When I first joined Reddit I really enjoyed the conversations I had with other people. I don’t really care about internet points and I always just sought out people whose opinions are different than my own to get diverse perspectives. In this way, subreddits centered around a particular point of view would guarantee me a conversation that was engaging and perhaps an opportunity to learn something.
But lately I noticed that moderators on that site have been using their bans to simply silence dissenting opinions and control the narrative and looking through moderator code of conduct it seems that the practice is not discouraged at all.
The first ban I ever received on that site was just a few months ago when I wrote just two sentences in response to someone. My post was not offensive in any way and I was writing in good faith. This was also the first time I ever posted on that subreddit. The moderator who permanently banned me claimed I was just to stupid to be allowed to continue posting in their community.
I am certainly capable of profound stupidity but just not the type one could devise in just a few sentences so I suspect that moderator was not being genuine with me.
Since then I have received two more permanent bans for posts which again were made in good faith and not racist, sexist, or displaying any obvious reason to take such a drastic action. Never a warning that I was violating the rules or a even a temporary ban. When I ask the moderator why, I get “muted”. A permanent ban should be for obvious trolling, spammers or people who repeatedly violate the subreddit rules. Not for just expressing a different opinion.
I feel like a certain breed of moderator has hijacked most of the subreddits I would have once found interesting to participate in. They come with a mandate to advance a specific agenda and it seems like Reddit’s fate has to become just like every other social media website that groups people by their beliefs while re-enforcing and radicalizing them.
Oh and the first moderator that banned me, he is active on the fediverse as well and they have re-created their community on kbin. So I suspect these types of people will eventually control the communities here as well.
Reddit has a huge number of bots and shills who astroturf it like crazy.
I used to hunt bots there as a hobby. It was scary how many there were even back then, and that’s before reddit destroyed the third party mod tools and Bot Defense shut down.
Ah I guess I don’t have context into that side of Reddit but given reddits scale, is a huge number of bots 1% of traffic/posts? 5%, 25%? How bad was it from your experience?
I would have put it at around 5% back then. In some subs (advice subs like AITA and meme subs) it was not uncommon to see two or three bots talking to each other and being upvoted.
Their methods were pretty crude back then so the combination of AI and lack of moderation is probably making it much worse now. In the past couple of years bots have accounted for almost half of all web traffic.
Here’s an interesting example of the kind of work that was being done before reddit put a stop to it.
deleted by creator
From memory about 25% of all traffic is bad bots (malware etc) and the other half is benign if sometimes a bit spammy.