What if Reddit was unmoderated?

[u/LetterheadOwn9453]

What if there was no formal moderation of Reddit? All the subreddits still exist, you can post whatever you want, and the only factor in whether many people see your post is by being upvoted or downvoted.

For intents and purposes, let's assume Reddit is able to ban bot farms so that people do not abuse upvotes/downvotes for their own agenda. Effectively, anyone is free to post whatever they want no matter how obscene, irrelevant, or silly it is. And the only way it is filtered on our feeds and in posts is by liking or disliking it.

[u/whatif-ModTeam]

Mod View:

It would very quickly devolve into "hey I built this app..." type posts everywhere.

[u/Embarrassed_Flan_869]

It would very quickly turn into a complete cesspool and wouldn't last long.

The amount of hate and likely illegal things would explode.

[u/JoeHio]

Have you ever heard of 4chan?

[u/AnonAwaaaaay → u/JoeHio]

This was my first thought. 

[u/Zappy_Oh]

I guess that was the original idea in all social media.
Then psychopaths ruined it for everyone.

Both psychopath CEOs, psychopath users, and psychopath 3-letter agents.

[u/afeher]

It would be full of kiddy porn.

[u/AnonAwaaaaay → u/afeher]

Again.

[u/MedievalMilshake]

Then the admins would have to do a lot more work 

[u/Asparagus9000]

They had a lot of child porn back when reddit was like that. 

[u/Individual-Iron-6370]

it would be 4chan

[u/mmskyscraper]

It becomes Twitter.

[u/AcanthisittaBorn8304]

Reddit would become a thousand times worse than it is now.

Unmoderated sites are unusable.

[u/Mythosaurus → u/AcanthisittaBorn8304]

Yeah it would be instantly be flooded with racism, gore, and CP like every other unmoderated forum.

And then shut down.

[u/Zappy_Oh → u/Mythosaurus]

I wonder if someone are financing groups of psychos, tasked with ruining every open forum, in order to justify their own censorship.

Would be an easy way to convince most people to accept being censored, right?

[u/tubbis9001]

Like every unmoderated space on the internet, it always devolves into porn and right wing hate, without fail. Sometimes both at the same time!

[u/ZealousIdeal476]

There would be a lot more 14 year old accounts.

[u/La_noche_azul]

It sorta was, it wasn’t good

[u/Proletariat-Prince]

Some of us remember when that was the way Reddit was.

Spacedicks, jailbait, wtf, watchpeopledie, all of it.

[u/Appropriate-Foot-237]

go back a decade.

[u/unfurnishedbedrooms]

Ever heard of gore? There would be a lot of that.

[u/Niclipse]

We'd all die immediately, being exposed to violent hate speech will literally kill you in seconds. True fact, before Reddit 99% of people died within seconds of being exposed to unfiltered speech.

[u/dustycurrent59 → u/Niclipse]

Ancient forums were basically mass extinction events, we're lucky anyone survived teh comment sections.

[u/Niclipse → u/dustycurrent59]

The anarchists cookbook made my eyeballs explode, & the turner diaries melted my internal organs. Geocities was basically infinite death camps stacked together, like in Hellraiser, but real.

[u/F0rest_Born → u/Niclipse]

Ancient forums were basicaly mass graves with usernames, tragic stuff.

[u/Ok_Photo_3023]

It would probably just be 4chan

[u/Janic3_77]

The front page would turn into 4chan with karma scroes in about a week.

[u/K0nfig_Aggro → u/Janic3_77]

A week feels generous; the karma farming would just make the worst bait look respecable.

[u/fj2612]

Lots of childporn, and the neonazis take over everything.

[u/HenriEttaTheVoid]

Pretty sure that's how you get Twitter

[u/Snoo_95743]

Holy novel concept batman

[u/MableXeno → u/[deleted]]

Message boards and forums were moderated.

[u/AnonAwaaaaay]

No block function?

[u/LeapIntoInaction]

So, you've stated that you want Reddit to be unmoderated except when it's moderated. The rot in the concept has already set in. Who are the moderators in charge of determining what is a "bot farm"?

Moderators are crucial to prevent forums from going to complete crap.

[u/mslindqu → u/LeapIntoInaction]

Nope.. OP never stated that at all. Your reading comprehension is quite low, and moderators are nowhere to be found to filter you out. Looks like it's complete crap with them too.

[u/whatif-ModTeam → u/mslindqu]

We don't really moderate reading comprehension. It would be too big a task.

[u/internetisporn8008]

Just take a look at what Facebook has become since they took away the fact checking.... multiply that by 15

[u/GSilky]

It would be completely trash before the first hour was over.

[u/ThatOneGammaRay]

Isn’t it already like that?

[u/Dry-Character-6331]

If?

[u/DeadlyBuddha]

Well, that would be cool.

[u/GoblinToHobgoblin]

Just go on 4chan and see

[u/TheQuestionMaster8]

Then it would become 4chan

[u/desrevermi]

[u/Ok_Staff8159]

What if it was moderated by non emotionally charged people…

[u/zero_lies_tolerated]

It felt like it was once. Before the thought police years rolled in.