Interesting insights into how controlled the narrative is in /r/canada on Reddit. One of the things that struck me was that there’s no self posts in /r/canada unlike many other countries’ and provinces’ subreddits. It would be nice if we differentiated ourselves here on Lemmy with more self posts
Hasn’t r/canada notoriously been a mod-dictatorship shithole for years now?
I never spent any notable time there, but I remember seeing meta-conflicts there spill out onto the front page on a pretty regular basis.
Literally had a self-professed white nationalist on the mod team and as far as I know still does.
and this is the problem with reddit (and sites like it, including this one): Create a sub / community, add your mod crew and wait for people to show up. Years later, the original mod team might not have the best interests of the current population at heart. Or you get “overton window creep” where overtime, the moderators shift in political stance from the original intent.
How can a site ostensibly representing a nation the size of Canada have a limited mod team appointed by who knows who? There is no moderation oversight on reddit. Or lemmy.ml. I think Beehaw has some of that, but not sure how far that goes.
Back in the day when stormfront was relavent, they had organized attacks on location subreddits. They tend to be easier to take over than general interest subs and have an outsized influence on politics. /r/canada was the crown jewel of this strategy.
I left r/canada even before I left reddit. The final straw was when I saw links to a report from Citizen Lab, a very respectable Canadian research group at U of T, about a foreign government interfering in Canadian affairs, getting deleted for not being “relevant to Canada.”
I got banned for archiving a conservative politicians leadership campaign website and publishing it when they started telling lies about their policy positions.
‘Not relevant’
My final ban came when I pointed out a known white supremacist was saying racist stuff. They temp banned me, a mod (a different one, the white supremacist one) challenged me to explain it, and then fully banned me when I didn’t reply, which I couldn’t do… Because they banned me.
On that subreddit, racist shit was okay but calling something racist was not.
This is why r/OnGuardForThee was formed. Not that I’ve been to either in the last year.
I think it’s a fine idea that requires a certain degree of community and camaraderie that I’m not sure exists in the Lemmyverse yet.
As a group, we’re good at sharing articles - often stuff that makes us mad (and there’s plenty of that to go around) - but less good at just…hanging out and shooting the shit.
I don’t know what the solution is aside from, “be the change you want to see.”
I listened to this yesterday and it mirrored my own findings after a couple of years of studying r/canada’s posts and moderation quirks.
Not mentioned in the article were the banned subreddits from a few years past. r/metacanada was the canadian equivalent of r/thedonald from the states and was full of hate speech and the worst of the alt right conspiracy theories. Many of those users are still on the site.
the weirder thing is the smaller regional subreddits across Canada being overrun with russian disinfo.
all of this very much led to my abandonment of reddit as a platform.
And yes, there are left-leaning subreddits like r/onguardforthee but do you really want to be on the same site that allows the kind of abuse and brigading that exists on other, more “mainstream” subs? I couldn’t stomach it.
