/r/AskBrits banned me for pointing out that there are several threads each day about immigration, each tailor made rage bait. Sometimes they’re not even a question.

I’ve personally caught a couple of Iranians and Russians brazenly posting such threads at 4am British time (working hours in Tehran) and the moderators did nothing. They simply allow such threads while deleting any thread that goes “is anyone sick of the constant threads about immigration?”

These threads generate so much engagement from people of all opinions that it makes the sub appear in people’s feeds as recommended content even if they’re not subscribed to the sub. It gives people the impression that there is only one political subject in the UK that gets any discussion.

I don’t know why the moderators of this sub do this, but the effects of their moderation are clear.

I can throw another example /r/lectures was a really cool place were people shared mostly academic lectures. Mod took over, put the sub in approved posts only and is just doing token approves very rarely without any way to reclaim the sub.

It sounds like a large part of the problem is how important a subreddit name is to popularity. If a subreddit has a good obvious name it is going to collect members and activity even if the mods are awful. Competing subreddits will struggle to attract new users as they need some different less-obvious name.

I wonder if this could be approached in a way that new subreddits didn't have this disadvantage so that they could compete on mod quality and slowly grow / migrate the community.

Of course there are advantages to short unique names like readable links. But it seems that this false authority may not be worth the downsides.

You missed maybe the biggest one, /r/bitcoin, which around 2015 started banning anyone who wanted Bitcoin to actually follow the original design and continue scaling up on-chain transactions. The moderator, some anonymous student (possibly named Michael Marquardt), literally declared anyone who wanted Bitcoin to be used for regular transactions offtopic and banned them on a massive scale.

When explaining his actions he said something like, "I've moderated forums before so I know how sustained censorship can change a community". And then he set out to do it.

Reddit has been garbage for a long time and people's reliance on it is a huge problem. Abuse of it redirected Bitcoin onto a fundamentally different path (one nobody had agreed to), simply because of the sustained gaslighting and psychological manipulation its format allows.

That said, user-driven content moderation sucks everywhere. Wikipedia has the same problem. So does HN to some extent. The future is moderation driven entirely by LLMs with openly published prompts.

/interestingasfuck banned me for commenting on /asmongold at some point. Not even for the content. Simply for having interacted with /asmongold.

Edit: To be clear I wasn't picked on by anyone. It's a bot they run. This is a blanket ban that /interestingasfuck extends to anyone who has commented/posted on /asmongold, or any subreddit they consider to be right wing (by USA standards).

It goes both ways. If you try to post anything remotely criticizing Donald Trump or his government on /r/conservative you'll also get banned. Even if you try to keep it objective.

Confusingly one-sided post given the point it's seemingly trying to make.

/r/conservative is probably the most heavily censored echo chamber on Reddit, yet somehow you only take issue with other subreddits flagging participation.