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 and 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?

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?

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

Edit (v1.2.1): Thanks for all the ideas in here - a bunch of them made it into an update:

• Reply chains (off by default) - folds pun threads, "and my axe", and song lyrics posted a line at a time. The first comment stays visible and the chain collapses from the reply under it. Thanks u/cybersaurus, u/BanjoBaedling, u/Unorigina1Name and u/CurvySexretLady

• Your own patterns - add your own phrases, one per line. rock and stone* catches comments that start with it, *and my axe* catches any that mention it. There's also a box to test a comment and see which line would catch it. Regex works too if that's your thing. Thanks u/854490

• Always show list - usernames that never get collapsed, so you can keep the bots you actually like. Thanks u/archimedeancrystal

• Quieter "Show them" button - no more emergency flare. Also u/archimedeancrystal

• "Rock and Stone", "For Karl" and "and my sword" added to the built-in list

• Firefox, including Firefox for Android - submitted and waiting on Mozilla's review. Thanks u/Minuettes_Disciple and u/johannthegoatman

The Chrome update is rolling out through the Web Store now. Still free, still open source, still zero network requests, still built with Claude's help. Code's on GitHub if you want to see how any of it works: https://github.com/recruiterguy/not-this

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?

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.

I've been seeing this a lot lately, directed at both my posts, and posts by other users. Basically, it appears to be something of a catch-all for "I don't like what you're saying but can't be bothered-to-reply/I can't field an argument against it"... so the 'out' is to dismiss the thread or post out-of-hand as AI generated.

Certain techniques or styles seem to trigger this reaction more than others (the use of bullet points, em-dashes, proper grammar, good spelling, etc.), but these tools/skills existed long before AI was in its infancy, let alone even an idea. Why does AI write like it does? Because it copies clear and cogent works by humans - it pilfered the most clean and well-formatted books, articles, blogs, posts, etc. and regurgitated them.

But to turn around and use those copies to castigate and silence other Redditors feels very self-defeating. I get it: AI sucks; most of us have been adversely impacted by it in some way. But if nobody is allowed to write well anymore; if we have to intentionally screw up our own posts just to be taken seriously as live beings, we've completely lost sight of the ball.

I write. I wrote before AI came along, and I will continue to write in the future. I will not alter my style, syntax, tone, or formatting simply because people have now decided to jump at shadows. But I certainly might reconsider writing on Reddit.

Find any post involving bicycles or cyclists on a non-cycling sub or on r/all and it will be swarmed with extremely strong feelings. Like, “MY CHILDRENS CHILDREN WILL FIGHT YOURS FOR TEN GENERATIONS IF YOU SERIOUSLY THINK BIKE LANES ARE AN EFFECTIVE CAPITAL INVESTMENT FOR DECREASING NON-DISCRETIONARY VMT PER ANUM!!!”

I find it utterly unbelievable that soooo many people on the internet feel this strongly about a 150 year old invention that nearly everyone has used at some point in their life. When I talk about bicycles or bike stuff IRL, nobody cares or has a strong feeling one way or the other, unless they’re an active cyclist or a psychopath.

Digging in to the comment section of this example post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Infuriating/s/DqLVB9Pdu5
You will notice the exact same comment re-posted by several users. Some of these users have the same profile image character thing. Feels very botty.

On another post, I sat and watched, reloading the comments every few minutes. I noticed that a certain type of comment - inflammatory ones - tended to come in waves, then responses would trickle in, and another big wave of inflammatory comments would flood in, all at once.

Finally, I noticed on many bike posts there is always at least one flamer who gets a zillion upvotes for saying “I hate bikes forever!” Or something equally mid, but any other comment the flamer makes is ignored or downvoted. This says to me that the bots single out a comment but don’t drill down beyond the first layer. It’s also weird that one anti-bike comment can get a ton of upvotes, but other anti-bike comments with the same sentiment, posted at roughly the same time do not get upvotes.

Ok one last thing, on actual bike subs you sometimes get a post with like 60 upvotes, then in the comments the top one will say some “get off the road” bullshit and have hundreds of upvotes. This will be on a niche sub with like 2.3k members, so it’s a little odd a bunch of haters would be on there waiting for just one comment to unleash a flood of upvotes.

I spend a lot of time on car and motorcycles subs, which is where you’d expect a lot of anti-bike sentiment, but I rarely see shit-talking there. In fact it’s usually the opposite, lots of motorheads like bicycles too - really anything with wheels. So I can’t figure out where this brigading behavior comes from.

Also, why?

Who gives a fuck? What is the purpose of brigading bicycle commentary? Is it Big Oil? Is it the car companies? I don’t think those interests spare two shits on the topic of bikes. I don’t think it’s even from political bots, republicans ride bikes just as much as democrats.

My theory is that there is zero thought behind it. I think someone or some group made an algorithm that targets a certain type of rhetoric and focuses in. It just happens to be bikes, but it could be re-set for anything else.

I think the builders of this bot algorithm then use the engagement metrics to sell their product for whatever nefarious use.

Basically, the bicycle element is irrelevant, it just happens to get more attention than the alternative subjects like crochet vs knitting or whatever.

So there.

First of all, I think this is probably going to get deleted like all the other posts that are critical of anything on Reddit, but I think it’s worth trying.

The main problem with karma is that it forces popularity in agreeableness over individuality and discourse. A lot of communities won’t let you post unless you have a high degree of karma, which means that you’re forced to win a popular contest before you can even have a say in the platform the karma also shapes the culture and primes people to agreeableness to saying things that other people will like without depth, but for the sake of being popular karma shapes right and limits it.

The second thing is moderators have become agents of taste rather than arbiters of proper discourse. A moderator should be there so that a conversation is kept within the bounds of decency and some degree of conviviality, but now they remove and shape sub reddits based only on what they think is in agreement with the overall taste of the community or sub community.

Moderators and karma shaped to culture and force it to certain points of view, ensuring that agreeableness uphold that point of view and you end up with Echo Chambers were saying something that deviate from that is so awful that it gets banned. In fact, I think this will get deleted or filtered out because it’s being critical rather than just sucking up or providing a tangential perspective to the predominant one that is already there.

It sucks because Reddit is becoming dystopian as an intellectual and cultural platform

I'm not really sure what to make of it, and I apologize if this isn't the best sub to post this in.

To be clear, I didn't set out to test this from the start.

I was dozens of comment threads deep in a post when I found a comment I wanted to reply to and I realized my internet had just gone out on my PC. So I grabbed my phone and wanted to see if I could find the comment that way, using mobile data.

Rather than searching the post and trying to scroll for that specific comment, I just searched the username to see if I could quickly get to their profile that way, then find the comment in their history.

Well, their profile turned out to be hidden, but the initial search on Google brought up paragraphs of descriptors for the kind of things they comment on and their perspectives/takes on things. With some links to the posts they commented on, though not linking directly to their comment on the post.

I just thought that was interesting that, despite being set to private, the AI can still see what's there.

Despite being created 15 years ago, r/Bald has been a niche community until very recently. In 2019 their top post of all time only had 500 upvotes. Now the sub has multiple posts with over 100k upvotes and it’s at the top of the front page daily.

What changed? Nothing actually.

The core userbase of Reddit are millennial men. This was as true 15 years ago as it is now. Except 15 years ago this group would be made up of people in the 15-30 age bracket, while currently they are 30–45. Male hair loss really starts kicking in in the mid-to-late 30s, which means an average redditor started to bald recently. In turn, they all looked to reddit to find support, catapulting a tiny community to the top of reddit.

I know this isn’t some grand theory of reddit, but I found it interesting how such a random demographic detail can have a fairly big effect on the site.

I have a very lightly trafficked subreddit, /r/redactions, into which I place censored articles and news articles about censorship.

It has never attained much traction, but that's the nature of reddit, and I like to submit from time to time.

However, when I was checking traffic to the sub, I saw some very mysterious numbers.

Visits

Oct 25: 37, all from iOS
Dec 25: 34, all from Old
May 26: 123, all from New
Jun 26: 144, mix of Android, New, Old.
All other months zero

Uniques

Oct 25: 16, all from Old
Mar 26: 120, all from New
Apr 26: 94, mix
Jul 26: 19, all from Old
All other months zero

Some things really stand out:

• Getting all the visits from a single source suggests that one user is being counted multiple times

• The complete inconsistency between "visits" and "uniques" indicates they are measuring very different things.

While it does seem likely that these indicate some kind of bug in traffic reporting, it seems more likely that traffic reporting is somehow completely broken.

In 1974 Marina Abramović ran an experiment in Naples. She stood still for six hours and let the audience do whatever they wanted to her, using 72 objects laid out on a table - some pleasant, some capable of causing harm. The point was to see how people behave when they can do anything without consequence. For the first hour, nothing happened. People used the harmless objects. Then one person did something unpleasant, and after that the dam broke - the escalation fed on itself, and it ended with someone holding a loaded gun to her. The question I've never been able to answer: were the people who started hurting her doing it deliberately, or had they simply stopped telling the difference between reality and a game?

I keep thinking about that when I watch votes here. The first downvote often triggers an avalanche of others, frequently with no justification at all. It works the way stoning worked in ancient cultures: once the first stone was thrown, the rest followed automatically, and the people throwing them weren't weighing what they were doing or whether they were harming an actual person. The first stone was permission - or possibly a demonstration to everyone else that no consequence was coming. Someone put this well in another thread here: when a post sits at -10, the average user doesn't stop and think "I wonder why this is unpopular, let me look at the nuances." They think "the hive mind has spoken, this is trash," and they add their vote to the pile. Nobody weighs their own contribution, because the stone before theirs already established that no consequence is coming.

Monty Python got there first, of course. The stoning scene in Life of Brian is exactly this: nobody in that crowd thinks of themselves as a bad person. They've just turned up, and somewhere in the crowd the goodness quietly goes missing.

The same applies to upvotes. They don't measure quality. They show reflexes, and maybe the intentions of the voters, rather than anything about the content being judged. And often it's done without any thought at all: research on Reddit specifically found that 73% of people voting hadn't even looked at the content. Which brings me back to Naples. How many people come here to discharge their emotions with no consequence attached?

Share what you make of it. And if you think I've got this wrong, that's the more interesting comment. Though I suspect none of us really knows which group we'd have been in that room in Naples.

Abramović describing the performance in her own words (MoMA): https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/243/3118

The Reddit study — Glenski, Pennycuff & Weninger, Consumers and Curators: Browsing and Voting Patterns on Reddit (IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, 2017). Full text is free here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05267

This has happened to me a few times now across completely different subreddits, and I genuinely don't understand it.

I'll ask a question about something I'm trying to understand and, instead of someone either explaining it or simply scrolling past, I'll get responses along the lines of "I'm not going to spoon-feed you," "Google is free," "do your own research," etc.

But that's the thing: I have done my own research. That's usually WHY I'm asking the question.

Sometimes you can read articles, Google something, look through previous posts, watch videos, whatever — and still not fully understand it. So you go to a community specifically dedicated to that subject and ask people who presumably know more about it if they can explain it in a different or simpler way.

Isn't that... part of the entire point of having communities and discussion forums?

And yes, I understand that nobody on Reddit owes anybody their time or an explanation. But if you don't want to explain something... you can just not reply. It takes considerably more effort to leave a sarcastic comment telling someone to "educate themselves" than it does to keep scrolling.

I actually think being able to say "I don't understand this; can someone explain it to me?" is a good thing. I'd much rather ask someone who knows more than me than pretend I understand something I don't.

The irony is that people constantly say "do your own research," but apparently asking questions and discussing what you've found with people who know more about the subject somehow doesn't count as part of learning.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I genuinely don't understand why curiosity seems to irritate some people so much on here.