mizmoose
For a brief period of time I was on a place on Reddit where new users could get help finding their way around the site.
Someone shows up there and says, “I’m not sure why I’m even on this libt++d communist site, nobody here will respect the way any good conservative American thinks.”
I’m thinking, OK, snowflake, don’t melt so hard from being a victim, but I responded with, “You might try /r/Conservative, and I can ask their moderators if they have any other suggestions.”
I did so: I sent the moderators of /r/Conservative a message explaining what I was looking for and asking for any advice they might have for this new user. The response I got back was, “LOL, F+++ off.”
Lovely, lovely people there.
(100% that good conservative American was on the libt++d communist site for the free porn.)
As a former sysadmin and a [still, for the moment] reddit moderator, my bet is that most of the subreddits that switched to private forgot to (or didn’t know to) go into “new reddit” and switch off the thing that allows people to request being added to the now-private subreddit.
A HUGE influx of people pounding on the “let me in, add me to the sub” button, which sends modmail, may have overloaded the whole modmail system, which in turn sometimes goes kaflooey for no apparent reason (my theory is: it gets bored).
Oh, yeah. The subs that claim they never ban are the ones with the biggest ban hammers.
There used to be some really icky subreddit dedicated to… basically being a bunghole. “Public Health Watch”, I think. It was anti-LGBTQ+, anti-women, anti-just about everything. Everything was a threat to these poor little pseudo-incels (they couldn’t even be incels right). I forget how I stumbled on it, but one day one of them posted a link to a study that “proved” something about women and their sexuality and how it damaged men and I don’t remember clearly, but their conclusion was so stupid. So I read the damn study and it explicitly said the exact opposite of what they said. I replied with whole paragraphs from the study showing that the study said disagreed with what that post claimed. I was banned within minutes.
On the one hand, I kinda get it: I regularly deal with pseudoscientists who cherry pick through studies to find one or two sentences that agrees with them, instead of what the study actually says, and claim I’m “interpreting” the study wrong. On the other hand, when you’re the cherry-picker, you don’t get to be angry when someone else reads the rest of the words and finds out you’re the dimwit.
People are selfish. People subconsciously think the rules apply to other people.
People who demand to come into closed stores and restaurants are not the exception. What’s even crazier is when you turn one away, anyone who has seen the door open even though the person was told no and didn’t get inside suddenly decides that maybe if THEY pound on the door, they’ll magically get access!
My Moose Sense was tingling and I decided to check on the subs I moderate on Reddit. Sure enough, there were issues.
One of the three subs was set to ‘restricted’ (nobody can post or comment but the sub is still open), not private. (I’ll pedantically put my explanation for this at the bottom so you can ignore it).
However, the seniorest mod, who is never around (seriously, his last post/comment was 10 years ago!), decided the sub should be private, not restricted. And he’d tried to do it himself, but because he hadn’t been around for at least two years, the site wouldn’t let him make the change! So I’ve changed it and it’s now private.
Additionally, a report troll appeared, because he couldn’t make any comments. I guess that’s an even better reason to make it private.
[you can now ignore my exposition blather]
The sub was set to restricted instead of private because, well, part of this protest is also about people with vision impairments not being able to use the iOS mobile app and relying on 3rd party apps. If a subreddit is private, any message set by the moderators (“This sub is private because…”) is not displayed by the Reddit mobile app. So the idea was, restrict access so any regular mobile reader would be sure to know what we were doing. But with 7000+ subs dark, I don’t think it’s any great mystery any more.