I wouldn't be surprised if the mods of r/politics are assholes, but every time moderation comes up here it's obvious that a lot of folks haven't been on the other side before. Modding sucks ass....
I wouldn't be surprised if the mods of r/politics are assholes, but every time moderation comes up here it's obvious that a lot of folks haven't been on the other side before. Modding sucks ass. People who need to be moderated rarely think they do, you have to be fairly heavy-handed if you want a large community to not be an absolute shithole, especially one that is political in nature, people constantly try to rules-lawyer you, and pretty much no matter what you do somebody is going to be mad at you. There's absolutely no fucking winning, and I can't imagine anybody being a mod in r/politics for long before they'll be a complete mess.
Yeah, I moderate a subreddit of about 50k folks and a discord with a few thousand people and a lesson I've learned the hard way is that it's generally better to be kind of blunt and heavy-handed...
Yeah, I moderate a subreddit of about 50k folks and a discord with a few thousand people and a lesson I've learned the hard way is that it's generally better to be kind of blunt and heavy-handed upfront. It sucks, but letting things slide for fear of looking unfriendly or draconian has INVARIABLY resulted in much worse situations down the line.
I would genuinely rather not be doing it a lot of the time, but the space I moderate is a safe space for many people and is one of the very few trans-friendly spaces for the topic. I want it to exist and for it to exist as it does it requires this kind of work.
Yeah, I always come back to this post on "evaporative cooling" in communities, and I think it's especially important if you want to be a friendly place for marginalized folks.
Yeah, I always come back to this post on "evaporative cooling" in communities, and I think it's especially important if you want to be a friendly place for marginalized folks.
You can be firm/strict without being an asshole though. I ran a few different defaults plus various other subs for about 5-6 years until 2018, and we had some amazing vibes and team members who...
You can be firm/strict without being an asshole though. I ran a few different defaults plus various other subs for about 5-6 years until 2018, and we had some amazing vibes and team members who legitimately enjoyed helping people. I can remember ousting a few mods who made a habit of disrespecting users and overstepping. We also had really well written modmail response macros in our mod toolbox that kept our language consistent regardless of which mod was responding (initial guardrails basically). That said, I never moderated a subreddit remotely as polarizing and divisive as /r/politics. It must be an absolute grind.
I used to moderate a relatively big (top 100 sized) subreddit. It was about a quarter the size of r/politics when I was a moderator. I want to talk a bit about what happened and why, with a bit of...
I used to moderate a relatively big (top 100 sized) subreddit. It was about a quarter the size of r/politics when I was a moderator. I want to talk a bit about what happened and why, with a bit of glance "behind the curtain" I guess.
You had an interaction with one moderator of r/politics, not with all r/politics mods. With how modmail is, a moderator responded, responded a second time, and then filed it away. There is probably very little oversight from the rest of the moderation team; it's likely that many members of the team are pretty disengaged and don't even know what happened. While that's not good either, it's different from the whole team being immature on hostile. Also, other engaged moderators may not have any idea about what happened; the moderator who handled the mail could do what they do and then archive the mail so unless there is a moderator specifically in charge of managing how the mod team interacts with people and reviewing closed modmails, they might not even know.
Moderators also deal with a lot of mail from their community, and a lot of it is vitriolic. After a while, it is easy to see vitriol in comments when none was intended. For example something like "Hey, have you guys thought about implementing link flair?" can get processed as "Hey dummies. Here is a very simple feature that I see you have failed to implement, because you are stupid." That's not a fair way for moderators to interpret what was said, but with the constant stream of vile stuff that gets sent at them, it can be difficult not to process things negatively.
This point may be a bit difficult to hear; moderators often receive ideas on how to run a subreddit from people who have no demonstrable knowledge about how to do it. As a moderator, we received unsolicited ideas multiple times a month, and always by people who presented it as something like this: "I have this great idea I've never seen anyone talk about. I think the subreddit would be great if we did [x]. I'd be happy to help!" I have no recollection of a single instance of unsolicited advice coming up with an idea that was both implementable and beneficial. Without a clear idea of what moderator tools were available, almost all of the ideas weren't something that could actually be done, and most of them boiled down to people saying things like "you need to remove things like [this]" or "you need to let votes do their job".
With larger communities, there is an issue of scale. When a community has a million members, you can't know very many of the people, and when you don't know someone, you don't really understand the tone that comes through their writing, so things that are intended as polite can sound blunt, things that are intended to be humorous can sound scathing, and things that are earnest can sound ironic. The issues of text based communication are only exacerbated by reddit's overt negativity.
Finally, the only recourse for a moderator to move on is often muting. Sometimes there's time to have multiple back and forth interactions with someone and sometimes there is not. I don't think it's good that reddit's tooling is like this, but moderators have to work with the very limited tools that they are given.
This is not a defence of any moderator being hostile to their community. I think that if a moderator acts poorly, they should generally be removed. But these types of interactions are almost inevitable on reddit because moderators are not given sufficient tools to manage communities at scale, and it leaves them burned out and unable to properly deal with individuals. I'm not saying it's okay for a moderator to act in the way you have described - it is not okay - but I am saying that it is an inevitability given how moderators are treated by, and (un)supported by, reddit admins and communities.
I've never been a big fan of people on Reddit sharing personal messages ( even public posts ) on different subreddits or forums for "naming and shaming".
I've never been a big fan of people on Reddit sharing personal messages ( even public posts ) on different subreddits or forums for "naming and shaming".
I didn't look at it that way. I've only seen redditors posting other people's content elsewhere, without their permission, as a means of shaming them and I will not do that.
I didn't look at it that way. I've only seen redditors posting other people's content elsewhere, without their permission, as a means of shaming them and I will not do that.
I think there is a difference between telling people about a private conversation and posting a private conversation "transcript" without their permission.
I think there is a difference between telling people about a private conversation and posting a private conversation "transcript" without their permission.
Unsurprising, I feel like mods of big subreddits often care more about having the power than using their power to be effective moderators. It was one of the things that annoyed me most about using...
Unsurprising, I feel like mods of big subreddits often care more about having the power than using their power to be effective moderators. It was one of the things that annoyed me most about using Reddit.
I've been a mod of a medium sized subreddit, so I tend to give mods the benefit of the doubt. You get many, many, negative interactions with users. I really tried to be polite and friendly, but...
I've been a mod of a medium sized subreddit, so I tend to give mods the benefit of the doubt. You get many, many, negative interactions with users. I really tried to be polite and friendly, but the responses I got were so flagrantly immature, narrow minded, and hostile I had to say something.
I also modded a couple of medium sized subreddits, but I can't imagine how much worse r/politics must be. I don't doubt that the mods are assholes, but it's hard to imagine anybody who isn't...
I also modded a couple of medium sized subreddits, but I can't imagine how much worse r/politics must be. I don't doubt that the mods are assholes, but it's hard to imagine anybody who isn't modding a sub of that size/nature.
100000% These mods have tried gaslighting me multiple times. I once said simply "The Gerontocracy is wavering" in response to someone dying of old age and got banned for inciting violence and...
100000%
These mods have tried gaslighting me multiple times.
I once said simply "The Gerontocracy is wavering" in response to someone dying of old age and got banned for inciting violence and celebrating death.
I've also called them out for shadowbanning/shadowremoving my comments they gaslit me saying that my comment wasn't popular, despite me having proof the comment didn't show up publicly.
Why not remove the comment, send a private note quoting the number of a rule, make a note, and wait to see if the person has a pattern of bad comments?
Why not remove the comment, send a private note quoting the number of a rule, make a note, and wait to see if the person has a pattern of bad comments?
You've created a false dichotomy here; it's not either a banning or a removal / note / wait period. If I were the moderator reviewing this, then the following would be done: comment would have...
You've created a false dichotomy here; it's not either a banning or a removal / note / wait period.
If I were the moderator reviewing this, then the following would be done:
comment would have been removed
removals all get a message about why
infraction recorded
if this was the first infraction, a one-day temporary ban would be issued
if this was a subsequent infraction, then whatever the relevant infraction penalty was
if this was the ultimate allowed infraction, a permanent ban.
in (almost)all cases, messages would be sent
in (almost) all cases bans are appealable
As to why not wait and see, well Reddit has made the really really smart and useful idea to allow people to hide their profiles so that you can't review them, so you can't actually check the history of someone to see if they have a pattern of bad comments, so that's not a thing you can do anymore without a lot of extra tooling. However, kept track of how many times people had been banned.
Sometimes it would just be vibes though. If someone used a slur of any kind, they would be immediately permanently banned, and it would be a hard sell to appeal that ban.
Edit: I had to add in an almost up there because we did have a few frequent flyers on the ban lists that would evade bans, but were actually pretty easy to track when they made a new account; they were not to be interacted with in any way. I am sure that there were a couple of times that someone got unfortunately false flagged and felt like the mod team was just stonewalling them, and that's unfortunate.
I don't see how you got all of the points you made, from my point that banning someone over one non-extreme comment is overreacting. It doesn't work for everyone, but for many people a removed...
I don't see how you got all of the points you made, from my point that banning someone over one non-extreme comment is overreacting. It doesn't work for everyone, but for many people a removed comment with explanation about violating a rule is enough. If it turns out they are one of those redditors where it was not a one-off comment temp banning is the next response, and then permanent banning. Banning over a one non-extreme, non-harsh comment is heavy handed.
The subreddits that I moderated had a set of procedures for moderators to follow, so what I was explaining was when I said "I would have considered banning you" what I meant was that the user...
The subreddits that I moderated had a set of procedures for moderators to follow, so what I was explaining was when I said "I would have considered banning you" what I meant was that the user would go through the moderation process. You seemed to assume that what I meant was "immediate permanent ban" which is fair based on what I said, be so I wanted to explain the actual process that I shortened to "would have banned you".
We did not go with your option of just warming, because we found it ineffective, and it introduced a qualitative judgment that we tried to get rid of, so there was a standard set of rules that guided how moderators would deal with infractions.
And to be clear, my stance is that this is an infraction; for a simple mistake, there would be a removal with an explanation. For a crappy comment like the one above, it would be done as an infraction, and I guess that's where the qualitative judgment is.
Not who you asked, but I was recently permanently banned from a subreddit based on my first comment, which violated a rule that I didn't expect. I should have carefully read the rules before...
Not who you asked, but I was recently permanently banned from a subreddit based on my first comment, which violated a rule that I didn't expect. I should have carefully read the rules before submitting but I thought I was familiar with the vibe from lurking and I just didn't think to check. It sucks, but that's how reddit operates. I would have much preferred a warning or a temporary ban as I didn't intend to violate anything. So it goes.
I don't know, I wasn't celebrating the death, saying it was a good thing, and the death wasn't the result of violence. The fact is, we do have a gerontocracy by definition given the average age of...
I don't know, I wasn't celebrating the death, saying it was a good thing, and the death wasn't the result of violence.
The fact is, we do have a gerontocracy by definition given the average age of those in power, and when one of those people who's presence contributes to why we define it as a gerontocratic system dies of old age and is replaced by a younger person, the gerontocracy is, by definition, wavering. This is just a fact and it's inevitably going to continue to happen given we haven't cured aging.
I'm autistic and I say literally what I mean, so I think in this case a lot of people are trying to read between the lines and are confusing an admittedly insensitive comment with a rule breaking celebration of violence or death.
I apologize I had my head up my ass while writing this. blah blah Since you are autistic, I will let you know that the way that you have expressed this is not okay. I understand what you're...
I apologize I had my head up my ass while writing this.
blah blah
Since you are autistic, I will let you know that the way that you have expressed this is not okay. I understand what you're intention was, but the way that you have written it is not good, be and I would implore you to not phrase it like anymore. Whether you intend it or not, language had nuance and flavor; even though you don't intend the nuance and flavor that you're using, be that doesn't make it ok.
As an example of how intent and result are not always related: if someone was going 50 in a 30 zone and were pulled over, would they be able to get out of the ticket by saying "I wasn't intending to speed, and did not realize that I could be perceived as spending. I think you are putting more intent into my actions than I had, and reading between the lines!"
You would still (rightly) get as ticket for that. And similarly, be moderators should still hold you to account for writing something like what you have written.
I want to push back on this, because your analogy does not actually map to what happened here. Speeding is a strict liability violation. Intent is irrelevant because that law is objective,...
I want to push back on this, because your analogy does not actually map to what happened here.
Speeding is a strict liability violation. Intent is irrelevant because that law is objective, measurable, and explicit. If you exceed the posted speed limit, you have broken the law, full stop.
That is not what this situation is.
What I said was a four-word factual statement. It did not celebrate death, advocate violence, or endorse harm. The only way it becomes a rule violation is if additional intent, subtext, or moral positioning is projected onto it that is not present in the words themselves.
That distinction matters. This was not a case of “you broke a clear rule regardless of intent.” This was a case of people inferring an attitude or implication that I did not state, and then treating that inference as if it were explicitly expressed.
I am not arguing that the comment was sensitive or polite. I already acknowledged it was crude. But crudeness or discomfort is not the same thing as celebrating death or inciting violence, which are the actual standards being invoked here. Unless we want to admit out loud right now that stated rules don't actually matter and the real rules are unspoken and unwritten social rules nobody explicitly talks about but can be selectively enforced by anyone indiscriminately.
Since you are autistic, I will let you know that the way that you have expressed this is not okay.
This positions me as needing instruction on basic communication rather than engaging with a disagreement about interpretation.
Being autistic does not mean I am unaware of how to communicate or that language doesn't have social impact. It means I tend to use literal language and expect others to respond to what is actually said, not what they assume must be meant.
I fundamentally disagree with a communication norm where people inject unstated intent into literal statements and then punish the speaker for that imagined subtext. That approach disproportionately harms autistic people, but it also undermines clear communication in general.
At worst, what I said was insensitive. That makes it crude at best and disrespectful at worst, not violent, not celebratory, and not a rule violation.
I apologize I had my head up my ass while writing this. blah blah Analogies do not have to be perfect to help illustrate a point. What I'm trying to get at with the analogy is that to the...
I apologize I had my head up my ass while writing this.
blah blah
Analogies do not have to be perfect to help illustrate a point. What I'm trying to get at with the analogy is that to the moderator that did the ban, that was a really good analogy. There are rules for how we converse about people, and you broke the rule.
This positions me as needing instruction on basic communication rather than engaging with a disagreement about interpretation.
To be clear, your autism is not relevant to my point, which is that you said something that most people would parse as "something that sucks". And I'm not saying that you need instruction on basic communication because you shared that you have autism. I am saying that you need instruction on communication because many people would read what you wrote and parse it as something that is celebratory of someone's death.
I fundamentally disagree with a communication norm where people inject unstated intent into literal statements
I understand that it is difficult to work with both connotations and denotations and that you seem like you only want to deal with the denotative meanings of what you are saying. The reality is that, especially in text on the internet, there are connotations to what you are saying. The fact that you want to fundamentally reject that people are going to try to interpret what you are saying is no different from me saying that I fundamentally reject the system of capitalism; it's fine to want to live in a world where the things we fundamentally want to reject don't happen, but the reality is that we do not live in that world.
People are going to look at the words that you write and try to find the meaning in them. In choosing the words above, "The Gerontocracy is wavering", you have picked words that bring with them a certain connotative meaning. People can and will interpret written language and because of the imperfection of language, what is received is not always what is intended. This other moderator and I, we are giving you feedback that the words that you have chosen to use bring with them a bunch of other things; glibness, celebration of death, and the phrasing you have used is generally unsavoury. What is received from the statement that you said will, more often than not, be seen as celebrating death, being glib, and generally being unseemly and unpleasant.
You have two options:
you can continue to use language like this, and people will think you are glib,unfeeling, and celebratory of someone dying
you can listen and adjust and try to pick different words that do not have this connotation to them
What is not reasonable to do is to say "everyone else has to adjust their language so that only literal interpretations are allowed forever". That's not going to happen; other people will not adjust.
I acknowledge that you retracted your previous comments, but I do want to be clear about where I stand. I reject neurotypical communication norms that require me to constantly anticipate, manage,...
I acknowledge that you retracted your previous comments, but I do want to be clear about where I stand.
I reject neurotypical communication norms that require me to constantly anticipate, manage, and pre-empt other people's emotional reactions to statements I mean literally when I state that I'm being literal.
I think that trying to anticipate the literally infinite amount of interpretations and reactions that are defined by every individual's unique life experience and perspective is exhausting, a waste of energy, and contains an extremely wide margin for error and accuracy.
Especially when I've been told my entire life that I am responsible for my reactions and emotions, and I can't expect everyone to cater to me. It's a hypocrisy that I'm being told to manage my emotions and reactions to things people do and say AND that I need to manage the emotions and reactions of others to the things I do and say unintentionally, and in this case things I didn't even actually say.
I understand that this kind of thing is the dominant norm, but I don't agree that it's correct, fair, or something I'm obligated to comply with. Just because it's normal doesn't make it right.
What I'm hearing from your explanation is that intent is treated as secondary to how others might interpret or feel about a statement. I disagree with that framing. If intent is irrelevant when I speak, then intent shouldn't suddenly become authoritative and used to validate a person's reaction when they assign an assumed intent onto me.
Because if you assume a subtext that isn't there, then you're assuming that I had intended that subtext, because if I hadn't intended it then you're reacting to something you've completely imagined out of thin air. That asymmetry is exactly what I'm rejecting.
Now, your emotions are valid if something I said triggered something unintended based on something from your experience or past or trauma. However those emotions are yours to manage and deal with when it's been clarified that it was not intentional.
I'm aware this choice has social consequences. I accept that. But I keep a closeknit circle of like-minded people in my life precisely because I have little tolerance for a culture that prioritizes assumed subtext over explicit meaning. I'm pretty happy with that and trust me it's great not getting into constant arguments and communication issues that I find so prevalent in neurotypical cultures. Nothing beats direct problem solving and direct clear communication and emotional intelligence.
I'm not asking others to change how they communicate. I'm stating that I won't police my language to accommodate assumptions I didn't make or meanings I didn't express. I will however clarify myself and acknowledge when something I've said has been taken out of context.
In the case with Reddit and the ban, I reject the concept that I'm getting banned for an unspoken rule from something that is interpreted badly only when assigned meanings and intent that aren't there. Doesn't mean I don't know why I was banned, I just reject the notion that was acceptable.
All this within reason of course. Of course I'm not talking about when people are being intentionally bad faith in order to troll or get reactions out of others. Obviously that's not ok and not something I'm defending in this comment.
I retract two previous comments and apologize for making them. They were rude and did not positively contribute to anything. I've edited them to reflect this.
I retract two previous comments and apologize for making them. They were rude and did not positively contribute to anything. I've edited them to reflect this.
Unless something has changed in the last year or so, Reddit mods don't have any ability to shadowban or "shadow remove" comments. It's just not a feature that has ever been part of the moderator...
Unless something has changed in the last year or so, Reddit mods don't have any ability to shadowban or "shadow remove" comments. It's just not a feature that has ever been part of the moderator toolbox, unless it has been added recently.
Also, that comment is certainly toeing the line of violating that rule. I can see a perspective where it is, and one where it isn't, it's a grey area. If a major politician died, I can just about guarantee yours was not the only comment removed for violating that rule, and I suspect that dozens or hundreds were worse. These people are volunteer mods, they can't stop and ask ever poster - "hey, did you intend to violate this rule or did you intend your comment to mean something different?", you'll fucking go crazy(er). You just remove and move on. It's not personal, but if you want to keep a place the size and nature of r/politics from being an absolute cesspit (and honestly it's hard to argue that it's not already pretty bad, but I promise it could be SO much worse) that's how you have to operate.
For many, many years it was possible to write an automod filter to automatically remove posts and comments from particular authors without letting them know. Why is "the gerontocracy is wavering"...
Unless something has changed in the last year or so, Reddit mods don't have any ability to shadowban or "shadow remove" comments.
For many, many years it was possible to write an automod filter to automatically remove posts and comments from particular authors without letting them know.
Also, that comment is certainly toeing the line of violating that rule.
Why is "the gerontocracy is wavering" a bad comment?
Wouldn't you be aware that comments are being removed? I haven't experienced this and it's been a good while since I left reddit, but that doesn't seem the same as a shadowban. I could be...
For many, many years it was possible to write an automod filter to automatically remove posts and comments from particular authors without letting them know.
Wouldn't you be aware that comments are being removed? I haven't experienced this and it's been a good while since I left reddit, but that doesn't seem the same as a shadowban. I could be mistaken, though.
Why is "the gerontocracy is wavering" a bad comment?
I didn't say it was a bad comment, I said it was on the line of violating that particular rule. In the context of news of a particular (old) politician dying, I can absolutely see it being taken as celebrating their death. I can also see it not being taken that way - that's what I was saying about the difficulty of handling comments like this in bulk.
No. From the start on Reddit your comments still appear on your profile/comments section even if they are removed. You have to go into the subreddit and find your comment to see it gone.
Wouldn't you be aware that comments are being removed?
No.
From the start on Reddit your comments still appear on your profile/comments section even if they are removed. You have to go into the subreddit and find your comment to see it gone.
we can do this to remove everything from someone. type: any author: name: [username1, username2] action: remove action_reason:"idiots" I solo mod a sub with ~2m -- without this rule, I'd be screwed :)
Okay but that's not a shadowban? It's automated removal, sure, but a shadowban involves a user being banned, but the site still behaves (to them) as if their posts/comments are going through. Or...
Okay but that's not a shadowban? It's automated removal, sure, but a shadowban involves a user being banned, but the site still behaves (to them) as if their posts/comments are going through. Or am I misremembering?
yeah, its a faux-shadowban. The user has no idea their stuff is being removed unless they check it from an incognito window. So its sort of the same but localized. In my sub, I've got a few...
yeah, its a faux-shadowban. The user has no idea their stuff is being removed unless they check it from an incognito window. So its sort of the same but localized.
In my sub, I've got a few hundred people in this condition and some of them have been spewing vile stuff for years, but nobody sees it.
For what it's worth, when I said "shadowbanned/shadow-removed" it's because I don't know a better explanation of how to describe crowd controlled comments that show up to the user who posted it...
For what it's worth, when I said "shadowbanned/shadow-removed" it's because I don't know a better explanation of how to describe crowd controlled comments that show up to the user who posted it but does not show up publicly or to anyone else until approved, all without any kind of notification that the comment was filtered.
If you have any better ideas that better describe what happens, I'm all ears.
I elaborated in another comment, but I was not accusing them of specifically targeting my comment, I was referring to the crowd control mod tool filtering the comment for approval. I reached out...
I elaborated in another comment, but I was not accusing them of specifically targeting my comment, I was referring to the crowd control mod tool filtering the comment for approval. I reached out to ask them to approve the comment and to ask what I needed to change to avoid the filter and remain in rules, and they said that it was public and just not popular, despite me being able to prove the comment wasn't public.
And the comment that got shadow-removed was not the same as the gerontocracy one. I got banned for the gerontocracy comment, but I got gaslit when asking them to approve my crowd control filtered comment.
A moderator can only remove comments in a way where it would show [deleted] for everyone, so you were accusing them of something that is not possible for them to do. Proof that the comment was not...
A moderator can only remove comments in a way where it would show [deleted] for everyone, so you were accusing them of something that is not possible for them to do. Proof that the comment was not publicly visible is not proof that a particular person or group was responsible. The comment was shadowbanned by either an admin or by reddit's overarching auto-detection system. Unless the person you were talking to was a site admin (rather than just a subreddit moderator) they were not gaslighting you, they genuinely have no mechanism to interfere with the visibility of your comment in that way.
I hope you weren't rude to them based off your own incorrect assumption.
This is why being a reddit moderator sucks. A vast majority of reddit users do not understand reddit. This is reddit's fault rather than the individual, really.
First off, I realized that the way I worded my comment made it sound like they could deliberately shadowban/shadowremove specific comments intentionally. I meant "them" as in the subreddit, I did...
First off, I realized that the way I worded my comment made it sound like they could deliberately shadowban/shadowremove specific comments intentionally. I meant "them" as in the subreddit, I did not mean "them" as in the individual specifically targeted me. Frankly that's a stretched assumption given the lack of specificity in what I said.
I was referring to the crowd control tool where comments that meet certain criteria or keywords do not get posted publicly and only show up to the user who posted them until approved by a moderator.
And just to be clear, I am a mod. I know how to work the crowd control tool. I know what it does and how it works. I will often message the mods of other subreddits to ask them to approve my crowd controlled comment if I notice it isn't visible when opening the comment in a private window, which is what happened with /r/politics in this instance.
Besides, I said that they gaslit me by saying that the comment was visible and public and that it just didn't have any upvotes or replies because what I said wasn't popular or upvote worthy, despite me having dealt with this before and having evidence it was NOT in fact visible publicly. I didn't say I was providing evidence of being targeted.
I've had similar experiences. I got the mod to reread my comment, they admitted I wasn't "inciting violence".....BUT I was "celebrating" someone's death ( natural causes ). A while after that they...
I've had similar experiences.
I got the mod to reread my comment, they admitted I wasn't "inciting violence".....BUT I was "celebrating" someone's death ( natural causes ). A while after that they updated their rules ( long form ) to include "celebrating" someone's death.
Another time I got my comment removed and locked after I told another author she wouldn't be much of a feminist if she refused to vote for a future candidate who would help women, but would be a man. That comment first started me thinking many of those mods just aren't mature. I felt like I was talking to a 20 year old wmst major.
I wouldn't be surprised if the mods of r/politics are assholes, but every time moderation comes up here it's obvious that a lot of folks haven't been on the other side before. Modding sucks ass. People who need to be moderated rarely think they do, you have to be fairly heavy-handed if you want a large community to not be an absolute shithole, especially one that is political in nature, people constantly try to rules-lawyer you, and pretty much no matter what you do somebody is going to be mad at you. There's absolutely no fucking winning, and I can't imagine anybody being a mod in r/politics for long before they'll be a complete mess.
Yeah, I moderate a subreddit of about 50k folks and a discord with a few thousand people and a lesson I've learned the hard way is that it's generally better to be kind of blunt and heavy-handed upfront. It sucks, but letting things slide for fear of looking unfriendly or draconian has INVARIABLY resulted in much worse situations down the line.
I would genuinely rather not be doing it a lot of the time, but the space I moderate is a safe space for many people and is one of the very few trans-friendly spaces for the topic. I want it to exist and for it to exist as it does it requires this kind of work.
Yeah, I always come back to this post on "evaporative cooling" in communities, and I think it's especially important if you want to be a friendly place for marginalized folks.
You can be firm/strict without being an asshole though. I ran a few different defaults plus various other subs for about 5-6 years until 2018, and we had some amazing vibes and team members who legitimately enjoyed helping people. I can remember ousting a few mods who made a habit of disrespecting users and overstepping. We also had really well written modmail response macros in our mod toolbox that kept our language consistent regardless of which mod was responding (initial guardrails basically). That said, I never moderated a subreddit remotely as polarizing and divisive as /r/politics. It must be an absolute grind.
I used to moderate a relatively big (top 100 sized) subreddit. It was about a quarter the size of r/politics when I was a moderator. I want to talk a bit about what happened and why, with a bit of glance "behind the curtain" I guess.
You had an interaction with one moderator of r/politics, not with all r/politics mods. With how modmail is, a moderator responded, responded a second time, and then filed it away. There is probably very little oversight from the rest of the moderation team; it's likely that many members of the team are pretty disengaged and don't even know what happened. While that's not good either, it's different from the whole team being immature on hostile. Also, other engaged moderators may not have any idea about what happened; the moderator who handled the mail could do what they do and then archive the mail so unless there is a moderator specifically in charge of managing how the mod team interacts with people and reviewing closed modmails, they might not even know.
Moderators also deal with a lot of mail from their community, and a lot of it is vitriolic. After a while, it is easy to see vitriol in comments when none was intended. For example something like "Hey, have you guys thought about implementing link flair?" can get processed as "Hey dummies. Here is a very simple feature that I see you have failed to implement, because you are stupid." That's not a fair way for moderators to interpret what was said, but with the constant stream of vile stuff that gets sent at them, it can be difficult not to process things negatively.
This point may be a bit difficult to hear; moderators often receive ideas on how to run a subreddit from people who have no demonstrable knowledge about how to do it. As a moderator, we received unsolicited ideas multiple times a month, and always by people who presented it as something like this: "I have this great idea I've never seen anyone talk about. I think the subreddit would be great if we did [x]. I'd be happy to help!" I have no recollection of a single instance of unsolicited advice coming up with an idea that was both implementable and beneficial. Without a clear idea of what moderator tools were available, almost all of the ideas weren't something that could actually be done, and most of them boiled down to people saying things like "you need to remove things like [this]" or "you need to let votes do their job".
With larger communities, there is an issue of scale. When a community has a million members, you can't know very many of the people, and when you don't know someone, you don't really understand the tone that comes through their writing, so things that are intended as polite can sound blunt, things that are intended to be humorous can sound scathing, and things that are earnest can sound ironic. The issues of text based communication are only exacerbated by reddit's overt negativity.
Finally, the only recourse for a moderator to move on is often muting. Sometimes there's time to have multiple back and forth interactions with someone and sometimes there is not. I don't think it's good that reddit's tooling is like this, but moderators have to work with the very limited tools that they are given.
This is not a defence of any moderator being hostile to their community. I think that if a moderator acts poorly, they should generally be removed. But these types of interactions are almost inevitable on reddit because moderators are not given sufficient tools to manage communities at scale, and it leaves them burned out and unable to properly deal with individuals. I'm not saying it's okay for a moderator to act in the way you have described - it is not okay - but I am saying that it is an inevitability given how moderators are treated by, and (un)supported by, reddit admins and communities.
Can you share the messages?
I've never been a big fan of people on Reddit sharing personal messages ( even public posts ) on different subreddits or forums for "naming and shaming".
But that’s kind of what you are doing, except you aren’t giving their side of the story?
I didn't look at it that way. I've only seen redditors posting other people's content elsewhere, without their permission, as a means of shaming them and I will not do that.
But aren’t you shaming them with this post? But in a way where nobody can judge whether they deserve that shame?
I think there is a difference between telling people about a private conversation and posting a private conversation "transcript" without their permission.
Unsurprising, I feel like mods of big subreddits often care more about having the power than using their power to be effective moderators. It was one of the things that annoyed me most about using Reddit.
I've been a mod of a medium sized subreddit, so I tend to give mods the benefit of the doubt. You get many, many, negative interactions with users. I really tried to be polite and friendly, but the responses I got were so flagrantly immature, narrow minded, and hostile I had to say something.
I also modded a couple of medium sized subreddits, but I can't imagine how much worse r/politics must be. I don't doubt that the mods are assholes, but it's hard to imagine anybody who isn't modding a sub of that size/nature.
100000%
These mods have tried gaslighting me multiple times.
I once said simply "The Gerontocracy is wavering" in response to someone dying of old age and got banned for inciting violence and celebrating death.
I've also called them out for shadowbanning/shadowremoving my comments they gaslit me saying that my comment wasn't popular, despite me having proof the comment didn't show up publicly.
I would also have considered banning you for saying that. That fucking sucks.
Why not remove the comment, send a private note quoting the number of a rule, make a note, and wait to see if the person has a pattern of bad comments?
You've created a false dichotomy here; it's not either a banning or a removal / note / wait period.
If I were the moderator reviewing this, then the following would be done:
As to why not wait and see, well Reddit has made the really really smart and useful idea to allow people to hide their profiles so that you can't review them, so you can't actually check the history of someone to see if they have a pattern of bad comments, so that's not a thing you can do anymore without a lot of extra tooling. However, kept track of how many times people had been banned.
Sometimes it would just be vibes though. If someone used a slur of any kind, they would be immediately permanently banned, and it would be a hard sell to appeal that ban.
Edit: I had to add in an almost up there because we did have a few frequent flyers on the ban lists that would evade bans, but were actually pretty easy to track when they made a new account; they were not to be interacted with in any way. I am sure that there were a couple of times that someone got unfortunately false flagged and felt like the mod team was just stonewalling them, and that's unfortunate.
I don't see how you got all of the points you made, from my point that banning someone over one non-extreme comment is overreacting. It doesn't work for everyone, but for many people a removed comment with explanation about violating a rule is enough. If it turns out they are one of those redditors where it was not a one-off comment temp banning is the next response, and then permanent banning. Banning over a one non-extreme, non-harsh comment is heavy handed.
The subreddits that I moderated had a set of procedures for moderators to follow, so what I was explaining was when I said "I would have considered banning you" what I meant was that the user would go through the moderation process. You seemed to assume that what I meant was "immediate permanent ban" which is fair based on what I said, be so I wanted to explain the actual process that I shortened to "would have banned you".
We did not go with your option of just warming, because we found it ineffective, and it introduced a qualitative judgment that we tried to get rid of, so there was a standard set of rules that guided how moderators would deal with infractions.
And to be clear, my stance is that this is an infraction; for a simple mistake, there would be a removal with an explanation. For a crappy comment like the one above, it would be done as an infraction, and I guess that's where the qualitative judgment is.
Not who you asked, but I was recently permanently banned from a subreddit based on my first comment, which violated a rule that I didn't expect. I should have carefully read the rules before submitting but I thought I was familiar with the vibe from lurking and I just didn't think to check. It sucks, but that's how reddit operates. I would have much preferred a warning or a temporary ban as I didn't intend to violate anything. So it goes.
I don't know, I wasn't celebrating the death, saying it was a good thing, and the death wasn't the result of violence.
The fact is, we do have a gerontocracy by definition given the average age of those in power, and when one of those people who's presence contributes to why we define it as a gerontocratic system dies of old age and is replaced by a younger person, the gerontocracy is, by definition, wavering. This is just a fact and it's inevitably going to continue to happen given we haven't cured aging.
I'm autistic and I say literally what I mean, so I think in this case a lot of people are trying to read between the lines and are confusing an admittedly insensitive comment with a rule breaking celebration of violence or death.
I apologize I had my head up my ass while writing this.
blah blah
Since you are autistic, I will let you know that the way that you have expressed this is not okay. I understand what you're intention was, but the way that you have written it is not good, be and I would implore you to not phrase it like anymore. Whether you intend it or not, language had nuance and flavor; even though you don't intend the nuance and flavor that you're using, be that doesn't make it ok.
As an example of how intent and result are not always related: if someone was going 50 in a 30 zone and were pulled over, would they be able to get out of the ticket by saying "I wasn't intending to speed, and did not realize that I could be perceived as spending. I think you are putting more intent into my actions than I had, and reading between the lines!"
You would still (rightly) get as ticket for that. And similarly, be moderators should still hold you to account for writing something like what you have written.
I want to push back on this, because your analogy does not actually map to what happened here.
Speeding is a strict liability violation. Intent is irrelevant because that law is objective, measurable, and explicit. If you exceed the posted speed limit, you have broken the law, full stop.
That is not what this situation is.
What I said was a four-word factual statement. It did not celebrate death, advocate violence, or endorse harm. The only way it becomes a rule violation is if additional intent, subtext, or moral positioning is projected onto it that is not present in the words themselves.
That distinction matters. This was not a case of “you broke a clear rule regardless of intent.” This was a case of people inferring an attitude or implication that I did not state, and then treating that inference as if it were explicitly expressed.
I am not arguing that the comment was sensitive or polite. I already acknowledged it was crude. But crudeness or discomfort is not the same thing as celebrating death or inciting violence, which are the actual standards being invoked here. Unless we want to admit out loud right now that stated rules don't actually matter and the real rules are unspoken and unwritten social rules nobody explicitly talks about but can be selectively enforced by anyone indiscriminately.
This positions me as needing instruction on basic communication rather than engaging with a disagreement about interpretation.
Being autistic does not mean I am unaware of how to communicate or that language doesn't have social impact. It means I tend to use literal language and expect others to respond to what is actually said, not what they assume must be meant.
I fundamentally disagree with a communication norm where people inject unstated intent into literal statements and then punish the speaker for that imagined subtext. That approach disproportionately harms autistic people, but it also undermines clear communication in general.
At worst, what I said was insensitive. That makes it crude at best and disrespectful at worst, not violent, not celebratory, and not a rule violation.
I apologize I had my head up my ass while writing this.
blah blah
Analogies do not have to be perfect to help illustrate a point. What I'm trying to get at with the analogy is that to the moderator that did the ban, that was a really good analogy. There are rules for how we converse about people, and you broke the rule.
To be clear, your autism is not relevant to my point, which is that you said something that most people would parse as "something that sucks". And I'm not saying that you need instruction on basic communication because you shared that you have autism. I am saying that you need instruction on communication because many people would read what you wrote and parse it as something that is celebratory of someone's death.
I understand that it is difficult to work with both connotations and denotations and that you seem like you only want to deal with the denotative meanings of what you are saying. The reality is that, especially in text on the internet, there are connotations to what you are saying. The fact that you want to fundamentally reject that people are going to try to interpret what you are saying is no different from me saying that I fundamentally reject the system of capitalism; it's fine to want to live in a world where the things we fundamentally want to reject don't happen, but the reality is that we do not live in that world.
People are going to look at the words that you write and try to find the meaning in them. In choosing the words above, "The Gerontocracy is wavering", you have picked words that bring with them a certain connotative meaning. People can and will interpret written language and because of the imperfection of language, what is received is not always what is intended. This other moderator and I, we are giving you feedback that the words that you have chosen to use bring with them a bunch of other things; glibness, celebration of death, and the phrasing you have used is generally unsavoury. What is received from the statement that you said will, more often than not, be seen as celebrating death, being glib, and generally being unseemly and unpleasant.
You have two options:
What is not reasonable to do is to say "everyone else has to adjust their language so that only literal interpretations are allowed forever". That's not going to happen; other people will not adjust.
I acknowledge that you retracted your previous comments, but I do want to be clear about where I stand.
I reject neurotypical communication norms that require me to constantly anticipate, manage, and pre-empt other people's emotional reactions to statements I mean literally when I state that I'm being literal.
I think that trying to anticipate the literally infinite amount of interpretations and reactions that are defined by every individual's unique life experience and perspective is exhausting, a waste of energy, and contains an extremely wide margin for error and accuracy.
Especially when I've been told my entire life that I am responsible for my reactions and emotions, and I can't expect everyone to cater to me. It's a hypocrisy that I'm being told to manage my emotions and reactions to things people do and say AND that I need to manage the emotions and reactions of others to the things I do and say unintentionally, and in this case things I didn't even actually say.
I understand that this kind of thing is the dominant norm, but I don't agree that it's correct, fair, or something I'm obligated to comply with. Just because it's normal doesn't make it right.
What I'm hearing from your explanation is that intent is treated as secondary to how others might interpret or feel about a statement. I disagree with that framing. If intent is irrelevant when I speak, then intent shouldn't suddenly become authoritative and used to validate a person's reaction when they assign an assumed intent onto me.
Because if you assume a subtext that isn't there, then you're assuming that I had intended that subtext, because if I hadn't intended it then you're reacting to something you've completely imagined out of thin air. That asymmetry is exactly what I'm rejecting.
Now, your emotions are valid if something I said triggered something unintended based on something from your experience or past or trauma. However those emotions are yours to manage and deal with when it's been clarified that it was not intentional.
I'm aware this choice has social consequences. I accept that. But I keep a closeknit circle of like-minded people in my life precisely because I have little tolerance for a culture that prioritizes assumed subtext over explicit meaning. I'm pretty happy with that and trust me it's great not getting into constant arguments and communication issues that I find so prevalent in neurotypical cultures. Nothing beats direct problem solving and direct clear communication and emotional intelligence.
I'm not asking others to change how they communicate. I'm stating that I won't police my language to accommodate assumptions I didn't make or meanings I didn't express. I will however clarify myself and acknowledge when something I've said has been taken out of context.
In the case with Reddit and the ban, I reject the concept that I'm getting banned for an unspoken rule from something that is interpreted badly only when assigned meanings and intent that aren't there. Doesn't mean I don't know why I was banned, I just reject the notion that was acceptable.
All this within reason of course. Of course I'm not talking about when people are being intentionally bad faith in order to troll or get reactions out of others. Obviously that's not ok and not something I'm defending in this comment.
I retract two previous comments and apologize for making them. They were rude and did not positively contribute to anything. I've edited them to reflect this.
Unless something has changed in the last year or so, Reddit mods don't have any ability to shadowban or "shadow remove" comments. It's just not a feature that has ever been part of the moderator toolbox, unless it has been added recently.
Also, that comment is certainly toeing the line of violating that rule. I can see a perspective where it is, and one where it isn't, it's a grey area. If a major politician died, I can just about guarantee yours was not the only comment removed for violating that rule, and I suspect that dozens or hundreds were worse. These people are volunteer mods, they can't stop and ask ever poster - "hey, did you intend to violate this rule or did you intend your comment to mean something different?", you'll fucking go crazy(er). You just remove and move on. It's not personal, but if you want to keep a place the size and nature of r/politics from being an absolute cesspit (and honestly it's hard to argue that it's not already pretty bad, but I promise it could be SO much worse) that's how you have to operate.
For many, many years it was possible to write an automod filter to automatically remove posts and comments from particular authors without letting them know.
Why is "the gerontocracy is wavering" a bad comment?
Wouldn't you be aware that comments are being removed? I haven't experienced this and it's been a good while since I left reddit, but that doesn't seem the same as a shadowban. I could be mistaken, though.
I didn't say it was a bad comment, I said it was on the line of violating that particular rule. In the context of news of a particular (old) politician dying, I can absolutely see it being taken as celebrating their death. I can also see it not being taken that way - that's what I was saying about the difficulty of handling comments like this in bulk.
No.
From the start on Reddit your comments still appear on your profile/comments section even if they are removed. You have to go into the subreddit and find your comment to see it gone.
we can do this to remove everything from someone.
I solo mod a sub with ~2m -- without this rule, I'd be screwed :)
Okay but that's not a shadowban? It's automated removal, sure, but a shadowban involves a user being banned, but the site still behaves (to them) as if their posts/comments are going through. Or am I misremembering?
yeah, its a faux-shadowban. The user has no idea their stuff is being removed unless they check it from an incognito window. So its sort of the same but localized.
In my sub, I've got a few hundred people in this condition and some of them have been spewing vile stuff for years, but nobody sees it.
For what it's worth, when I said "shadowbanned/shadow-removed" it's because I don't know a better explanation of how to describe crowd controlled comments that show up to the user who posted it but does not show up publicly or to anyone else until approved, all without any kind of notification that the comment was filtered.
If you have any better ideas that better describe what happens, I'm all ears.
I elaborated in another comment, but I was not accusing them of specifically targeting my comment, I was referring to the crowd control mod tool filtering the comment for approval. I reached out to ask them to approve the comment and to ask what I needed to change to avoid the filter and remain in rules, and they said that it was public and just not popular, despite me being able to prove the comment wasn't public.
And the comment that got shadow-removed was not the same as the gerontocracy one. I got banned for the gerontocracy comment, but I got gaslit when asking them to approve my crowd control filtered comment.
A moderator can only remove comments in a way where it would show
[deleted]for everyone, so you were accusing them of something that is not possible for them to do. Proof that the comment was not publicly visible is not proof that a particular person or group was responsible. The comment was shadowbanned by either an admin or by reddit's overarching auto-detection system. Unless the person you were talking to was a site admin (rather than just a subreddit moderator) they were not gaslighting you, they genuinely have no mechanism to interfere with the visibility of your comment in that way.I hope you weren't rude to them based off your own incorrect assumption.
This is why being a reddit moderator sucks. A vast majority of reddit users do not understand reddit. This is reddit's fault rather than the individual, really.
First off, I realized that the way I worded my comment made it sound like they could deliberately shadowban/shadowremove specific comments intentionally. I meant "them" as in the subreddit, I did not mean "them" as in the individual specifically targeted me. Frankly that's a stretched assumption given the lack of specificity in what I said.
I was referring to the crowd control tool where comments that meet certain criteria or keywords do not get posted publicly and only show up to the user who posted them until approved by a moderator.
And just to be clear, I am a mod. I know how to work the crowd control tool. I know what it does and how it works. I will often message the mods of other subreddits to ask them to approve my crowd controlled comment if I notice it isn't visible when opening the comment in a private window, which is what happened with /r/politics in this instance.
Besides, I said that they gaslit me by saying that the comment was visible and public and that it just didn't have any upvotes or replies because what I said wasn't popular or upvote worthy, despite me having dealt with this before and having evidence it was NOT in fact visible publicly. I didn't say I was providing evidence of being targeted.
I've had similar experiences.
I got the mod to reread my comment, they admitted I wasn't "inciting violence".....BUT I was "celebrating" someone's death ( natural causes ). A while after that they updated their rules ( long form ) to include "celebrating" someone's death.
Another time I got my comment removed and locked after I told another author she wouldn't be much of a feminist if she refused to vote for a future candidate who would help women, but would be a man. That comment first started me thinking many of those mods just aren't mature. I felt like I was talking to a 20 year old wmst major.