Thread

Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

312 points · 408 comments · p-s-v

nomilk · 1790655652 · focus · HN ↗
The biggest problem I have with reddit is mods can slowly but systematically ban users who express unfavourable opinions, and over time, anyone casually browsing could mistakenly believe those views are unpopular, whereas in reality everyone with that view (everyone who spoke it, anyway) was banned.
To give a simple example, one video game franchise subreddit bans any negative discussion on the most recent title. Over 5-10 years, this shielded them from negative feedback. But the franchise has tanked because core users weren't listened to, and they ended up making something nobody wanted.
1. aurareturn · 1790656841 · focus · HN ↗
  My biggest problem with Reddit is that trolls, memes, unintelligent posts have taken over the platform. Go to any semi-popular subreddit and most upvoted posts are just low effort memes. Posts that are long and well thought out don't win over memes and trolls. One of the reasons is that posting a few short words wins in upvotes because they get posted first while it takes much longer to write something thoughtful.
  Reddit's system rewards these low effort posts for some reason. Over time, the platform becomes less and less trustworthy until it becomes something like Quora.
  1. whatisthiseven · 1790657430 · focus · HN ↗
    People who build their identity around high scoring karma of memes take it seriously, and certainly don't want to hear "every subreddit devolves into memes if you let it"
    The users themselves are killing it.
  2. cbg0 · 1790657464 · focus · HN ↗
    This has always been Reddit, aside from the niche subreddits.
    aurareturn · 1790658784 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think so. I've been a Reddit user for 12+ years or so. Obviously when you make the platform easy to use for anyone, you also invite more casual users who just want to meme.
    Reddit doesn't even make any attempt to control quality since user engagement numbers matter more than quality.
    Reminds me of Quora which over optimized the site for engagement growth but eventually became completely useless for this reason.
    cbg0 · 1790661150 · focus · HN ↗
    Here's the front page from 12 years ago, not exactly riveting debates in top hats.
    <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140929012305/http://www.reddit.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20140929012305/http://www.reddit...
    <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140929073818/http://www.reddit.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20140929073818/http://www.reddit...
    <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140929232807/http://www.reddit.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20140929232807/http://www.reddit...
    aurareturn · 1790665608 · focus · HN ↗
    The subreddits that I frequent have turned into a low effort meme fest.
    No original OP posts are allowed, only URLs from the same old websites.
    krageon · 1790666937 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, and the person you responded to posited that this is because they used to be niche. You claimed this was not the case, they provided some URLs that demonstrate semi popular subreddits have always been shit.
    This post sounds like you are still disagreeing but nothing you've said points to another conclusion
    tayo42 · 1790667195 · focus · HN ↗
    Your reddit experience is from mods and their rules and how they enforce it, not the site overall.
    aurareturn · 1790668023 · focus · HN ↗
    Site overall. Mobile app makes it easy to type a few words and hit send and hard to write well thought out posts.
    rusticpenn · 1790669417 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, look at AskHistorians. Its still pretty awesome.
    keiferski · 1790677007 · focus · HN ↗
    Not really, if you want to ask a question. 9/10 times it gets locked for breaking some obscure rule. If anyone answers, that answer is just deleted immediately as well.
    This type of subreddit specifically is almost entirely useless since the advent of AI.
    rusticpenn · 1790843478 · focus · HN ↗
    It depends. I have compard some answers with my discussions with different llms and i still find the answers in the sub qualitatively better.
    kelipso · 1790705616 · focus · HN ↗
    Every interesting question just shows a bunch of deleted comments, so I stopped looking at it a while ago.
    rusticpenn · 1790843423 · focus · HN ↗
    There is another sub which tracks answered questions. Its a side effect when focussing on quality.
    jamesnorden · 1790682267 · focus · HN ↗
    When every mod does the same it becomes the whole website.
    Good4boothee · 1790682362 · focus · HN ↗
    As long as mods are human volunteers, can they ever keep up with scale of reddit? I regularly see submissions (on old.reddit's /r/all) that got to 10k+ upvotes and 200+ comments in hour or two before it was taken down for breaking given subredit rules.
    someonebaggy · 1790682588 · focus · HN ↗
    The site is the sum total of all that
    ieie3366 · 1790675224 · focus · HN ↗
    The big default subreddits were garbage 12 years ago, yes. But the rest of the site was not.
    Now in 2026, even small niche subreddits are facebook / tiktok tier with low effort meme posts etc
    bartread · 1790685422 · focus · HN ↗
    > even small niche subreddits are facebook / tiktok tier with low effort meme posts
    Completely agree.
    There's a few niche subs I hang out in but, for me, the standout in terms of quality decline is r/DIYUK. The difference between that sub in 2019/2020 vs today is stark.
    It's pretty common to scroll through several pages of repetitive one-line "jokes" before getting to anything remotely resembling a real answer.
    Mods seem relatively inactive and there are only 4 of them anyway, which is nowhere near enough to keep on top of the volume of posts and comments nowadays. Really it needs either a lot more mods, or some form of LLM-backed automation, to weed out the low effort comments.
    It's become a bit of a wasteland in terms of a lot of the regular contributors who used to give good, well thought out answers, have tapped out. I complained about this the other week and got downvoted and accussed of "showboating" which, honestly, I'm not even sure what the commenter who said that meant in the context of the discussion that we were having.
    It's a real shame because there aren't really any good UK-focussed DIY-oriented discussion forums any more: all the others degraded and became toxic, which is where r/DIYUK won, because it resisted that trend for longer. No more, sadly. DIYnot always stood out as a place that was more about battling egos than providing meaningful help and advice and, although r/DIYUK hasn't gone in quite that direction, it is sadly headed down an equally useless and destructive path quality-wise.
    shevy-java · 1790667259 · focus · HN ↗
    > Reddit doesn't even make any attempt to control quality
    But mods can say they censored you because of low quality contribution to reddit. :)
    I do agree that the karma system does not work. I was able to farm 77k karma in two years, after I created a new account there (the old account I had before for +14 years was forced to change the password, so I created a new account - and used EXACTLY the same password, to prove a point to reddit that they are incredibly stupid. Sadly, reddit never understood the problem, even though it should be obvious that, if your passwords are lost yet users retain the same password after being forced by reddit to change it, something in reddit's insinuation simply does not add up here.)
    harvey9 · 1790685452 · focus · HN ↗
    I once cracked a pretty good joke on a high-traffic thread and got about 30k upvotes for that one post. None of my serious posts in serious subreddits ever got close. I don't think Reddit karma is a useful indicator of anything.
    lordnacho · 1790675632 · focus · HN ↗
    This got me wondering whether you could train an automod to act like Dang.
    Dang is more or less what keeps HN from becoming Reddit.
    aurareturn · 1790676141 · focus · HN ↗
    Don't think so unless all moderate actions are public.
    jamesnorden · 1790682325 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know about that, political slop is sometimes manually unflagged here.
    someonebaggy · 1790682644 · focus · HN ↗
    People would find exploits in the automod. For example if a trivial keyword filter flags comments mentioning Palestine but not ones that mention Paluhstein, or "the country of Isn'treal"
    This is called Algospeak and has infected a lot of people's everyday language. People say "unalive" instead of "kill" or "murder", because the internet has drilled into them that you have to use that word.
    lordnacho · 1790713668 · focus · HN ↗
    An LLM would easily understand that, no?
    someonebaggy · 1790714819 · focus · HN ↗
    If trained enough, but the commenters will just start calling it watermelon instead. So you train your LLM to block comments about watermelons, so they say thing. So you train your LLM to block comments about things. Congrats you blocked all comments.
    david-gpu · 1790682320 · focus · HN ↗
    I've been on Reddit since late 2005. Before there were comments or subreddits.
    My memory is fuzzy, but I remember it getting pretty shallow and memetic since before the Digg diaspora in 2010. And I think it was the popularity of image posts that did it; it was better before image links became popular.
    However, Slashdot was already highly memetic since the late nineties, and it was not image-based, so I may be wrong about the effect of pictures.
    paimapi · 1790783985 · focus · HN ↗
    you weren't around back in the days that it was just a Ron Paul fanboy forum and a lot of r/atheism echo chambers (I say this as an atheist who got keenly annoyed by the amount of self-fellating going on there) - this was pre-sub-reddits, when kn0thing was still active on the site and a force for some pro-social moderation, and Digg was still their biggest competitor (until it was flooded with the HD-DVD key leak and a lot of people left it out of annoyance)
    pschastain · 1790677825 · focus · HN ↗
    Once-upon-a-time reddit was the cool new alternative to digg
  3. EA-3167 · 1790659257 · focus · HN ↗
    A non-trivial number of the newer accounts that do that are bots, ban-dodgers building karma, people aging accounts for general resale and so on. Even a lot of "human" activity on Reddit isn't in good faith before you even get to the general triviality 99.9999% of it represents.
    Plus at this point if you really want to ask what Reddit thinks ask an LLM, it'll tell you in painful detail without exposing you to that place. Just remember to check claims and sources (a good practice for human claims as well as LLM ones).
  4. Teever · 1790664799 · focus · HN ↗
    One of my biggest criticisms of social media in general is that the algorithm that determines how things are scored and ranked is intentionally obfuscated under the auspices of preventing 3rd parties from gaming it in such way that results in an outcome where it is impossible for users to determine if the platform owners are gaming it themselves.
    I'm not aware of a social media site that does it but I think that I'd very strongly prefer a site where I could view a transparent log of who voted for what and when and what moderator took what action and when and why and how that all factors into how a comment / post / thread is ranked on the feed at any particular moment than one that hides all that stuff.
    Reproducible builds but for social media.
    Less 'pay no attention to that man behind the curtain' and more 'Exactly what it says on the tin"
    The more that I interact with moderators on social media the more I've come to realize that as much as they're burnt out from answering the same questions from not-bad actors over and over as they are dealing with organic bad actors or automated content generators and that a great deal of those questions stem from the opaque nature of the algorithm.
    All too often I find that moderators on social media are exasperated and burnt out not just from the endless janitorial work but also from users reaching out to them for understanding about the opaque nature of their actions and the outcomes that they have in the system.
    So a lot of moderators gravitate towards a 'don't rock the boat' sort of mentality and over time adopt this sort of mentality: <a href="https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo?t=56" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo?t=56
    IMHO we're well past the point where any sort of security by obscurity with regards to the algorithm prevents any sort of automated influence on social media and the negative impacts of this kind of moderating technique only causes more damage than it prevents / mitigates.
    pydry · 1790670206 · focus · HN ↗
    i would like this too but I dont see any way to maintain anonymity or pseudonymity and clamp down on spamming.
    you can have neither or both but I dont see any way to have one without the other.
    >The more that I interact with moderators on social media the more I've come to realize that as much as they're burnt out from answering the same questions from not-bad actors over and over
    I'm mystified why this isnt a problem AI isnt applied to.
    wizzwizz4 · 1790683935 · focus · HN ↗
    It is: /u/AutoModerator can be used for that.
    charcircuit · 1790689744 · focus · HN ↗
    X may be the platform you are looking for.
    <a href="https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm
    nothercastle · 1790693882 · focus · HN ↗
    X is bad it always reverts to low effort content and then bombards you with constant racisms and sexism. There are Jems but you are constantly swimming in a river of garbage
    marcusverus · 1790710050 · focus · HN ↗
    You get more of what you engage with. If you respond to ragebait--even to express your disgust--the algorithm assumes you want more ragebait.
    verzali · 1790948465 · focus · HN ↗
    When I made a new X account a while back it immediately started showing me awful videos of people getting killed etc. This was without me engaging in anyway, just what came with a fresh account. So yes, maybe it gets worse if I engage, but the site seemed primed to be awful.
  5. munksbeer · 1790683809 · focus · HN ↗
    Visit /r/science
    Their own rules forbid low effort posts:
    "No off-topic comments, memes, low-effort comments or jokes"
    And yet every single topic is filled with exactly that any time I go to read anything. It can't be beyond their wit to get rid of that stuff.
    trombuance · 1790689024 · focus · HN ↗
    That's for the reason already mentioned above: Users who post substance and care about the issues will sooner or later write about something or express an opinion the moderators don't like and get banned. Over time the site is filled with lame jokes, single word comments and cliches.
    peter_d_sherman · 1790736719 · focus · HN ↗
    >"low-effort comments"
    I have never heard that term used before, prior to reading this thread...
    All I know is that "low-effort comments" -- is going into my 2026 lexicon!
    (Admittedly this comment, my comment, the words I have written, above -- is admittedly somewhat of a "low-effort comment" in and of itself(!) A low-effort comment about other low-effort comments (a "meta" low-effort comment, if you will!), but I digress... I guess at times "we all fall short of the glory of the highest of high effort comments"... :-) )
    Anyway, "low-effort comment" is a great piece of terminology, isn't it? :-)
    It's going into my 2026 lexicon...
  6. fishfasell · 1790684066 · focus · HN ↗
    100%, r/science 15 years ago was very strict on keeping the conversation serious and no low effort posts or jokes. That subreddit is now littered with stupid comments, jokes, and you have to dig to find serious commentary. Reddit is dying and I love it.
  7. [deleted] · 1790685662 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  8. gosub100 · 1790685828 · focus · HN ↗
    > One of the reasons is that posting a few short words wins in upvotes because they get posted first
    It's not being first to the race, it's that some people are lazy and don't want to read "long" posts but will optimize for snappy quips that are more likely to be upvoted. This incentives some "karma whores" to make these posts instead of engaging with the topic more.
  9. Jaygles · 1790687054 · focus · HN ↗
    And there is often no respect for serious topics.
    Tragedy? Low-effort memes
    Someone in high esteem passes away unexpectedly? Low-effort memes
    Slow descend into fascism? Low-effort memes
  10. jansport123 · 1790781116 · focus · HN ↗
    there are still very insightful posts/comments but they are a minority buried by mostly inane comments and reddit is moving more towards like instagram reels model these days.
2. KevinMS · 1790657533 · focus · HN ↗
  Not that long ago to find both sides of an argument in the comments you could search by "controversial" and the negative comments would be at the top and often you'd agree with them, or at least appreciate the debate. Now they are mostly gone. It was probably a combination of banning wrong-think and dissidents learning to not waste their time.
  The worst thing for a forum is to let users punish comments they disagree with, you know, one way by fading out their comments until you cant read them.
  1. aurareturn · 1790659115 · focus · HN ↗
    I think it's the latter. People don't want to waste their time.
    Echo chambers have gotten stronger.
    OroPla · 1790689700 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not so much the time wasted in discussions, but the time wasted in having to create new accounts, since your old one got banned from the platform. Though, since the last presidency change in the USA it feels like reddit has gotten less ban-happy.
    Before I added a bunch of subreddits to my blacklist that will never show up again in a search engine I had to make a new reddit account every four to six months.
  2. pixeljam · 1790740678 · focus · HN ↗
    It's really a shame when I stumble across an old (8y+) reddit post from search results, and I see that the useful replies are either from [deleted] or [Removed by moderator]. :(
3. altmanaltman · 1790658509 · focus · HN ↗
  Can you specify more on the one video game franchise example you're talking about? If you mean Battlefield then they did not ban "any negative discussion", just incels bitching about allowing female characters to exist in a video game about WW2. Battlefield 6 sold 7 million copies in first three days and the franchise has not tanked in any conventional sense so I guess you're talking about some other incident.
  1. satvikpendem · 1790663266 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe Halo or Dragon Age or Mass Effect is more likely.
  2. lbreakjai · 1790670776 · focus · HN ↗
    Battlefield is the opposite. I struggle to find a positive discussion about the game, which has a lot of flaws but which I still quite enjoy, as a very casual and occasional player.
  3. pjc50 · 1790672017 · focus · HN ↗
    That description could cover almost any game released in the past decade. I suppose the more popular ones have multiple warring subreddits with different mod rules.
    (pet hate: it's perfectly OK to call your subreddit xyz_offficial, even when you are in no way officially affiliated with the game developer or publisher)
  4. pixelstack · 1790673910 · focus · HN ↗
    not op, but can give my personal example. I was banned from one of the twitch streamers subreddits because I questioned hype about GTA 6 and called it ghetto simulator. Reason was for stirring controversial and provoking topics.
4. Drupon · 1790661324 · focus · HN ↗
  To give another simple example, Israel has managed to pollute the mods of r/worldnews enough to make it a singularly active cheerleader of the genocide until the last year or two.
  1. TheHalc · 1790666839 · focus · HN ↗
    I was banned from there this summer after posting something relatively innocuous asking whether Palestine had a right to defend itself. At least, I assume that's why I was banned, they never actually gave a reason.
  2. LtWorf · 1790667705 · focus · HN ↗
    There is a single moderator for most of the big italian subreddits and he bans anyone that says "genocide bad". He also bans anyone who points this out.
    Pretty sure that's his day job.
  3. lysp · 1790675458 · focus · HN ↗
    This is what comes to mind for me too.
    As an example, I am well aware of how strict r/worldnews is moderated on IvP topics, so I am extra careful to be factual rather than simply making comments based on more general thoughts, like I do for other areas.
    I have responded to some comments in the past by responding by quoting legal cases, news links I sourced my comment from, or from subject experts.
    It doesn't matter how accurate or factually proven the comment is. If it's even slightly critical, it'll end up with votes of anywhere from -10 to -50 from all the down votes.
    For other people's comments, anything negative that hasn't been down voted into oblivion will always have the "cross" icon next to them, meaning it's listed as "controversial", which is when it has a large number of down votes, plus up votes to balance it out.
  4. mschuster91 · 1790689362 · focus · HN ↗
    Where's the problem? r/worldnews is pretty Zionist in nature, and anime_titties, workreform plus way too many other "leftist" subreddits are anywhere from somewhat neutral over "Israel bad" to outright glorifying Hamas.
    Don't want to engage with Zionists, go to anime_titties, don't want to engage with Qatari propaganda, go to worldnews.
    Drupon · 1790700280 · focus · HN ↗
    My problem is that that website didn't let a small genocidal colony infiltrate and subvert its major frontpage subs 10 years ago.
    mschuster91 · 1790702996 · focus · HN ↗
    I'd rather ask myself how Qatar managed to wiggle its way into pretty much every university and many left-wing and "progressive" parties that now openly support Hamas.
    Israel has been allied with our nations ever since it was founded, the Qataris and other oil sheiks were a bunch of warlords and nomads a century ago.
    Drupon · 1790963824 · focus · HN ↗
    It is progressive to support Hamas because they're the only major organization liquidating settler colonial vermin infesting their land.
  5. power78 · 1790708428 · focus · HN ↗
    The opposite is also true. There are many subs that posting anything positive about Israel will get you banned on that sub and all subs that moderator moderates which is insane.
5. Karrot_Kream · 1790662995 · focus · HN ↗
  While I do think quality of subs can be quite high (much higher than discourse here for certain topics and certain subs), this is a pretty well known problem. Discussion on this [1] from a post I made earlier.
  r/sanfrancisco is quite negative on the current mayor Daniel Lurie and frequently expresses approval for Zohran Mamdani even though Lurie has an approval rate of 74% in SF [2] while Mamdani has a 69% favorability [3] in NYC largely because of the political skew of the sub.
  [1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49556546">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49556546
  [2]: <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/sf-mayor-lurie-poll-approval-22224967.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/sf-mayor-lurie-...
  [3]: <a href="https://sri.siena.edu/2026/09/23/siena-poll-of-likely-new-york-state-voters-hochul-50-blakeman-41/" rel="nofollow">https://sri.siena.edu/2026/09/23/siena-poll-of-likely-new-yo...
6. ainiriand · 1790663251 · focus · HN ↗
  I fully agree with your point of view. I think that I saw it the clearest when, in a Magic the Gathering subreddit I usually follow one person started a thread on a set of rare cards and immediately was downvoted to oblivion, and later on closed by the mods. Turns out that those cards were indeed legit, and just because everyone else thought they were not nobody got to see them once the booster opened.
7. charlesfries · 1790664081 · focus · HN ↗
  The business model is fundamentally broken. Reddit, unlike other sites driven by user-generated content, forgoes the cost of huge (but ideally impartial) content moderation teams in favor of unpaid user moderators, leading to what you've described. Nothing will change unless the business model changes.
  1. TheqO · 1790665263 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, it's now a listed company.
    Shareholders want to get paid. CEO wants to get paid.
    The primary KPI's are revenue and profit, customer satisfaction will only matter if people actively quit.
    I started to get banned from subreddits after giving perfectly polite comments which happened to be contrary to popular opinion, so stopped posting on Reddit and only read it with an ad-blocking browser.
    Don't give them content, don't give them your data and revenue. Reddit know full well that there should be an appeal process to user-mod nazi's. But these people obsessively post new content on their forums and so are protected.
    RIP Aaron <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpvcc9C8SbM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpvcc9C8SbM
  2. philipallstar · 1790675566 · focus · HN ↗
    Twitter did the same with paid mods, because paid mods are no more likely to be impartial than unpaid ones.
  3. Hendrikto · 1790676809 · focus · HN ↗
    Paid content moderation teams are also biased and partial.
    dataengineer56 · 1790678248 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes but not to the same extent. Professional, paid moderators following a centrally-defined set of rules are going to act differently to terminally-online volunteer mods.
8. stale2002 · 1790666199 · focus · HN ↗
  This is true! I know this because thats what I did. You can get away with almost anything as a reddit mod, and can systematically control whatever userbase you want.
  In some case this is benign, like with advertisers and marketing, and in other cases it is much worse in which case there could be actual foreign enemy governments doing psyop campaigns on reddit.
  Reddit isn't controlled by the company. Instead it is controlled by an army of anonymous nobodies who could have all sorts of bad motivations.
9. voidifremoved · 1790667018 · focus · HN ↗
  This is true in every online space, whether explicitly or implicitly.
10. ralfd · 1790667510 · focus · HN ↗
  This is a difficult problem, because subs can also depend on ban-hammer-happy moderation.
11. LtWorf · 1790667588 · focus · HN ↗
  The mod for r/linux was famous for banning anyone who didn't take his side in the kde/gnome systemd/systemv or whatever (I don't remember).
  They got rid of him just because the owner of the subreddit was someone else who wasn't really using reddit any more but still could kick that mod.
12. sliqqq · 1790667631 · focus · HN ↗
  Perfect explanaition! I see this not only in politics, but also in simple tech or niche fields I'm very familiar with, sometimes even medical things I have to deal with for 20 years: If it doesnt fit the (uneducated) mods' view, it will get downvoted or (shadow)banned. Resulting in bizarre threads with 40k upvotes, but no actual answers on the open question, because the answers have been removed. Totally nuts.
13. ruszki · 1790669293 · focus · HN ↗
  Why doesn't this happen with racism? In European subreddits, speaking about gypsies in a racist way is followed by a ban. Yet, it's still there, and quite clear that that's the norm in Europe. Compared with topics of homeless people, about who Eastern Europeans talk the exact same way as about gypsies, and with the same logic - it's just not "protected", so it's not banned - I encounter both regularly.
  1. IsTom · 1790669916 · focus · HN ↗
    > speaking about gypsies in a racist way is followed by a ban
    I'm suspecting that is only because of behaviors learned from US on the internet. If not for that they wouldn't have thought of banning for it. It's not a topic that comes up often, but IRL negative views on gypsies are the norm in Europe.
    I think it's important to understand that it's viewed as culture issue, not color-of-skin issue (that is something that can be changed, people of gypsy heritage that go to school and work are not considered gypsies for this) and so not getting filled in the category of "racism".
  2. vconnor · 1790673719 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  3. carlob · 1790675683 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe I don't understand exactly what you are saying, but if I do: there is a fundamental difference between Gypsies and homeless people, you are born a gypsy by no fault of your own, but most people are not born homeless. As such racism towards Gypsies is far more heinous because you could have any education, profession, income, housing situation you'll always stay a Gypsy and face the same prejudice, whereas you can (somewhat) more easily stop being homeless.
    Now we could have a discussion on whether being poor is a choice or a consequence of societal inequality, but I think more people agree on racism here...
    Hendrikto · 1790677029 · focus · HN ↗
    It is not at all about race. It is about the lifestyle. And you definitely choose that yourself.
    ruszki · 1790689506 · focus · HN ↗
    Looking at Eastern Europe, how some behavior which is net negative to everybody in the current environment still alive 200 years after the zero sum game is dead, I would say, that's not that simple.
  4. OroPla · 1790680966 · focus · HN ↗
    Gypsies aren't a race, what they do is a lifestyle. Kinda like classical pirates and brigand bands. But while the latter examples have disappeared for the most part in Europe, gypsies are still a plague upon law and order.
    ruszki · 1790689920 · focus · HN ↗
    > Gypsies aren't a race, what they do is a lifestyle
    I said the exact same thing for like 20 years. Until I realized that this thought is utterly racist. Luckily, I was disgusted about myself and my environment where this is a normal thought, and improved, instead of doubling down.
    You've just called a behavior based on a name of an ethnic group. You cannot be more racist than that.
    pcthrowaway · 1790703592 · focus · HN ↗
    I think some people simply aren't aware that "G**y" references the Roma (and is also considered a slur by most), because they associate it with the negative stereotypes which have been ascribed to them.
    ruszki · 1790716902 · focus · HN ↗
    They have a vested interest to think this way, or say this. Their words' trustworthiness is zero.
    PapstJL4U · 1790759258 · focus · HN ↗
    Gypsy seems to reference at least a dozen or so different groups of people in different languages (some languages use Tsinganoi-related version). Some groups use the word themself, others don't.
    Most often it is the mainstream society living in stationary houses describing people living in temporary encampments with a different culture.
    OroPla · 1790843188 · focus · HN ↗
    The one people hating the gypsies the most are the Roma. They're not the same thing.
    OroPla · 1790707132 · focus · HN ↗
    Gypsies are not Roma. Gypsy is the word for a lifestyle. Like vagabond or Amish.
    ruszki · 1790716489 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/gypsy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/gypsy
14. atraac · 1790670982 · focus · HN ↗
  I feel like most of their problems come from downvoting, not mods though. It's just not possible to have a real discussion on reddit anymore, because anything that is not the mainstream opinion just gets insta downvoted. People will literally downvote anything they don't agree with, and seem to be more likely to do that if they see the comment has a negative score already. If they allowed subreddits to turn off downvoting, and have HN-like system where every new comment lands on top for a while to give everyone a chance, that whole place would be much more healthy.
  1. Akronymus · 1790671154 · focus · HN ↗
    HN also only gived downvote perms after being active, afair.
    saghm · 1790688005 · focus · HN ↗
    IIRC it's unlocked at 500 karma. You need to contribute in ways the community considers valuable before you can signal that something isn't valuable.
    Akronymus · 1790688168 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah I wasn't sure of the actual threshold (I kinda just lucked into a lot of karma early on because of a post about factorio releasing 1.0)
    saghm · 1790694180 · focus · HN ↗
    Ah, that makes sense. I'm basically the opposite, in around a decade I've posted articles directly maybe a dozen times, so it took me a while before I received the privilege to downvote.
    brokenmachine · 1790906224 · focus · HN ↗
    I only see downvote sometimes, for some reason. I don't see it available on the comments on this post.
  2. Aunche · 1790679820 · focus · HN ↗
    The most nefarious behavior I've seen is when the mods shadowban every argument they disagree with that has positive upvotes but leave arguments they disagree with that has negative upvotes to give the impression that everyone on the opposing side is stupid.
  3. pcthrowaway · 1790703197 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the mods are a larger contributor to the "acceptable discourse" in most subreddits than drive-by downvoters. Most people with unacceptable opinions (as per the mods) find other subs to congregate in when they've been banned or know their input will result in them being banned.
    There are exceptions though: I participate in some capacity in most of the feminist subreddits, and the divisions between different branches are pretty charged. One example "feminismuncensored" subreddit which I believe was created in reaction to the "feminism" subreddit's slant towards white liberal feminism (which has been getting better over the years), but seems to have attracted trans-exclusionary feminists due to the name, and the fact that trans-exclusionary feminist views are also not tolerated in most of the other larger feminist subreddits (for those who don't really pay attention to this, my use of "trans-exclusionary" rather than "gender-critical" is a signal of my own bias towards trans-inclusive feminism).
    The /r/feminismuncensored moderators recently stickied a post clarifying that transphobic comments are not tolerated there, and as you can imagine it was heavily downvoted by people who (I think somewhat reasonably) assumed the name of the subreddit meant trans-exclusionary feminism would be tolerated. Comments supporting the moderators' decision there were heavily downvoted as well. So this is one of the (relatively rare IMO) cases where the subreddit appears to be frequented by people whose views are out of line with the moderators' ideas of acceptable discourse. In most other subreddits the moderator bias and community bias tend to be more closely aligned
    dozzr · 1790744334 · focus · HN ↗
    Most of the so-called "feminist" subreddits are run by men who pretend to be women, so that's not surprising at all. These men have a habit of worming their way into every online women's space and, if they can, taking control of the discussion. Reddit is especially terrible for this, and the only way for women to protest this misogyny without risk of having their accounts banned is to downvote.
    zbentley · 1790793780 · focus · HN ↗
    What do you mean when you say "men who pretend to be women"?
    I understand this is a fraught question, and I'm not trying to be snide or score points. Given the specifics of the post you're replying to, I think that's a germane thing to clarify here.
15. bewareofscams · 1790678598 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
16. dminik · 1790679198 · focus · HN ↗
  Yeah. I don't want to be conspiratorial, but there is some heavy censorship happening in certain (or maybe most) subreddits.
  A good example is worldnews. For a long time I thought it was a pretty good source of, well, news. But at some point I started noticing that certain topics (cough Negativity about Israel cough) which got a decent amount of discussion were deleted as duplicates of posts that came in later and had 0 comments and could not be seen on hot/top/whatever.
  Back to your topic, I think this is in large part due to the death of multiple forums and personal websites and the aggregation of everyone to like 4 platforms.
  In the past, if you were banned or didn't like one forum, you could find another. Or maybe just post your thoughts on your own website/blog. But now nobody will see it unless it's on reddit, discord or YouTube.
  I don't think we can get that back, but maybe a bluesky(-ish) forum/reddit alternative where you can chose who you interact/see posts and comments from would work well. It would take another collosal fuckup to get people to move and even then... Lemmy was alive during the API/third party apps thing and nobody really moved.
  1. someonebaggy · 1790682768 · focus · HN ↗
    worldnews is a really egregious example of what you're talking about. If you say one negative thing about Israel it gets deleted, you get banned from the sub and sometimes even banned from Reddit. Of course other subs do this on other topics too.
  2. odiroot · 1790687043 · focus · HN ↗
    And worldnews is still quite tame with it. Other news subs are much harsher in their moderation, especially the EU local ones.
17. FoxITNow · 1790681616 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
18. andai · 1790682416 · focus · HN ↗
  I heard an influential person say thing about YouTube. That the "real" leaders of popular movements get banned, and then people get a completely distorted idea of what people actually believe, because the only exposure they get is to the ones YouTube approves of.
  1. neuronic · 1790683384 · focus · HN ↗
    This is absolutely true and a main reason why you will see a lot of Pikachu faces in r/de after a German election. This is true for most subreddits which are touching on topics that in some form or another promote tribalism.
    Such topics tend to naturally create opinionated flame wars, politics just being the most obvious example, but the subreddit mods often take a side even though the subreddit may advertise itself as the general hub for the topic.
    bel8 · 1790685984 · focus · HN ↗
    My friend told me the same phenomenon happens in Brazil's canonical subreddit /r/brasil
    I'm told that their mods tolerate left leaning hate speech much more than right leaning counterpart so unaware visitors think current left leaning government is beloved by a great majority and that it has been for years.
    But they told me that last election ended very tight, something like 49/51% and I'm told current imminent election is at similar 50/50 split.
    Same probably happened with German election.
19. assimpleaspossi · 1790684503 · focus · HN ↗
  I visit two subs every day and get banned from both of them maybe three times a year. I am an expert in one area and experienced in the other. I typically respond only to outrageous responses to someone who asked a seemingly innocent question. Because I disagreed with the majority I typically get my karma down so low that my comments aren't showing or, last week, I was banned altogether.
  No. I'm not nasty or disrespectful. I just disagree and give the reasons why.
  I try to be helpful but I no longer care. I only glance at the titles in case something new shows up. I don't want to sound like I'm bragging but, as I said, I'm an expert in one area and experienced in the other and reddit users lose that. I know others feel the same way and never go there. I wish I wouldn't.
  1. complex_fir_rea · 1790691855 · focus · HN ↗
    Your experience is similar to mine. I feel like my most stupid and forgettable comments generally get more attention and upvotes, but when someone makes a comment that's clearly false and I respectfully disagree citing authoritative sources, people get defensive and in some cases reply with ad hominem.
    Tried to clear a confusion between DDR5 / LPDDR5 / DIMM standards and cited the relevant JEDEC standards with specific quotes? Get downvoted, all of arguments ignored and replied with more false information.
    Tried to argue that, even if given a charitable interpretation, some units of measurement could be confused if not written correctly (on a conversation where such confusion was clearly happening already)? Downvoted.
    Explain the difference between latency and throughput? Explain that O(1) ⊂ O(n)?
    Reddit is full of idiots who are too confident about things they don't understand and aren't humble enough to admit they're wrong, so they just insist and I just don't care anymore.
    And let's not even get started about having nuance and a balance point of view in politics.
  2. zfnmxt · 1790701582 · focus · HN ↗
    > Because I disagreed with the majority I typically get my karma down so low that my comments aren't showing or, last week, I was banned altogether.
    This is just the nefarious nature of karma-based systems. It also applies here. I find reddit's shadow banning/shadow hiding especially offensive. (Just think for a moment how utterly disgusting it is that such a feature was intentionally designed, implemented, and is now maintained.)
    Not downvoting legitimate (but unpopular) comments is protected by the various rule systems (reddiquette, HN guidelines), but of course rule adherence is (very) low (especially on reddit).
    > I wish I wouldn't.
    Me too. And here as well.
20. raverbashing · 1790687342 · focus · HN ↗
  One of the most egregious cases of sub capture was definitely r/fauxmoi
21. saghm · 1790688308 · focus · HN ↗
  Without more details, it's not really clear that your example leads to the conclusion you give. Plenty of subreddits for games are run by the community rather than the company who owns the IP, and any company serious about getting feedback isn't going to blindly trust a subreddit even if they do moderate it themselves.
22. dogleash · 1790695992 · focus · HN ↗
  > The biggest problem I have with reddit is mods can slowly but systematically ban users who express unfavourable opinions
  I recently got banned from subreddit A1 because I commented in subreddit A2 without knowing the ongoing bloodfeud where A1 moderators didn't find the A2 moderators strict enough. I'm a tourist to the topic "A" all together and barely understood the lore of the topic. Let alone the cultural eggshells of following a search result into the wrong subreddit.
23. lisp2240 · 1790710335 · focus · HN ↗
  This is a good place to remind everyone that Ghislaine Maxwell is a moderator of /r/worldnews. She stopped using her main account when she was arrested but we suspect she's still moderating from prison using other accounts. If you comment or post about this on Reddit you will get an account level shadowban.
  Let us see if the pedophiles control this site too. Bookmark this and then check back later to see if it was flagged and removed.
  1. MisterMunchkin · 1790715056 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s absolutely hilarious that she was a mod. And she would regularly meet with the reddit admins, she was one of the crew since very early on.
    It’s like discovering that katy perry is a 4chan mod that deletes tayposts.
  2. stickfigure · 1790721784 · focus · HN ↗
    I tried to source this and it appears to be speculation.
24. thisislife2 · 1790841233 · focus · HN ↗
  Mods are doing what the platform is designed for - create "echo chambers". If a sub-reddit causes cognitive dissonance then that means (from the perspective of the platform), you aren't in the "right" sub-reddit (i.e. echo chamber). If you are posting something that isn't within the accepted "norms" of the echo chamber the mods are supposed to "prune" your views, so that you are driven to find the sub-reddit where your views are acceptable. Or you create your own echo chamber on Reddit where the views that you think are "valid" are upheld by your coteries.
  It's a really effective but screwed up way of creating fundamentalists ...

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.