There was a post here the other day asking women about their preferences in a partner's emotional attachment style (not the exact wording, but about as close as I can remember). The responses were overwhelmingly critical of the framing of the question and how it mischaracterized the qualities of a healthy relationship. Upon looking at life.women a day or two later, it seems to have been removed.

While I agree that the post showed problematic thinking and was kind of a nuisance post rather than one which fostered healthy discussion, I'm not sure I agree with removing it entirely. The original poster did not seem to have any malicious intent, but instead displayed a flawed internal view of healthy relationships. Though the feedback was likely not what they were hoping for, I think it could be instructional not only for that original poster but also for any other site visitors who may have a similar way of thinking. If someone were to read the post and not recognize anything wrong with it, only to then read the criticism in the comments, it's possible they may discover that their own thinking is flawed in a similar way to OP and seek to change the way they view the topic. If we hide every problematic question, people with similar thinking won't ever see that 1) other people have similar problematic views and 2) those views are problematic for reasons X, Y, and Z.

More simply, if people come here and ask questions that we find distasteful, instead of deleting them should we leave them up with the relevant feedback so that other people learn from that interaction and develop a better idea of where the poster went wrong? It feels like there are a lot of folks out there that might be simply ignorant about social and relationship norms and could learn by example. If these people never see a post where someone is getting called out for their misguided thinking, how do we expect them to learn what's acceptable and what isn't?

I'm curious to hear your opinions. Should we tolerate entertaining some troublesome questions in order to better educate others, or is it not our job to teach them proper social skills/those posts don't belong here at all?

(To be clear, I do not support leaving up anything overtly abusive or malicious/hateful, those should obviously be removed ASAP).

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/reddit-mods-fear-spam-overload-as-botdefense-leaves-antagonistic-reddit/

the Reddit community is still reckoning with the consequences of the platform's API price hike. The changes have led to the shuttering of numerous third-party Reddit apps and have pushed several important communities, like the Ask Me Anything (AMAs) organizers, to reduce or end their presence on the site.

The latest group to announce its departure is BotDefense. BotDefense, which helps removes rogue submission and comment bots from Reddit and which is maintained by volunteer moderators, is said to help moderate 3,650 subreddits. BotDefense's creator told Ars Technica that the team is now quitting over Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward moderators and developers, with concerning implications for spam moderation on some large subreddits like r/space.

BotDefense started in 2019 as a volunteer project and has been run by volunteer mods, known as "dequeued" and "abrownn" on Reddit. Since then, it claims to have populated its ban list with 144,926 accounts, and it helps moderate subreddits with huge followings, like r/gaming (37.4 million members), /r/aww (34.2 million), r/music (32.4 million), r/Jokes (26.2 million), r/space (23.5 million), and /r/LifeProTips (22.2 million). Dequeued told Ars that other large subreddits BotDefense helps moderates include /r/food, /r/EarthPorn, /r/DIY, and /r/mildlyinteresting.

On Wednesday, dequeued announced that BotDefense is ceasing operations. BotDefense has already stopped accepting bot account submissions and will disable future action on bots. BotDefense "will continue to review appeals and process unbans for a minimum of 90 days or until Reddit breaks the code running BotDefense," the announcement said. The announcement also advised "keeping BotDefense as a moderator through October 3rd so any future unbans can be processed."

Looking at the current top thread in ~talk, it seems many of us were forged in the fires of Mount Digg, and now suffer again through the great Reddit diaspora. Perhaps it is here our journey ends?

I am not from the US of A, but one thing I have always found fascinating about that country is the concept of the constitution. I believe it was so incredibly well conceived, the three legged stool, with all the thought that went into how it might be attacked and edge cases, that the founding fathers would have made excellent software testers. The fact American democracy has stood this long is some feat.

Which brings me to my question. Should Tildes create some form of constitution? A set of principles that binds and guides it? I believe something like that would make questions like this easier to answer. A founding set of ideals from which everything else should derive.

We have something akin to this at my company, where the founding principle is the customer is always our main priority. This has served our business well for decades; is everything we do in service of the customer and their needs. You would honestly be amazed at the loyalty and trust this builds over time.

Anyway just some food for thought. I think I will be calling this my new home for now - it feels very much like the Reddit of old right now, a feeling I haven't felt for a great age.

Edit:

This might be a caching issue - Tildes mods have edited this post's title accordingly.

Anyway, this issue is concerning, as many people deleted their comments and accounts. Now the accounts are gone but the comments are back. Intentional or not, Reddit should fix this asap and communicate. This isn't acceptable.

Edit 2, 16 days after the original post:

For the 4th or 5th time, comments are popping back. Most of them in their original form, very few (2 out of 25) still edited as "[deleted]"

Original post:

(I know, more reddit stuff, sorry)

On June 16, four days after the beginning of the current Reddit protests, some users were reporting that their deleted comments were getting restored:

• https://mstdn.games/@chris/110553477682106144
• https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/34112/Heads-up-Reddit-is-quietly-restoring-deleted-AND-overwritten-posts-and

There were doubts if this was intentional or a bug caused by the blackout, or some rollbacks. Hanlon's razor, etc.

I then personally mass-edited my comments to "[removed]" two days ago, and lo & behold, they're getting edited back. And from what I've seen, there's definitely a pattern:

• All restored comments are at least 8-12 months old, so several pages deep in the comments history
• 90% of them are about programming, a few of them on my country's subreddit.
  • (More than half of my comments are on gaming subreddits, they're still edited as "[removed]")
• The vast majority of them have responses
  • (Though most of my comments also have responses)
• They're edited back in "small waves". 15-20 this morning, 4 this evening (so far).

I'm now editing them back twice, hoping that Reddit only keeps the previous version of a comment.

I find Reddit's behavior to be absolutely shameful. I've been on internet forums for nearly 25 years, and I've never seen a site unilaterally and silently decide to un-delete or (un-)edit comments. Never.

It feels like a golden rule of internet has been broken, and I'm surprised to not see more talks about it.

I just saw this post in the /r/ModCoord subreddit, which lists multiple instances of Reddit admins contacting moderator teams of closed subreddits with this message:

Hi everyone,

We are aware that you have chosen to close your community at this time. We are reaching out to find out if any moderators currently on the mod team would be willing to take steps to reopen the community. Subreddits exist for the benefit of the community of users who come to them for support and belonging and in the end, moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Your users rely on your community for information, support, entertainment, and finding connection with others who have similar interests. The ability to find and make these connections is incredibly important to many people and ensuring that active communities are able to remain stable and active (and open) is very important.

Our goal here is to work with the existing mod team to find a path forward and make sure your subreddit is usable for the community which makes its home here. If you are not able or willing to reopen and maintain the community please let us know.

Shit is getting real. The admins are looking for scabs who are willing to cross the picket-line and do the work the strikers are refusing to do.

It's not like this wasn't predictable. We all knew this was coming. It's still surprising to see it actually happen.

In this article from The Verge posted today "While the company does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it won’t force communities to reopen, Reddit also suggests there’s no need for that"

Ironically mere minutes before this article went live, Reddit admins posted this to /r/modsupport.

"Leaving a community you deeply care for and have nurtured for years is a hard choice, but it is a choice some may need to make if they are no longer interested in moderating that community. If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod who wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team."

This statement not only completely contradicts what was "pledged" by Spez, but is also a very clear threat to subreddit moderators telling them to fall in line or get replaced by someone who will.

More articles that came out today about this subject:

Kotaku: Reddit's CEO Is Just Making Everything Worse

NBC: Reddit CEO slams protest leaders, saying he'll change rules that favor ‘landed gentry’

MacRumors: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators From Subreddits Continuing Apollo-Related Blackouts

ARS Technica: As the Reddit war rages on, community trust is the casualty

NPR: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: 'It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company'

The full Verge interview Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview

@Deimos can tell us how many bans we've had so far on Tildes. Last count I knew was in the 50s months back, and some of those were the same person - out of 13,000 users. I'm sure it's rising right now, I'm also pretty sure it's still under a hundred, and I don't actually care if it's 1500. (Edit: It was four new bans, omg so nazi.)

If you take the time to learn something about social forums, you'll discover that 1% of the users cause 90% of the problems. Tildes will ban that 1% aggressively. Act like an asshole, attack someone, and you will find the door. You do not however have to tiptoe around like there are landmines here - nobody is going to ban you unless you start attacking other users or trolling all the time. You are in fact allowed to swear here, just not at people. Take a lesson from Louis Black - rants are best when aimed at inanimate objects. :)

Have you ever been to a nice big social party? Did you act like an asshole there? Did the bouncer throw you off the balcony? Probably not. That's because you didn't punch people in the face, piss all over the kitchen floor, or set the living room rug on fire while you were there (I hope). Try pretending that this is a real world party and adjust your behaviors accordingly. It is really not that difficult. Extend people here the same courtesy at a minimum that you would for a real world social gathering - maybe even go as far as you would for a black tie affair. The rest of us would appreciate it, I promise.

I'm sure by now most of you know about /r/redditalternatives. It's an old subreddit that has been collecting links to anything and everything even remotely like a social site for years that came out of the 2015 blackouts. Most of their favorites are long dead, and most of the ones they love now will be dead in a few years. They've been telling us we would be dead in two months for the last five years - which tells you how much their average user knows about social software. They are not exactly well read on the topic.

They are a useful link archive, and also a place for people to whine about the bans they've earned from other websites, or to shill for their own websites. Plenty of astrotrurfing for lemmy and squabbles going on there. Some of you folks are over there right now trying to sell them on Tildes, or worrying about the complaining about the bans.

I'd advise you not to waste your time commenting in that place. They do not want us there shilling, and you will never convince a redditor of anything due to the mindfuckery that place has inflicted on its users for decades. Let them be. Everyone who gets banned here (or on most other sites) posts a thread about it over there, and always has - this is tradition now. Laugh at it, like I always do. It's Shawshank all over again - everyone in there is innocent, lawyer fucked them.

Tildes was linked in the /r/videos post, which was #1 on reddit and why Deimos has an inbox taller than mount everest today. The 'secret' is out now. You do not need to go into forum warrior mode and try to defend Tildes. That's what your instincts are telling you to do, because 'tribes' are a thing, but it's not the right course of action. I guarantee you will have a better day if you just go for a ten minute walk, right now, rather than posting on reddit.

Frankly, bettervanilla's big collection here is the only useful thing to show up in that place in years, so good on them for giving that place a purpose again.

If you do want to help out, then use your invites. It's better if you pick, rather than just emails and invite threads. You do realize if Deimos tops everyone up to 5 codes, that's almost 100k new invites available and almost 20k people who can send them out, five at a time. This place is already past the point where it can die from the evaporative cooling effect, which did in fact have us on ice for a while there, but that's over now.

Look for conversations not where people are looking for alternatives, but where people are talking about real forums, pining for the old days of the internet, deep discussions, and complaining about cat posts and low effort content. Those are the people who will thank you for telling them about Tildes. Let's not be the same spamming, astroturfing jerks that every other website has become.

Edit: I take it back, this is also a remarkable post about the fediverse's moderation problems and I wish that place had more discussions of that nature. Also, Deimos says he banned 4 people in the last week, out of thousands of new users. Clearly, we're being unreasonable. :P

My account was permanently suspended saying I had violated TOS multiple times, not only is this wrong, my previous suspension was unfair too, but I didn't appeal because it was only 1 week long and I know the state of reddit moderation, I just let it go, now this is getting out of hand, what is wrong? How can an account with so much contribution be suspended unfairly without any valid reason? Something needs to be done, if this continues, it's a matter of time for Reddit to become Facebook, mark my words. Peace ☮️.