> - If you post on /r/conservative you can expect to receive a bunch of bans from unrelated (popular) subs. Doesn't matter what you posted, being associated with that subs "taints" your account enough for some moderators.
You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until the moderators there audit your post history and perform an interview with you to confirm your ideology matches theirs.
If someone does pass the test they’re allowed to comment. If they make a comment that disagrees with the message the moderators want to push, their commenting privilege is revoked.
It’s not a real subreddit. It’s a moderator-curated echo chamber. They run it like a propaganda outlet, only allow approved thought from approved commenters, and ban anyone who steps out of line with the mods.
That’s why every thread you view there will have “load more comments” buttons that never load anything: They remove more comments than you’re allowed to see.
If you say anything remotely controversial anywhere on reddit you will be hunted by a moderator of another sub and then targeted for banning.
I pointed out on a sub that the question on the 4473 (form to buy a firearm) asking if you are a drug user is a 5th amendment violation as it asks you to incriminate yourself to exercise a right.
An Ivy league lawyer, moderator of another sub, about a whole year later, found it, declared that it was illegal legal advice, then had my whole account nuked using his legal credentials to scare reddit into getting rid of me.
> You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until the moderators there audit your post history and perform an interview with you to confirm your ideology matches theirs.
> If someone does pass the test they’re allowed to comment. If they make a comment that disagrees with the message the moderators want to push, their commenting privilege is revoked.
Be that as it may, i dont see how the solution to /r/conservative being a weird echo chamber, is for other subs to be an anti-/r/conservative echochamber. Seems like both are wrong, and two wrongs dont make a right.
I don't see an issue with it, if you are willing to put in the effort to swim in the cesspool that is /r/conservative you don't get to complain when other people find the smell objectionable.
Oh I’m definitely biased, I’m not a huge fan of quasi-fascist morons hiding behind a thin veneer of legitimacy while breaking the law, electing a sex offender, destroying every relationship with their foreign allies and engaging in hilariously blatant corruption.
Nor am I fan of their voters/supporters.
At this point if you don’t oppose them you implicitly support them, the normal rules no longer apply.
To take an apolitical comparison, think about an ordinary crime- a murder, a rape, an arson, etc.
There is some set of people saying "We know that this man murdered these victims. We think that is very bad. We think the murderer should go to prison so that he doesn't murder more people".
Does a neutral centralist say "Yes, the murderer should go to prison" or do they say "I'm remaining central, I don't want to join the side that is condemning the murderer. I think they hate the murderer. I think the murderer should remain free."
My belief is that a neutral centralist agrees to send the murderer to prison. And if someone supports letting the murderer carry on murdering people, then they can reasonably be said to be supporting the murderer rather than claiming to be a centralist on the murder issue.
Your position is as silly as you view the parent's. It's natural for anyone who thinks there are active crimes being committed to not engage in "compromise" until the other side agrees that they are crimes.
For example, I don't think it would be logical for someone who literally believes abortion is murder to bother allying with a side that doesn't believe as such unless there is a bigger crime that is being commited that they both can agree on. See, both sides would agree that that compromising with someone condoning murder for the sake of centrism would be fucking stupid. Obviously no side thinks they're condoning murder, they simplly don't agree that the action constitutes murder.
So instead of pointlessly championing centrism for the sake of centrism, it's much more constructive to argue: no, they are not a sex offender, no they are not directly engaging or aiding and abetting corruption, no those foreign allies are not worthy allies because of xyz etc etc.
What a weird time to find out that most of my centrist and conservative friends are actually far left because they mostly agree with such an assessment.
Then again, I suppose definitions can differ. Maybe you have a set of principles and boundaries. Maybe you're just rooting for or against a sports team.
The craziest thing for me was seeing my father, whom my whole life was an solid Cold War era republican (better dead than red and all that) started posting about nationalizing companies Trump was beefing with.
On the other hand, there are some old jokes hiding in there somewhere.
Parent poster isn't saying that r/conservative should be banned for that behavior.
Since that sub's arbitrary ban behavior is allowed, other subs banning people for similarly arbitrary reasons (like people who have been vetted by its mod circle into being allowed to post there) should be permitted.
Someone disapproving of things isn't grounds for comparing it to a cycle of vengeance that leaves everyone blind.
If you think there's a better set of global rules that reddit should adopt, that's a fair observation. But until it does, it's not fair to call out other subs for mirroring the rules of a problem sub. If it can behave that way, so can they. If it can exist as a safe space for MAGAs, the rest of us are free to create a safe space from MAGAs.
The thing about morality is its about how you "should" behave not how you "can" behave.
> If it can exist as a safe space for MAGAs, the rest of us are free to create a safe space from MAGAs.
If you think its a-ok when /r/conservative does it, then by all means sure. I mostly object to the hypocrisy here. The original comment found /r/conservative's mod policy objectionable. Either it should be ok for everyone or it should be ok for noone. The part i'm objecting to is the implicit idea that its ok when people you like do something but not ok when people you don't like do it.
As long as you apply your moral views consistently i'm fine with it, regardless of whatever they are.
> Should reddit just be a place only for liberal politics?
I should be eating off golden plates and live in a house made of candy, and I shouldn't have to worry about the president's goon squad invading 'liberal antifa cities', or any of the other insane shit that's going on, but life isn't quite living up to my expectations at the moment.
Perhaps when they open up their safe spaces and behave in a civil manner, other communities might take their demands for access more seriously.
All-in-all, if your biggest political concern right now is that you've been banned from a few subreddits because you're a participant in another one, I'm sorry that it's causing you distress. But I'm afraid that your problems aren't ranking very highly on my list of immediate political concerns. When the ship's on fire, I frankly don't care about the poor feng shui of the deck chairs.
You're. having a conversation with a made up person in your head. Sorry that happened to you. There are so many things in this reply that I have not said or don't think that must be my only conclusion. I'm quite confident that if we had this conversation in person it wouldn't derail so quick, or at least I would hope so.
Huh? It sounds to me like this is arguing one should be OK with /r/conservative doing it (and joining up, even) but then not OK that other subs do it, too.
That doesn't really pass the sniff test, so maybe I'm missing something.
I'm more trying to say, if you find it wrong that r/conservative does it, then you shouldn't do it yourself. Other people's bad behaviour should not be a justification for you own.
When it comes to morality, we can't control how other people act, we can only control what we ourselves do.
Especially when the "retaliation" is aimed at members and not the people implementing the mod policy.
Lets go down to /r/conservative and throw rocks at them for being dumb was a pretty popular activity for people. For anyone who has been on reddit for any length of time, it should be abundantly obvious why the sub needs extremely heavy moderation. That sub is like having an LGBTQ tent at a redneck festival.
There's heavy moderation, and then there's enforcing propaganda. If you really want to look there during controversial issues, you'll see even long time posters get comments removed when it goes against whatever agenda they want to push. That's no longer a matter of trying to facilitate unpopular discussion.
Sort of, but not to this degree. I think there's 4 levels of "control" a sub can have.
0. "Soft" power from votes, which determines what topics are de facto allowed to be talked about. Mods don't have as much influence here (hence why it's not really "#1"), but they can still influence it by removing certain comments. The psychology of down votes and how it affects communities has been studied for well over a decade so this isn't too crazy
1. "Petty mod abuse", which is probably what many comments remember reddit comments for. You make a tame comment, some lawful evil mod removes your comment, and any discussion over that ruling is met with mutes or bans. This is usually backed by "some" rule, so most of the time they have some point (no matter how stupid)
2. "Soft rules abuse", which is where "off-site" behavior kicks in. Where there's unlisted rules that are enforced, often from behavior not even directly performed in that community. It can also be personal grudges from some sort of supermod, which bans you from multiple subs they moderate over behavior in one of their subs.
3. Then there's "sentiment abuse", where people are moderated less for their behavior and more for whatever the mod feels like that day. Either to forge their own narrative, or from being paid off and following some external party's sentiment. These are almost never listed as rules because they are either too blatantly biased ("do not insult Google" on r/Google wouldn't work out well, even if it is run by Google employees), or simply because the rules change too frequently.
I'd say r/conservative is solidly in tier 3, and even there is a very extreme example. It was interesting seeing how the sub quickly changed on topics like the Epstien files based on whatever spin occurred IRL.
> They run it like a propaganda outlet, only allow approved thought from approved commenters, and ban anyone who steps out of line with the mods.
When almost any community is particular about who it lets in and who it doesn't let in, it can be seen as a reasonable moderator precaution. Heck, some of the very best social spaces I'm a part of are only accessible by knowing people who know people.
But Reddit at it's core is a content aggregator with a comments section, which uses a moderation model driven by a strange mix of authoritarian mods and mob rule. A mod can ban you for any reason, but there's nothing stopping an outside mob from trying to control a narrative by mass voting in a way that mods have little to no control over.
In practice, /r/conservative can't really be considered a functional social space. But this core contradiction at the heart of the Slashdot/HN/Reddit model means that none of them function very well as social spaces either. These days, the actual "community" part of most hobbyist subreddits are on alternative platforms like Discord, and quite frankly I think it's for the better that this is happening.
>there's nothing stopping an outside mob from trying to control a narrative by mass voting in a way that mods have little to no control over.
if it's really persistent they can't. Votes are one of the few mechanisms mods have no control over in their sub.
But in general, mods can remove any post they don't like, even if it gets voted against their wishes, as well as ban any users posting such posts. Do that for a few days and that usually wins out.
Platforms like Discord give their moderators much more power and discretion, while removing mechanisms for users for protest them. Despite this, Discord largely succeeds in facilitating social spaces for its users.
The biggest reason why this works is that even though users have fewer recourses against power-tripping mods, it also takes away the moderator's leverage of being the tastemakers of content aggregation that Reddit/HN/Slashdot mods and power users have. Without content aggregation, it's a lot easier for social circles to cleanly split if there are disagreements.
I also think that the fact that Discord servers are opaque works to its benefit. The openness of Reddit leads to a lot of cross-subreddit co-mingling, which invariably leads to drama and conflict. There's a lot less of this happening on Discord - it's not zero, but it's to the extent that posting discord conversations outside of their servers is widely considered "leaking" and Discord actively uses legal avenues to go after dragnet-style log archives.
You're kidding right? Think critically for a moment. Do you understand how politically scewed reddit is? What do you think would happen if /r/conservative was wide open, what would get upvoted, what would get burried? Give me your honest prediction.
> You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until
You present this as if it were somehow evidence that somehow justifies the bans from the other unrelated subs.
There is no morally justifiable reason why having mainstream conservative viewpoints (which is to say, ones held by a very large fraction of the general populace) should bar someone from non-political participation in non-political subreddits.
The bans in fact are another symptom of the same cause: every kind of right-wing enclave on Reddit gets trolled constantly. The generally left-wing userbase does whatever they can to ostracize right-wingers, or perceived right-wingers. Which includes both banning them from other spaces, and mocking them in their own.
> It’s a moderator-curated echo chamber.
This describes every vaguely political or ideological themed subreddit. Except maybe the general r/politics, which might still be "letting the votes decide" if you don't have the "acceptable" views on every issue. I have literally seen subreddits that would ban people for "ableism" for using the word "stupid" to describe an idea or proposal. And that was like a decade ago and it was getting clearly worse year after year.
>There is no morally justifiable reason why having mainstream conservative viewpoints (which is to say, ones held by a very large fraction of the general populace) should bar someone from non-political participation in non-political subreddits.
Rule 1 of site guidelines includes:
>Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
And given the conservaive mindset as of late in the US against trans people and undocumented workers, you can see the issue you run into.
I do disagree with banning off-sub behavior, though. you can use it to tag users and keep a closer eye on them, but moderators moderate their own space, not the entire site.
> And given the conservaive mindset as of late in the US against trans people and undocumented workers
I disagree that they have the beliefs you ascribe to them, broadly speaking. Again, we are talking about the mainstream. Views held by a very large fraction of the general populace.
>I disagree that they have the beliefs you ascribe to them, broadly speaking.
Very well. But their party leader does, and few in the party or even among constituents don't seem to push back on it at all. At the very least, they do not oppose the actions and statements taken and made.
I disagree with this as well, and I specifically disagree that the "actions and statements taken and made" commonly cited to evidence the point actually evidence the point.
And I have been disagreeing about this since the 2015 election campaign. The pull quotes, to me, very obviously did not mean what they were represented as meaning, and I remain convinced of this.
>The pull quotes, to me, very obviously did not mean what they were represented as meaning
This week alone:
- Trump was ranting about Trans athletes. In the middle of a meeting with Canada.
- we have had 2 inditements of political opponents based on a DM-mistakenly-turned-tweet listing opponents he wanted sued.
- he called democrats a Gnat to take care odd while addressing the generals of the military
- he's mobilizing the national guard, again to invade a city that is not in emergency. When a judge halted this, he tried to sent mobilized CA national guards (which is currently under lawsuit) go Oregon instead. The judge had to summon the DoJ at 7pm on a Sunday to halt this.
- He's also in the process of trying to deploy Texas NG into Illinois. This is on top of a judge needing to tell federal agents to not use force on Chicago journalists. Likely in reaction to the fact that ICE shot a protesting pastor in the face (and yes, that's another lawsuit)
- in midst of a government shutdown, he's trying to plan around laying off 750k federal workers, and not pay any of them as the government has always done.
- and to top it off he wants to call for the arrest of a governor and mayor because they do not want their city invaded.
That's just Trump, just this week. Not talking about RFK's nonsense, Noem's photoshoots, Johnsons attempt to election fraud and blame shifting, and Bondi's embarrassing senate hearing. These are several GOP leaders' consistent behaviors over months. It is the GOP c.2025
And this isn't an unusual week. This entire year's been a firehouse of conflicts that make Watergate seem like a tame kerfuffle. We're well, well, well beyond the idea of "well nothing is happening".
To deny the last 10 months of consistutional crisis is the deny reality. There's really no other way to say it. You're free to disagree with reality but that does not reject it.
Look up any of the nearly 200 EO's, the dozens of court cases against the DoJ, or the hundreds of hours of raw footage out there if you really care about what's happening. Clearly I can't fit that into a HN comment, and I can't make a horse drink even if I could fit it here.
There was nothing shallow or curmudgeonly about my response. I was careful in explaining why giving examples like this is missing the point and why the examples are not what I'm talking about. I excused myself from attempting a point-by-point rebuttal because I know from past experience that this only leads the discussion deeper into the mire with no insight.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I have been trying my hardest to explain reasoning rather than simply accumulating evidence. But the entire discussion has been wildly off-topic from the beginning, so I don't see a reason to continue anyway.
Could it be that sharing conservative ideas is against Reddit's community guidelines?
There are other subreddits with primarily right or moderate leaning communities and comments in those get deleted all the time with moderator messages saying they risk the entire subreddit getting taken down by Reddit simply for sharing basic conservative views.
1. don't harrass people on or off-site, nor promote hate
2. no spam or content manipulation
3. no doxxing nor non-consential sexual material
4. no CSAM or CSAM-adjacent material
5. don't impoersonae others
6. label NSFW content
7. no illegal content
8. don't break reddit on purpose
other conservative subs have historically had issues with rules #2 and #8, so I'm sure Reddit is more sensitive to that. In addition, current conservative leaning subs do tend to have more issues with rule 1, even to this day. I imagine what you are seeing are content being pre-emptively removed to prevent potential harassment that can get the sub banned.
To the average reddit, simply being conservative or voting for trump is promoting hate. I guarantee you 100% they think this. Take a /r/all post that is anti trump and read the comments about republicans, they hate them.
Perhaps. But admins won't ban a sub for being conservative or voting for Trump alone. Admins are the ones who can ban subs, not mods.
Mods from there have absolute power, as long as they follow the above guidelines. As we know, the rules can be as petty as they want. Their only limit is that they can't ban someone who's never participated in a sub (so they can't pre-rmotively ban someone for existing)
The evidence gets deleted. Go talk with any of the mods or former mods for right of center-left discussion forums - any deviation or disagreement with far left narratives is asking for conflict. Anything that risks brigading or attention by one of the larger leftist subs will get nuked because those smaller communities can't expend the hours needed to deal with the flood of hate and harassment they get.
If you find that not credible, you haven't been paying attention - reddit is a leftist cesspit echo chamber, and the only way any dissenting viewpoints survive is through having an absurd level of micromanaging and moderator involvement, like r/conservative, or being so small as to fly under the radar and not attract notice.
Centralizing forums to reddit was one of the worst things to ever happen to the internet, in retrospect. We should have stayed diverse and decentralized, and leaned into federation style community links, and made it easier for people to navigate and surface interesting unique communities, independent of the arbitrary politicization and ideological nonsense that infects reddit.
Commenting conservative things is not against community guidelines. However, most conservative comments are against community guidelines.
For example, supporting Trump is fine. Repeating what Trump says might be against community guidelines. Not because being a trump supporter is against the rules, but because trump sometimes says blatantly racist things, and that IS against the rules.
It's simple to be both conservative and not rude, nasty, racist, sexist, etc. Many influential conservative voices struggle with this. So they get banned, and, by value of following their lead, their followers.
Another example, on a bigger scale. Trump can be upset about losing an election. That's allowed. But Trump cannot advocate people go cause violence because of it. That's not allowed, and we had days in court because of that.
Exactly. The sibling replier[1] summed it up. Nobody is getting their accounts nuked for mere "conservative views." They're getting their accounts nuked for heinous views that are against Reddit's rules, whether related to politics or not.
> Repeating what Trump says might be against community guidelines.
For the irony-cherry on top, repeating what he says is also often against r/conservative guidelines - they'll happily ban you for it, because a lot of the things Trump says are also really fucking stupid and contradictory, and his supporters don't like to be reminded that the emperor's naked.
I'm sure you can give us examples of these "basic conservative values" that gets entire subreddits banned off a platform run by a libertarian prepper who admires Elon Musk.
Out of curiosity, what views? I'm trying to understand if Reddit is just ban happy against conservatives or if basic conservative views are really against reddits TOS
Trans related topics are expressly against TOC and enforced unless a subreddit is ruthless in removing any comments that aren't expressly positive and affirming. There is no room for nuance on this topic. Just giving an example.
As a trans person, I find it interesting that so many people have opinions on an illness that truly sucks. It’s rough reading every day that you are “wrong” about something you suffer from. I wish folks could see the losses we experience when we transition. I think if they did, they might extend a little more grace and compassion.
Nuance is not a popular thing in the US in recent decades. The false dichotomy appears to be more than our collective favorite logical fallacy, but some people’s favorite avocation.
I blame the media, as well as people. People's "news" have been reduced to headlines or 30 second clips on tiktok/insta. Of course they won't convey nuance.
And of course content creators / news aggregators know this so they purposely strip all nuance out of their reporting.
>Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
is against TOC. You can talk about trans issues and offer reservations. You cannot say "trans people are a mental illness" or "trans are not people". That is clearly promoting hate and has nothing of substance to discuss.
For a more explicit and current example, you can say "I don't think female-affirming trans athletes should be allowed to compete in female oriented divisions of sport. Their testosterone output makes for an unfair advantadge".
That might STILL be removed, not because that comment breaks the rules, but because reddit seems to have a serious problem on the issue and it always devolves to "we need to take men out of women's sports" and then some long chain of people denying trans people of their identity. That's promoting hate. Especially since that is not too far off from what the U.S. president argues.
> You cannot say "trans people are a mental illness" or "trans are not people". That is clearly promoting hate and has nothing of substance to discuss.
You definitelly can. There are plenty of big subreddits with posts like that, whose mods agree with.
> denying trans people of their identity. That's promoting hate.
To be clear: your position is that refusing to see other people as they see themselves, in one specific aspect, is inherently hateful?
That's likely the crux of our disagreement in the other subthread, then.
Either that or you imagine that "denying identity" refers to something else, but I've only ever seen it used in cases that boil down to that. This often gets described as "denying existence", which from my observations conservatives just think is absurd. The entire point is that "identity" refers to self-image, while "existence" refers to what is externally observable.
>your position is that refusing to see other people as they see themselves, in one specific aspect, is inherently hateful?
Yes. That tends to fall under "hate speech":
>public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation
Denying existence or identity will fall under that curtain either way.
That seems to be the interpretation Reddit uses, so your account or community will be banned for breaking its rules, regardless of your interpretation. Both dehumanize, and dehumanization is a one way ticket to denying someone as worthy of the rights humans enjoy.
These are different things (which was most of the point),
> will fall under that curtain either way
... but I fail to see how in either case.
> Both dehumanize
I don't see this, either.
Again, the actual act we refer to is:
> refusing to see other people as they see themselves, in one specific aspect
Is there any other aspect of how people see themselves which would lead you to the same conclusion? For example, if I consider myself physically attractive, and others disagree, are they hating me?
> But as a hint, it's pretty easy to deny existence when you dehumanize someone.
This has the logic backwards, and is also playing semantic games with the meaning of "deny existence". We're talking about a claim that someone already does not exist (which is why people think it's absurd: they're often actively having a conversation with the person they're falsely accused of believing not to exist), not the act of causing someone to cease to exist (an imprecise, colloquial way of referring to murder).
You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until the moderators there audit your post history and perform an interview with you to confirm your ideology matches theirs.
If someone does pass the test they’re allowed to comment. If they make a comment that disagrees with the message the moderators want to push, their commenting privilege is revoked.
It’s not a real subreddit. It’s a moderator-curated echo chamber. They run it like a propaganda outlet, only allow approved thought from approved commenters, and ban anyone who steps out of line with the mods.
That’s why every thread you view there will have “load more comments” buttons that never load anything: They remove more comments than you’re allowed to see.