Elon Musk may be causing Reddit to censor Luigi Mangione posts | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk may be causing Reddit to censor Luigi Mangione posts

slate.com

25 pointsDocFeind12 comments

The guilty by association by upvote system doesn't make any sense. It's not how users work, intent aside, users don't don't care about if the content is appropriate or not. Post a cute cat photo to a "no cats" sub and it will get upvoted by users who don't know / care about the rules.

It's a dumb policy disconnected from how users operate.

The rest of this article was painfully hard to read reddit inside baseball that I honestly can't figure out if anything is validated to be 1:1 as far as the reasons for anythign that happened go...

One question:

How do reddit admins even operate? I've had limited contact but my experience is they seem to all operate individually. If you catch the attention of one moderator who is helpful, all good. Others you don't get any response, and yet others ... I swear I've seen them protect bad actors for the longest times for the same actions that other admins might lay down the hammer.

Reddit administration seems very amorphous and rules vary by administrator.

Subreddit moderators are not reddit administrators. Reddit admins are employees (or perhaps contractors) of reddit and are the only ones that can issue site-wide bans or remove content ("[Removed By Reddit]").

But like moderators, they're inconsistent as hell as to how and what they remove or who they ban.

All around, reddit has become a trash factory. Not only running of the site, but the content. Extreme attention seeking users ("AIO", "AITAH", etc), or simply bots (pick any cat-related sub, all reposts, all bots).

Even some technical subs are full of blind fanboy-ism and ignorance. It's simply painful. Unfortunately it's still a good place to get US and local news, /r/aviation often being one of the first subs to report on incidents, like the DIA AA fire, with photos/videos from the sub's own users.

I know the moderator difference, I'm talking asking about admins.

The admin approach to policies have always seemed very individual to the admin with wildly different responses.

I agree from what I've observed. You can have topic X posted which gets removed, only for someone else in the same sub to defiantly post about topic X with a "reddit removed this!" and it will stay up.

The way reddit admins operate is madly arbitrary. From experience, I am willing to bet that some subreddit admins or moderators get money under the table from interested parties to look the other way or worse.

I don't know about money, but I did have an experience where it felt like an admin was "protecting" a particularly usual / abusive sub level moderator who seemed to frankly have some serious mental health issues. They'd rant about people stalking them IRL because of their status as a moderator. At first they were just strange questionable stories but later it escalated. Some of their stories sounded like they'd assume anything as being stalked IRL. It got to the point where their stories involved them making vague references to threats to other users. The community was at a loss as far as what to do and no amount of contacting the admins seemed to illicit help, response was always seemingly from the same admin who seemed to sidestep all the worst behaviors.

Then somehow some other admin noticed and cleaned it all up... just all perfunctory like that.

You're never going to be able change Reddit and it's arbitrary actions, you can only move the discourse elsewhere.

Indeed, and I encourage others to do the same. I'd rather pay a couple of bucks to make sure my post lands instead of hoping a funny intermediary will consider the post okay. I've got a post that has been pending review by moderators for six months, with me messaging the mods of said subreddit; never again. I think LLMs could actually improve reddit from this POV.

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