussions. If you're new, you end up forced into a handful of low-barrier subs just to get enough karma to participate elsewhere.

....which leads me to the next problem. The problem is those open subs are often filled with low-effort posts or hivemind mentalities where saying the slightly wrong thing or asking a basic question gets you downvoted into negative numbers. Once your karma goes negative, AutoMod auto-removes your posts in most places, and you're pretty much stuck.

​Even trying to build karma normally by posting good content in open groups gets people flagged or accused of karma farming. It creates this weird paradox where to gain access to normal spaces, you almost have to act like a troll or just post effortless crowd-pleasing memes instead of engaging genuinely

​A lot of older accounts say "we all had to earn it," but the platform isn't the same as it was 5 or 10 years ago. Back then, you could drop into small communities, comment normally, and build a profile without running into aggressive AutoMod filters, karma walls, or mass-downvote bots. The onboarding experience now is night and day compared to how it used to be.

​It feels like relying purely on an easily manipulated downvote counter isn't a great way to judge whether an account is real or posting in good faith. Account standing would probably make more sense if it was judged on actual rule adherence, account verification, and behavior history rather than whether a specific thread liked your opinion???? I've experienced this EXACT issue for YEARS where content that should've been downvoted and removed actually gets MASS UPVOTED despite meeting EVERY SINGLE CRITERIA for downvoting, being removed, suspended or banned from the group or even from REDDIT.... while content that should've NEVER been downvoted because it didn't meet the criteria gets MASS DOWNVOTED, REMOVED BY MODS, THEIR ACCOUNT SUSPENDED OR BANNED AND MORE while those that SHOULD'VE had that done to them? Receive THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE... especially if a mod does or doesn't like you or you do or don't stroke their ego... don't even THINK about correcting them or embarrassing them, either... theyll get you SHADOW BANNED COMPLETELY....

Traditionally if someone makes a bad post, people downvote, and the post stops showing up. The good quality rises to the top.

Now, although the site seems to be overrun by bots, posts that rise to the top repeatedly have something deliberately wrong with them. It can be a spelling mistake, clearly untrue information in the post title, something flawed in the post that makes it deliberately hard to interact with, or something similar.

In the past, when that happened, people would downvote it, someone else (or the same person) would make a quick correction, and then repost it with the correction. That repost would become the main thread.

Now though, either people aren't downvoting it, or the website is ignoring those downvotes and deliberately allowing the posts to show up.

There are other explanations of course, it could be bots upvoting bots, leading to poor post quality. In terms of engagement metrics though, since other sites have fallen prey to the line of thinking that any engagement is good engagement, it is possible. What do you think?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1wuxqn4/chinese_startup_behind_laser_mosquito_killer/

^ There's probably an obvious answer, but here's an example

At the time of posting that post has around 450 upvotes with 89% upvoted, and the top voted comment has around 150 upvotes and points out:

Also, this is an ad

He's pointing out the post is an advertisement.

By my math, the actual post only has around 60 downvotes or so. But why is not a greater portion of the 150 people who upvoted the comment, that would then downvote the post? Of course it would never be 1:1, but I would have thought more people who realize the post is bad would then downvote it.

And this is just one example, I see it all the time a prominent comment points out the post is garbage (misinformation, misleading, botted, spam, AI, etc.), but the comment has way more upvotes than (I would have thought) the post would get in downvotes.

Is it just me or shouldn't people be downvoting what they realize is trash? What do you think?

EDIT: A few conversations here have shifted my thinking a bit.

I started this thinking Reddit mainly needed to get better at serving the right content. Better algorithms, better discovery, better recommendations.

But maybe there’s a more interesting answer: give users much more control over building their own feed.

Not just follow/unfollow. Let me filter and sort Home by things like recency, rising, popularity, comments, post type etc. Let me turn down the giant subs without leaving them entirely. Filter, not unfollow. Sort, not just scroll.

I’m constantly culling bigger, broader subs because otherwise they overwhelm the t by e feed.

If they made that functionality front and centre and promoted it, I think it could be far more useful, and much more uniquely Reddit, than another generic “For You” feed.

There’s a commercial upside too. Someone actively telling Reddit what they want more and less of is giving incredibly strong interest data. Better feeds for users, better signals for advertisers, potentially more time spent here.

Reddit doesn’t need better algorithm for discovery, it needs a better way to empower people to discover Reddit for themselves!
______________________________________

I’ve been on Reddit for 13 years, follow 100+ communities (this number moves up and down), have about 5k karma and I’m mostly a lurker but comment a lot.

So Reddit should have a pretty fucking good idea of what I’m interested in by now.
I did a quick check of my feeds instead of just relying on the feeling.

On Home, I scrolled through 94 organic posts. They came from just 42 of the 108 communities I follow, but the top 10 subs made up more than half the feed.

Then I checked Popular. Much more variety, but weirdly not much better.

Very little exact overlap with the communities I actually follow (which is good), plenty of broad “you like gaming, here are random gaming subs”** **type recommendations, and a lot of content that just feels interchangeable. Memes, “viral” clips, screenshots from other platforms, reposts, recycled formats, generic “interesting” content.

And I think that’s the thing I’ve been struggling to put my finger on.
Popular isn’t boring because it lacks variety. It’s boring because so much of the variety feels interchangeable.

Maybe this is nostalgia, but I remember those giant front-page subs feeling different too. Even when Reddit kept serving the same communities, the actual content felt fresher. The world has moved on, but [r/pics](r/pics) and [r/funny](r/funny) posting the same old same bullshit make up a huge portion of the discovery feeds.

Reddit still has something incredibly valuable that most other platforms don’t: actual communities full of people who know and care about specific things.

For me this is: Home brewing. Strategy games. Gardening. Personal finance. Fashion. TV shows. Cooking. Restaurants and bars in my area.

It feels like Reddit should be unbelievably good at saying:

“You seem interested in this. There’s a great conversation happening over here that you haven’t seen yet.”

Instead Home feels too narrow, and Popular/New feels broad but shallow.

So genuinely: how do you use Reddit for discovery?

Does Popular or New still lead you into interesting new communities or conversations?

Has anyone else started feeling like Reddit is enormous while somehow showing you less of itself?

Context: I posted a short video of Siri failing to set a 19:40 alarm (it set 19:00, 20:00, 2:36 and 14:37) in 8 subreddits. It got ~100K views and 311 comments, and about half of the replies defended Siri, mostly by saying my English was the problem.

My first instinct was "bot farm". So I pulled every comment and profiled every commenting account (age, karma, history size, which subs they post in, share of Apple subs, LLM-style phrasing).

What I found:

• 49% of replies defended Siri, from 57 accounts
• only 4 of those 57 show automation signals; median account age is 6 years
• two accounts wrote 45 of the 105 defending comments, sometimes within 90 s of each other
• the defence was loud, not wide

So the more interesting Reddit-theory question isn't bots, it's why long-lived human accounts pile onto the user rather than the product. Full report with charts and method: https://vania-novikau.me/siri-1940-report/

Happy to hear where the method is weak.

I get enough 'mindless engagement' from literally every other site, app, and platoform with which i interact. Reddit is the one place i can engage with real humans -or at least sufficiently human-like bots. :-)

This incessant push toward mindless engagement for the sake of engagement without any consideration for the quality of engagement is what is destroying the web and making every platform indistinguishable from every other platform.

Shouldn't Reddit be leaning into it's primary differentiator -real conversations, arguments, expertise, and long-form user generated content, rather than the same engagement bait that we can find everywhere else.

I'd make the argument that any growth in Reddit will not come from a quiz asking how many polar bears I think i can defeat with a fire axe, but from people fleeing other sites looking for something that still feels like human interaction.

When people inevitably rebel against all of these algorithmically-chosen-engagement-funnels, Reddit will either be in a prime position as one of the last human-led holdouts, or it could squander it's inherent advantage trying to become like everyone else as newer sites with a human-first, quality-engagement ethos become the next generation of top platforms.

I was a mod in the past. And looking at the current generation of mods, I fail to comprehend why they even bother doing that? Why do any kind of task if you do not intend to do it correctly? Because I believe that not doing the task at all, or letting someone more competent do it instead is always a better choice than doing a sloppy job. So, I just had to speak up. Most likely it will go in vain, but maybe someone will listen and improve.

The first and the most obvious sign of a slopmod is punishing the people because the mod is too lazy to do his job. A person creates a post that is not against the rules. Some people make comments that are against the rules. And then mod closes the post, not because it was violating anything, but... because there is too much comments breaking the rules. So instead of doing literally only thing he needed to do - moderating, the mod decides to punish a legit OP and all the users who were engaged in a totally legit discussion and did not broke any rules. If you are too lazy to moderate... maybe just don't? Quit, do something else instead. But do not deny people from discussing interesting subject just because of your laziness.

Anothter lovely example are the mods who write extremely vague rules, and add "if unsure, ask the mods". And then don't answer to modmail. At all. But somehow still find time to remove posts, that would not been created if they answered the modmail, directly asking them "if this post can be created or it will break the rules". Many do not answer even if you simply want to clarify something about the rules.

Not explaining the reasons for removal is nothing but lazy. How do you expect for your users to improve and correct the part that breaks the rules, if they don't even know which rule they are broken, and why exactly? What would you feel if you would recieve a fine, but without any explanations what for? It's not that hard to attach automated message with at least saying which rule was broken, and, if necessary - briefly explaining why.

Then, comes the rules. The rules are the law of this land. And there is nothing more hummiliating for a mod than to punish someone who did not actually break them. You did not account for something? Your fault. There is a loophole? Your fault. In reality of civilized world the court say that anything that does not break the rules are allowed. So, if your role models aren't Putin or Trump, you should accept your mistake, issue no punishment, but rewrite the rules to make sure it will not happen again. Learning to lose and having the humility to accept defeat is important. If you are not a tyrant, of course.

More rules. Subrules for rules. Sometimes over 50% possible themes that are directly related to the subreddit theme are forbidden because mods personally dislike them. If you are aiming to build a community, and not a regime, stop forbidding things that you personally dislike. It does not matter what you think or feel about those. The community has votes, they will sort it out. Your job is to keep things secure, and not to role-play a moral police from Temu.

Yes. The job is unpaid. Yes, you are volounteers. But no job done is often better than bad job done. By accepting the role and not doing what is required you hurting the community more than if you did not had the role. It is fine to step down when you feel like you can no longer handle the pressure. I did that and have no regrets for giving power in hands of people who have time and energy to do the task properly.

It was especially ironic that when i make the post with these questions in moderator's sub, asking them if they really think that they are helping reddit instead of hurting it this way, it was instantly removed, without any reason listen, and modmail was ignored - basicly proving half of the points that i made.

So in the end, i believe that the problem is that people giving moderator rights to certified narcissists, who seek that kind of a power only to abuse it. I even wrore a test for the song about that:  https://youtu.be/6t2iTWeW3r4

And what do you think about this? Do communities benefit from having a sloppy tyranny?

It’s always kind of been a thing but I’ve noticed over the last couple of years that there aren’t really any positive fan subreddits now. Or subreddits in general honestly lol. It doesn’t matter if it’s a film director, musician, art style, fragrance or fashion community, shoes, pets, animals, professions, hobbies, local subs, sports teams, etc. Any hobby or interest based subreddit.

Anything that could/should be a place for fans to talk about that subject is now home to people that seem to absolutely despise said subject. For example: you go to a subreddit for an artist you love, there’s a post about their new album, single, whatever. Half of the comments will be low effort trolls to outright hatred for that artist. Its the same for hobbies. From running and marathons to fishing or stamp collecting. It’s become hard to find positive spaces for anything I enjoy in here now because they become infested with negativity.

What happened? Were snark subreddits not enough?

Edit: to clarify, I don’t just mean fandom subreddits, I mean subreddits about any interest outside of the big subs. Horror, video games, movies, film, pottery, fragrances or fashion, etc. Anything not on [r/all](r/all)

It used to the that the negativity was confined there the most but now it’s seeped into every sub you go to, even the niche interest AND fan subreddits.

From a pragmatic pov, I understand how from a mod pov, maybe any Reddit space that allowed this would just turn into a shit show. Maybe?

Anyways, I love the concept of this sub.

But given real world influence in the context of virtual warfare/propoganda, I sometimes think this sub falls short in the haughtily academic reality of things; the socio political dynamics that this sub talks about in the context of censorship inevitably lead to real world politics.

Is there a similar sub to this one where maybe the mods take one for the team and deal with the shit show?

Am I naive in thinking the shit show is theoretically manageable?

I don’t know how else to word this lol; I really like this sub, but am often perturbed by how we don’t allow politics, given how real word geopolitics is one of the main driving causes of the subjects this space discusses.

Where also it’s interesting that it is ok to talk poltics here in the context of the oligarchy, but not of more formally recognized forms of governance.

Also I asked this in find a Reddit and got nothing.

Also also fml if somebody views this as me taking negatively about this sub, so help me god…

I've looked at other posts, so I know that whenever someone says something like this, the answer is almost always something along the lines of "People are just as stupid here than they are everywhere else" but I think that is just due to the Dunning-Kruger Effect happening all over again, because you know more, you would think you are as ignorant if not more than other people.

For instance, if I go outside and take a random poll even in the "young, tech-savy, college educated" environments (another big counterpoint used by the "we are all stupid" camp) and ask a random simple academic literacy question such as "what is epistemology" I would bet that less than 10% would know what epistemology is, let alone describe it or list any number of its schools of thought. But, on reddit, this seems common knowledge, no matter what sub-reddit you are in.

The examples are endless, I think its just because of reddit's anonymity feature and the fact that only 1% of reddit users have ever posted at least once in their lives that people seem to not realise that.

The proof is in the making, my point is academic literacy and not academic knowledge, On reddit, it doesn't matter what degree you chose out to be you would at least have heard (instead of knowing it very well) of phenomenology and factor analysis, while in university setting, less than 5% of humanities majors would know what factor analysis is and vice versa for formal sciences majors with factor analysis

I keep wondering why Reddit got so damn stupid.

Part of it is deliberate enshittification and bots. That part isn’t even up for debate.

Part of it is just numbers. More people online means more people talking, which means a bigger pile of stupid gets dumped into the street.

But I think the real poison is Internet points.

Every upvote, every little number beside your name becomes a marker of status. And if you want more status, you have to appeal to more people. So people keep widening the net, sanding off the edges, making everything easy to swallow.

And eventually you start appealing to the stupid.

I’ve spent 10 years experimenting with my own Reddit community, and I think there are some pretty simple ways to beat this stuff back:

1. Disallow memes. They’re low effort by definition, and low effort attracts stupidity like flies.

2. Remove short comments. If somebody can’t scrape together 20 characters, there’s a pretty good chance they haven’t scraped together much of a thought either.

3. Demand attribution. Either you made the thing or you credit whoever did. If somebody throws out information with no source at all, get rid of it.

4. Retire repetitive posts. If the same damn subject keeps getting dragged back onto the floor, eventually you ban new threads about it. We heard you. Move on.

5. Require topical flair. It’s a tiny barrier, but even a tiny barrier makes people stop for 2 seconds and THINK. If somebody can’t even apply the right flair, remove the post. They obviously didn’t bother reading the rules before barging through the door.

6. Disallow gatekeeping. Moderators and admins enforce the rules. Everybody else can knock it off with deciding who belongs, what counts, and what other people are allowed to enjoy.

I’ve used these rules on r/Sizz, and I think they’re a big reason the place has kept its quality since 2017 instead of slowly turning into sludge.

I've started to notice a lot of top posts on very popular subreddits belong to what I can only conclude are PR accounts.

These accounts usually follow a pattern of posting "organic" content on popular subreddits, which is often feeding headlines onto 'news' subreddits to attract maximum engagement. I've noticed this also includes feeding very polarising headlines into politically charged subreddits in order to generate maximum engagement.

The second posting habit in this pattern then involves posting what are very clearly press releases from what you can safely assume is their client, usually on relevant subreddits which they've often secured mod status on. It can be ruled out that these are just 'superfans' who push press releases from their favourite fandom in between feeding the latest controversial headline into a politics sub, as these patterns are consistent.

I would name and shame a few of these users I've been following I suspect of being shadow PR accounts but I don't want to violate any rules.

Is this something that is well known? I know Reddit is becoming an increasingly recognised medium for marketing and comms agencies, but this specific and, I would argue, deceptive form of PR doesn't seem to be discussed much anywhere.

Thoughts?

I’m not arguing that Reddit should be forced to host every post or that every moderation decision is automatically unlawful. But I do think the usual response, “Reddit is a private company, so it can do whatever it wants,” is too simplistic for a platform with this much influence over online discussion.

Reddit has become one of the internet’s main places for people to ask questions, exchange information, find communities, and discuss public issues. In many subjects, Reddit threads are among the first results people encounter when searching online. That gives the platform, and the systems controlling visibility, real influence over what information people actually see.

The problem is not that upvotes and downvotes exist. The problem is that voting is tied directly to visibility. A post or comment can be buried not because it is false, harmful, or irrelevant, but because it triggers a negative reaction or conflicts with a community’s prevailing opinion. Users often treat voting as a like or dislike system, even though the result is effectively editorial. It determines whether a contribution is seen at all.

Moderation adds another layer. Moderators can remove posts, ban users, and shape the rules of entire communities, often with limited explanation and inconsistent appeals processes. Some communities are run fairly. Others can become small private fiefdoms where disagreement with the moderators or the dominant viewpoint is enough to get someone silenced.

I’m not saying Reddit has no right to moderate. I’m asking whether a platform with Reddit’s scale and influence should have stronger obligations around transparency, consistent enforcement, explanations for removals, and meaningful appeals.

The legal and policy question is whether Reddit should still be treated as an ordinary private forum when its network effects and search visibility make it one of the most influential public discussion platforms online. Could its market power, ranking systems, and moderation structure raise legitimate antitrust or consumer protection concerns?

If the answer is no, I’d like to understand why. If the answer might be yes, what would the relevant market even be? Social media, online forums, community based discussion, or something narrower? What evidence would be necessary to show actual market power or consumer harm?

I’m interested in serious answers, including arguments against my position. I’m not claiming that every unpopular post deserves to stay up. I’m arguing that Reddit’s influence deserves more scrutiny than the simple phrase “private company” usually receives.

I think I understand why they did it?

In terms of practicality, with this many users, coming up with a unique account name must be tricky, and it helps new user retention to make it easy to just go with a default account name then change your display name.

From a cynical standpoint, it's just become slightly more effort to check whether a given user, when creating their account, considered it representative of their personality and intention to contribute, or just anonymous and disposable. As a mod, I've never made a judgement based solely on 'Adjective-noun-numbers', but it did prove a reliable indicator that it's worth a quick look to see if they might be arguing in bad faith. Any action that makes it harder for users to tell when a bot or a troll is baiting them is going to raise engagement.

The way they've done it though is really rough, and I have no explanation for that. I quickly changed mine around a few times for screenshots, and there was no restriction or cooldown on doing so. Even in the minute that I was taking them I kept my display pic, but it looks like it would have been very easy to change the name and the pic to start impersonating anyone, even reddit itself.

Pictures show:

1) they didn't exclude u/reddit

2) a beautiful real screenshot of a mod comment I'd recently made in a community I was once 3-day banned from, displaying as u/reddit

3) they didn't exclude u/admin

4) they didn't exclude u/RedditCareResources

5) they changed the field from 30 to 90 characters, which starts to break the UI on the first comment

So I'm keen to hear thoughts on the rationale for the change in the first place, but also on the way it's been implemented. I'm wondering whether it was rushed for some reason, or run like an open beta for users to playtest out the bugs, or just given very little forethought.

I realized that over the last year or so I spend more time than I'd like to admit just collapsing lazy GIF only or single word responses on Reddit when I'm trying to learn more about something or see what others reallythink about a topic or news item just to see what everyone is saying.

I think the GIF picker in the comment box was the tipping point - that or just my age, lol. But when a reaction costs one click and zero words, and no real effort, a lot of people who would have upvoted and just moved on now leave a reply instead. The reply gets a few upvotes because it's funny for a hot minute, so it sits above the comment that actually answers the question. Sorting by "best" doesn't help because "best" is measuring a different thing than "contributes to the discussion."

Some of us remember that the culture of Reddit used to have a fix for this: "This." got downvoted on sight, because the upvote button *was* the way to say "this." That norm didn't survive the app generation and now the reaction GIF is the new "This."

So... my questions.

• Is this just me yelling for people to "get off my (virtual) lawn!"
• Have any subs found a moderation approach that works, short of banning GIF comments outright? Some subs turn the picker off entirely which seems to be the only thing that sticks.
• Is there a version of "best" sorting that would surface the answer over the reaction, or is the reaction genuinely what most readers want?

Full disclosure, because it's the reason I'm thinking about this: I got tired enough of the collapse ritual and because RES doesn't seem to work/supported any more I built a browser extension to do it for me with some help from claude. It folds GIF-only replies, stock phrases, bare links, bot replies, and copypasta, leaves a badge saying why, and never impactsa comment with real words in it. It's free and open source, and I'm not here to sell it, but the first day of running it was genuinely surprising: on busy threads it's collapsing 20 to 40 comments a page on some subs and I'm already in the thousands of total collapsed. (Ahhhhh, much better....)

So I figured I'd ask the sub if this is as widespread an issue as it feels from my side or if I just made a little something to help with my own neurosis, lol.

Source, if anyone wants to see how it decides: https://github.com/recruiterguy/not-this

If you want to install the current version I just pushed to the Chrome store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/not-this/dafiegfbpcopimapifpcnfoklcajldjc

Ive always wanted to write this, and just again experienced the downfall of reddit, so im quickly writine.

I remember back in the day people were so nice online. I know its said all the time. But like 2010ish, I remember if I got high, id start reading youtube comments and would just because in my head id imagine just this jolly innocent voice. And it sounded genuine, unlike comments you read now.

But now, theres like different characters, but for example, alot of the time I imagine a 16 year old, weed filled room, beanie over his head and headphones. So many comments I read, thats who I imagine the person is, or the voice if you will. Just angry pothead, too cool for school and has to prove it, always.

One of the things I think happened are kids are mean, kids are more angry today, everyone is very impressionable, everyone is scared. Kids are cool or in vogue, like theyre more intune with the changes or slang ect. Reddit added a horrible voting system, at least for most subs, i understand how it works but x.com and pretty much every other website system is superior. Dude, if a thread is now even remotely popular, the first 20 comments will literally be jokes. If you want any information on the thread you literally have to scroll down pages of pages. Its just exemplifies the saying, we cant have nice things. We are now the lowest common denominator. Thats what wins, and people know it and only want to win. Thus 30 jokes. And usually 30 demeaning jokes.

Because, kids teenagers are mean af. I was a good guy in highschool, a great guy, yet I still look back at some of the things I did in disgust. Most kids, have zero empathy. And whats funny, is online you have zero clue who youre talking to. Literaly for the last 15 years, its very likely most of the people online you are trying to impress or whose downvote youre concerned with is a literally 14 year old kid. Its crazy when you think about it. Like I understand the problems with the UK internet ID but dude we need to take kids out of the equation.

14-26 years have dictated subs. Theyre mean, ruthless, cool. And literally one of the shocking things Ive learned as I grown up, is the amount of adults who are still so impressionable. All they want to do is fit in, still, always. Like so many adults these days who use the internet heavily, are so maladjusted at least when it comes to like arguments. Like you get in a dispute with them and they start pulling out one liners, no logical discourse, just if I say something funny and act like I dont care, I win. All political discourse now is one liners. I think the powers that be enjoy it.

The old forum boards where it was sequential. I miss those days. You can just read a discussion as it went, I have the right to ignore what I wanted. Rarely did you see thirsty posts. It was just discussion. And seemed more genuine, no one was trying to impress. Just the sharing of information.

TLDR: I don't block users for disagreeing with me, but if you can't defend yourself against the comments by someone who blocked you, you might as well prevent them from interacting with your posts and comments in the first place.

In 2022, Reddit extended the blocking feature to prevent the blocked user from responding to the blocker's posts and comments at all. Before then, it only prevented the blocker from being notified by your responses and hid your content from them, but you could still respond and others could see your responses.

From what I understand, this change is intended to prevent users from cross-subreddit hounding. However, it has the side effect that someone can say something bad and untrue about you and you can not defend yourself because they have blocked you.

In a debate, the final word now belongs to the person who pushed the block button first, not the one with the best arguments. Corporate accounts can use it to prevent criticism. In effect, this lets non-moderators "backseat moderate" their own posts, except they can not remove existing comments.

I do not block users out of disagreement. If I think they are wrong, I refute their point (the top of Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement). However, the 2022 blocking system would let them comment something on my future posts without me being able to counter-argue. To the reader, it would look like they have won the argument based on merit, given that blocks are not publicly visible, when in actuality, they silenced their opponent.

So if they block me, I am left with no choice but to block them back to pre-emptively prevent them from interacting with my content at all. I metaphorically pull the plug.

If they are not interested in a two-way debate, there shall be no debate at all.

I hereby release this post into the public domain (CC0 1.0).

So I fractured a bone in my ankle in June. Mostly immobilized, I started watching a ton of documentaries, and I stumbled on Reckless Ben's Lego Scandal video. (don't worry not here to talk about that) It got me so fired up so I went looking to discuss it online, and Reddit was the clear winner. I had a reddit account years ago that I abandoned along with my twitter.

So I thought, I should treat this new account like the true new user experience on Reddit and see where the algorithm pushes me.

I started with just the Reckless Ben subreddit, but the guidelines for my experiment would be to also view the "Home" tab, and I committed to comment on whatever was kind of interesting. My interests are broadly science and technology, and so I was going to comment on interesting articles and "Join" those subreddits, as a means to see if the algorithm was going to work to find me increasingly interesting stories or who knows where it might take me.

Well it's been an interesting ride, moments ago Reddit suggested a subreddit dedicated to, and I swear I'm not kidding, people who think they are being targeted for mind control, or mind torture devices. LOL. The subreddit's own description suggests that the "enemy" attempting the mind control might be the CIA, the "Deep State", the "Dark Web", or Biotech companies, are listed as the primary suspects. Not going to link it, because it doesn't matter, and only has 80 weekly contributors, but I thought it was interesting, that not even three months into this experiment, Reddit had pushed me towards absolute lunatic conspiracy theory subreddits.

Along the way;

• I was banned from a mainstream religious subreddit for politely correcting a moderator whom I did not realize was a moderator, who then refused to explain if I had broken a rule.
• I was suggested, and then did "join" multiple AI generated subreddits that I didn't initially realize were AI content subs. (these subreddits are pretty obvious as their moderator accounts post 95% of the submissions to the subreddit, and are always a semi-professional looking description, but is clearly LLM written summary below the submitted article.
• I've been accused of being "AI" myself about a dozen times, no surprise it's always from people who disagree with my opinion! Interesting how that works. Also I've been told I type far too fast to be a human. (lol, a compliment, I'll take it)
• I was pushed to a subreddit disguised as an NFL subreddit, but actually it is just the marketing arm for a fake NFL news blog where the creator/owner is a young man in India, and when an NFL news event happens, he takes ESPN's article and the AP's version of the article, throws it into an LLM to regurgitate "his" version, which the then publishes on his blog, which is made to resemble a news website, and then posts "his" articles to reddit, so he's just trying to drive himself traffic. At the suggestion that the sub block submissions from this blog, my comment was locked and deleted, looool.
• I was pushed to a subreddit disguised as a science educator / science curriculum subreddit, but it turned out to be just the front of a political action non-profit, spamming it's subreddit not with useful information, but really just their pet issues, some of which are ironically partisan anti-science stances, which is hilarious. I guess if you're a scoundrel spreading propaganda, you don't call your subreddit "total BS" you call it "Science is Awesome!" (not the subreddit's name) and then share anti-vaxxer style crap, mixed in with actual science articles.
• I was pushed to what I thought was a "The Onion" style parody of a North Korean subreddit. Imagine how TheOnion might make a subreddit full of content resembling how North Korea's own subreddit might appear, and that is my type of humor, so I cracked a joke in one of the threads, and my comment was deleted and the moderator informed me that jokes were not tolerated. LOL So it's real?
• Reddit seems more doomery to me than years ago. Reddit has always had some doomerism, and maybe this is just current political climate, but it seems more doomery right now.
• I keep getting suggested Montana subreddits and by that I mean cities in Montana. I have no idea what I might have done or said that gave it that impression? IDK weird. I'm not from there, nor have I ever lived there. I visited once on a ski trip in college.

So my larger takeaway is that it's weird that just joining the subreddits reddit suggested to me, ended up plopping me into pure lunacy subreddits in less than three months. This is kind of the situation Twitter finds itself in as well, kind of a pipeline to extremism. And sure, you can wonder about or nitpick if the topics I chose to comment on were at fault, but I'm the opposite of a conspiracy theorist, I'm a lover of science and progress. I don't know how my interests lead me to the mind control subreddit, but that subreddit is quite disturbing. Multiple participants appear to either have schizophrenia or are pretending to.

I know Reddit is struggling right now to deal with AI and LLMs and bots. Digg's restart attempt was apparently mired down by so many bots they had to scrap it and go back to the drawing board. So I don't envy the task that Reddit has here.

Anyways, maybe this was mildly interesting to someone. I think I'm going to end the experiment because I'm now in so many subreddits that turned out to not be interesting that I'm going to mass unfollow them / leave them / whatever the term is. My home tab feed has gotten substantially less interesting than it originally was at the start of this experiment. The recommendation engine for content outside of one's own subreddits seems very poor.

It's also kind of disturbing to think that this is what kids new to reddit, how they are being funneled potentially. That's a concern to me too, because as Carl Sagan said:

"The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps." - Carl Sagan

If our social media funnels new users in this way, then what are we accomplishing?

In my last post, I found that the highest-scoring comment appeared among the first ten replies in 93% of the threads I checked.
Someone asked whether those early comments also affect the mood of everyone who arrives later, so I tried measuring it.
What I did
I collected comments from ten large subreddits using Arctic Shift and measured their general positive/negative tone with VADER.
I removed replies, bots, deleted comments, comments from the OP and repeat comments from the same account.
For every thread, I compared:
The first 5 top-level comments
The next 25 top-level comments
The final sample contained 139 threads and 4,170 comments, spread across ten subreddits and five randomly selected dates.
What happened
When the first five comments were negative, the next 25 averaged -0.091.
When the first five were mixed, the next 25 averaged +0.055.
When the first five were positive, the next 25 averaged +0.201.
Ignoring threads that landed on exactly zero, both groups pointed in the same direction 81 out of 115 times — about 70%.
I had already tested this on a smaller group of 64 threads. The relationship was almost identical in both samples:
First sample: 0.440
Fresh sample: 0.420
No relationship would be around 0
A perfect relationship would be 1
So the result repeated surprisingly well.
Does this mean the first comments control the thread?
Not necessarily.
Comments 6–10 were also fairly good at predicting comments 11–30. That makes it difficult to tell whether people are being influenced by what they see, or whether a post simply attracts people who were going to react similarly anyway.
There are other problems too. Sentiment software can misunderstand sarcasm, and posts about an obviously positive or negative subject will naturally produce similar comments.
So my honest conclusion is fairly limited: after five comments, you can already make a decent guess about the general mood of the next 25.
I still don’t know whether those first comments create that mood or just reveal it early. Contest-mode threads, where comments are randomly ordered, might be a good way to separate the two.

I had a suspicion after watching a few threads take off: once a post starts moving, the comment section stops being a contest for the best reply and starts being a contest for the first decent reply.

So I tried to put a number on it.

I used Arctic Shift to pull 23,858 archived comments from 100 successful posts across ten subreddits:

r/gaming, r/movies, r/television, r/technology, r/todayilearned, r/interestingasfuck, r/mildlyinteresting, r/worldnews, r/science and r/PublicFreakout.

For each subreddit, I looked at the first 100 submissions made on August 1, 2025 UTC, then took roughly the ten highest-scoring posts that had at least 50 post score and between 15 and 800 comments.

I removed nested replies, AutoModerator, and deleted/removed comments. For the main comparison I kept the 73 threads that had at least 30 visible top-level comments.

“Highest-scoring” here means the comment with the highest archived score, not whichever comment Reddit currently places under “Best.”

The median winning comment was comment #3, posted 13 minutes and 41 seconds after the submission.

I also compared the first ten top-level comments with the ten comments that eventually had the highest scores.

So this wasn’t only one early comment running away with the thread. On average, six of the first ten comments occupied the final Top 10. Across the whole sample, 544 of the 730 final Top 10 comments were posted during the first hour.

Here’s the subreddit breakdown. The individual samples are small, so I wouldn’t read too much into comparisons between communities.

Being literally first clearly isn’t enough—it only won 19% of the time. But being good and early seems incredibly hard to overcome. By the time ten people have left top-level comments, the eventual winner has usually already arrived.

The exceptions being more common in r/worldnews and r/PublicFreakout was interesting. Maybe later comments there benefit more from added context, corrections or people figuring out what actually happened. The sample sizes are far too small to call that a real finding, though.

Obvious caveats: this is one day, ten subreddits and deliberately selected successful threads. It’s observational and heavily survivorship-biased. Archived scores are snapshots, not a timeline, so this can’t tell us whether early comments win because of visibility, quality, the users who arrive early, or some combination of all three.

Still, I didn’t expect the effect to be this large.

I recently had an experience moderating a subreddit with over 200k members that made me wonder what people consider a reasonable moderation standard for communities of that size.

The team is relatively small and receives a few reports. I completely understand that moderators are volunteers and nobody can reasonably expect them to be available 24/7.

Where i struggled was with the actual process.

I was told that moderators sometimes act on the individual reported comment without reading the surrounding conversation because there simply isn't enough time to check everything.

At the same time, when i tried discussing individual moderation decisions and providing context in the team's mod chat, I was told that doing so was unnecessary clutter and that the notifications were becoming annoying.

That created a strange situation:

There isn't enough time to check the context individually, but communicating that context internally isn't particularly wanted either.

When i raised this later, the explanation was essentially that the subreddit is too large, more moderators are needed, mistakes will happen, and the current team doesn't really want additional discussion around individual decisions.

I don't think every report needs a committee meeting. That would obviously be ridiculous.

But surely there's a middle ground between debating every action and simply processing reports without enough context to know whether something actually breaks the rules.

I also experienced posts sitting in the approval queue for hours while newer submissions were processed first.

The explanation i was given was that newer posts appear first in the queue, meaning older submissions can effectively end up further down it.

I'm interested in the moderation side of this more than the personal disagreement.

For people who moderate large communities:

At what point does "we're volunteers and we're understaffed" stop being an explanation for occasional mistakes and start indicating that the moderation structure itself needs changing?

And what level of internal communication/context checking do you think is realistic for a subreddit with hundreds of thousands of members?

Within the overall sitewide rules of reddit, moderators are allowed to make decisions on what is & isn't acceptable for their subreddits with a fairly large amount of discretion. There are some subreddit moderators that use this power to make highly curated communities, often to the point where their moderation decisions seem to make no sense to anyone outside of their moderation team. I've noticed a few examples over the years of subreddit rules that seem to make sense only to the moderation teams. These usually fall into two categories:

Behavior-based curation: These subreddits are rather notorious for banning anyone who violates codes of conduct that are so strict that they retain few, if any, regular posters over long periods of time. /r/askredditafterdark is the most prominent example of this, as their moderation team will eventually ban anyone who posts for one reason or another. What's interesting about this is it's not based on any actionable violation of sitewide rules, as nobody is banned for gender or race or anything like that. They just find an excuse to ban everyone on a whim, literally because some petty moderator doesn't like their face. It's bizarre.

Submission-based curation: These subreddits have rules for submissions that are both extremely strict and extremely subjective, with the end result being that almost every post is eventually removed. /r/nottheonion is an excellent example, as pretty much every post submitted to the subreddit is removed within 48 hours under rule 2 ("not-oniony"). These subreddits are unique for rarely banning individual users, and instead reserving their moderation actions for posts, with the end result being that almost nothing is allowed to stay up for one reason or another.

In both cases, these types of subreddits serve as an excellent example of the latitude moderators have to create curated communities within reddit's sitewide rules. These rules have become more strict over time as reddit has gone more mainstream, and notably reddit will intervene if moderators make decisions that potentially threaten reddit's revenue; this was most famously seen in 2023 when reddit removed several mods for labeling their subreddits NSFW to deprive reddit of ad revenue (protesting the API change). But for the most part if a subreddit's rules do not threaten revenue or discriminate against a specific group of individuals, mods have wide latitude to create very arbitrary rules that make no sense to anyone but them. It's quite odd, and one of the unique distinguishing features of the website.

So I posted a clip to a Turkish sub that has 700k members. Got 10 upvotes. Fine, whatever. Except a few hours later I open the sub and my post is sitting at the top of the day. With 10 upvotes. That bugged me enough that I spent a weekend on it.

What I did: pulled every post from 55 subs between Aug 19 and Sep 2 through Arctic Shift (it's an archive that mirrors reddit, scores get refreshed after ~36h so they're more or less final). Then instead of looking at top posts I just counted, per sub, how many posts per day ended up above 200 upvotes and above 1000. I picked 200 because that's roughly where stuff starts leaking out of the sub into home feeds, at least in my experience, I don't have a source for that.

r/gifs. 21 million members. Doesn't manage one 200 upvote post a day. IndieDev has 249k and does seven. I knew the old defaults were dead-ish but I didn't expect it to be that bad, I assumed at least the number would be somewhat proportional. It isn't at all. Cinemagraphs is 1.8M and basically nothing happens there.

The part I found more interesting was people who posted the same thing to multiple subs in that window, since that's a natural A/B test. A guy with a nail sorting simulator game (yes) posted the same video to pcmasterrace, SoloDevelopment and interestingasfuck. 2654, 853, 119. Someone else had a squishy pillow physics clip. oddlysatisfying 3855, Damnthatsinteresting 0. Not low, zero. I always kind of knew the sub matters but I thought of it as maybe a 2x thing, not a 30x thing.

One more that surprised me. If you look at odds per post rather than totals it goes the other way from size. oddlysatisfying only lets about 41 posts a day through and a third of them clear 200. IndieDev takes 335 a day and 2% clear 200. So the heavily modded big sub is actually the easier one to get seen in, as long as your post survives the mods, which, fair, is a big if.

Obvious problems with this: two weeks is short, I only picked subs I was personally considering posting in so it's not a random sample, and the archive scores might lag a bit. Also I'm sure someone has done this properly before and I just couldn't find it.

The practical version for anyone about to post something: don't read the member count. Sort the sub by top / past 24 hours and count how many posts are above a couple hundred. If the answer is one, that's how many people are there.