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Comment by IanCal | Hacker News Reader

If people haven't tried looking for smaller subreddits or more controlled subreddits then I'd highly encourage them to. Reddit may have a huge amount of low effort content and frankly highly disturbing content, but some of the subreddits are absolutely fantastic. I'm not really into history but https://reddit.com/r/askhistorians is a treasure trove of fascinating information, with well sourced and detailed answers to the kind of questions non-history buffs might want to ask.

Reddit, with good moderation, is a world apart from what you see if you visit the main page.

On a side note, it's also a great place to go and see discussions around things you highly disagree with. It might help to understand the motivations of "the other side".

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I don't know about the quality of moderation in r/AskHistorians however.

I read a recent answer there whose first sentence was the opposite of reality. Thinking of how I could demonstrate this easily and effectively, where any person could follow up easily and see what's right, I posted a comment saying it contradicted the second sentence of the Wikipedia article on the topic.

My comment was automatically banned by the auto-moderator because it had a link to Wikipedia and no other links. I tried reading the subreddit rules before posting, but it's pretty hard to find this rule -- indeed, it is not explicitly stated as far as I can tell.

> My comment was automatically banned by the auto-moderator because it had a link to Wikipedia and no other links. I tried reading the subreddit rules before posting, but it's pretty hard to find this rule -- indeed, it is not explicitly stated as far as I can tell.

It is at least currently in the subreddit rules page, as linked to on the main site.

"Wikipedia, or any other single tertiary resource, used by itself not a suitable basis for a comment in this subreddit."

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules

In general on reddit, if you've had a comment removed and think it's not right then message the moderators.

The comment I was responding to was written by a moderator, who saw my comment and edited their comment to hedge their incorrect claim. They messaged me but my comment was not reinstated.

I don't think that a subreddit that bans links to Wikipedia can be considered a good source of information.

> I don't think that a subreddit that bans links to Wikipedia can be considered a good source of information.

I don't believe it does as I recently posted a comment with a wikipedia link. It does, however require more authoritative sources than wikipedia, mine did at least have several other corroborating sources. Perhaps the auto-mod is set to remove comments without at least one non-wiki link.

They encourage people who would otherwise have linked just to wikipedia to hunt out the sources that claim comes from and use those instead.

I hope they put in a note in their comment or said thanks at least, I'd hope for more there.

Yes, as my post a few back mentioned, I think the automated ban is for comments that include a link to Wikipedia but not elsewhere.

They were nice about things; the PM read "AskHistorians doesn't allow Wikipedia, but .... I clarified in my OP .... Thanks for prompting the clarification!"

This is incredible. Did you spend more than 10 seconds even reading the sidebar?

To post an answer on /r/AskHistorians you have to have a degree in the field in question or proven experience in the field.

I don't think that people who consider Wikipedia the end-all-be-all knowledgebase should be considered for anything.

I did read the sidebar. [The Hacker News guidelines contain the following text: Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."]

I was not posting an answer. I was correcting an error in an answer, and I thought that showing that it contradicted Wikipedia was productive. (The automated implementation of the subreddit rules disagreed.) I thought it would be great if my comment resulted in either the answer or the Wikipedia article being edited so that they were in line; this objective was vaguely achieved.

It's important to think of reddit more like a new Usenet. It's a collection of communities, not one monolithic thing. You find the ones you like and discard the rest. Something like HN could theoretically just be a /r/HN (in fact there is a Hackernews subreddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/).

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