When I first joined Reddit I really enjoyed the conversations I had with other people. I don’t really care about internet points and I always just sought out people whose opinions are different than my own to get diverse perspectives. In this way, subreddits centered around a particular point of view would guarantee me a conversation that was engaging and perhaps an opportunity to learn something.
But lately I noticed that moderators on that site have been using their bans to simply silence dissenting opinions and control the narrative and looking through moderator code of conduct it seems that the practice is not discouraged at all.
The first ban I ever received on that site was just a few months ago when I wrote just two sentences in response to someone. My post was not offensive in any way and I was writing in good faith. This was also the first time I ever posted on that subreddit. The moderator who permanently banned me claimed I was just to stupid to be allowed to continue posting in their community.
I am certainly capable of profound stupidity but just not the type one could devise in just a few sentences so I suspect that moderator was not being genuine with me.
Since then I have received two more permanent bans for posts which again were made in good faith and not racist, sexist, or displaying any obvious reason to take such a drastic action. Never a warning that I was violating the rules or a even a temporary ban. When I ask the moderator why, I get “muted”. A permanent ban should be for obvious trolling, spammers or people who repeatedly violate the subreddit rules. Not for just expressing a different opinion.
I feel like a certain breed of moderator has hijacked most of the subreddits I would have once found interesting to participate in. They come with a mandate to advance a specific agenda and it seems like Reddit’s fate has to become just like every other social media website that groups people by their beliefs while re-enforcing and radicalizing them.
Oh and the first moderator that banned me, he is active on the fediverse as well and they have re-created their community on kbin. So I suspect these types of people will eventually control the communities here as well.
It’s gotten worse over there.
Nice thing about the Fediverse is how difficult it is to really control, due to its decentralized nature. It’s unquestionable that some bad actors will acquire positions of power here, that’s just inevitable. It’s not an internet thing, it’s a life thing. Corruption.
But here anyone’s actual ability to dominate any particular subject matter is slashed down, just by the ease of creating nearly identically named duplicate communities.
It’s still possible, and will occasionally happen, but its just harder here.
I’ve noticed voting manipulation, astro-turfing and bots here on the fediverse, but it’s not even close to how bad it is/was on reddit.
Nah, there were whole entire threads with me and a few bots over there. You can tell by a few things that they probably don’t know we can tell yet.
I think that the lemmy/kbin fediverse communities are honestly more of a bubble than Reddit is. To some extent Reddit has gone mainstream (critical mass) and so yes you get some bubbles from moderation but the averages for up/down votes probably more accurately (than fediverse anyway) reflect societies opinions. fediverse suffers from bubbles in a different way where it hasn’t reached critical mass and from what I can tell, marginalized groups have flocked to the fediverse more quickly than most and thus have outsized representation her. And that is reflected in the posts that make the front page on instances. At least on kbin judging from the posts that make front page one might assume half of the people out there are autistic, adhd, lgbtq+, Star Trek fans. Unless my understanding of current demographics is way off, those groups make up a much smaller sample of the overall population. Not saying this is a problem but from someone that doesn’t really fall into any marginalized groups, the opinions upvoted and popular on this site often do not align with what the general population (at least in the USA) tends to think and, perhaps unfortunately, also vote for.
Reddit has a huge number of bots and shills who astroturf it like crazy.
I used to hunt bots there as a hobby. It was scary how many there were even back then, and that’s before reddit destroyed the third party mod tools and Bot Defense shut down.
Ah I guess I don’t have context into that side of Reddit but given reddits scale, is a huge number of bots 1% of traffic/posts? 5%, 25%? How bad was it from your experience?
I would have put it at around 5% back then. In some subs (advice subs like AITA and meme subs) it was not uncommon to see two or three bots talking to each other and being upvoted.
Their methods were pretty crude back then so the combination of AI and lack of moderation is probably making it much worse now. In the past couple of years bots have accounted for almost half of all web traffic.
Here’s an interesting example of the kind of work that was being done before reddit put a stop to it.
I know it will happen here, I hope it doesn’t. I paid for multiple premium accounts, had millions of fake internet points, and was/am well regarded in most communities. The final straw was when I posted a factual statement, with evidentiary links, that disagreed with a mod. Instant permaban and mute. I am at least in the top 1% of experts in this field, volunteering my time and energy to help other people for what? To have to lie when someone stupid doesn’t understand? Nope. Cancelled all my accounts, edited most of my extensive post history to remove any helpful information, and left a complaint form in the never checked reddit corporate account email. My small protest will do absolutely nothing. But I can’t keep posting anything there, I’m just done with it.
I made a post to a movie sub reddit about how Deckard had to be a replicant because he had a child with one, the mod deleted my post and banned me from the sub and said it was lukewarm bullshit, and when I told him to go fuck himself for being rude my entire account was banned from reddit as a whole.
I was banned from /r/food for pointing out that someone’s “homemade” breakfast consisted of a toaster waffle and a frozen hash brown.
The moderator who banned me went through my post history, combing it for things they disapproved of, and made sure to highlight various deficiencies of my character in their ban explanation.
