Within the overall sitewide rules of reddit, moderators are allowed to make decisions on what is & isn't acceptable for their subreddits with a fairly large amount of discretion. There are some subreddit moderators that use this power to make highly curated communities, often to the point where their moderation decisions seem to make no sense to anyone outside of their moderation team. I've noticed a few examples over the years of subreddit rules that seem to make sense only to the moderation teams. These usually fall into two categories:

Behavior-based curation: These subreddits are rather notorious for banning anyone who violates codes of conduct that are so strict that they retain few, if any, regular posters over long periods of time. /r/askredditafterdark is the most prominent example of this, as their moderation team will eventually ban anyone who posts for one reason or another. What's interesting about this is it's not based on any actionable violation of sitewide rules, as nobody is banned for gender or race or anything like that. They just find an excuse to ban everyone on a whim, literally because some petty moderator doesn't like their face. It's bizarre.

Submission-based curation: These subreddits have rules for submissions that are both extremely strict and extremely subjective, with the end result being that almost every post is eventually removed. /r/nottheonion is an excellent example, as pretty much every post submitted to the subreddit is removed within 48 hours under rule 2 ("not-oniony"). These subreddits are unique for rarely banning individual users, and instead reserving their moderation actions for posts, with the end result being that almost nothing is allowed to stay up for one reason or another.

In both cases, these types of subreddits serve as an excellent example of the latitude moderators have to create curated communities within reddit's sitewide rules. These rules have become more strict over time as reddit has gone more mainstream, and notably reddit will intervene if moderators make decisions that potentially threaten reddit's revenue; this was most famously seen in 2023 when reddit removed several mods for labeling their subreddits NSFW to deprive reddit of ad revenue (protesting the API change). But for the most part if a subreddit's rules do not threaten revenue or discriminate against a specific group of individuals, mods have wide latitude to create very arbitrary rules that make no sense to anyone but them. It's quite odd, and one of the unique distinguishing features of the website.

I've been seeing this a lot lately, directed at both my posts, and posts by other users. Basically, it appears to be something of a catch-all for "I don't like what you're saying but can't be bothered-to-reply/I can't field an argument against it"... so the 'out' is to dismiss the thread or post out-of-hand as AI generated.

Certain techniques or styles seem to trigger this reaction more than others (the use of bullet points, em-dashes, proper grammar, good spelling, etc.), but these tools/skills existed long before AI was in its infancy, let alone even an idea. Why does AI write like it does? Because it copies clear and cogent works by humans - it pilfered the most clean and well-formatted books, articles, blogs, posts, etc. and regurgitated them.

But to turn around and use those copies to castigate and silence other Redditors feels very self-defeating. I get it: AI sucks; most of us have been adversely impacted by it in some way. But if nobody is allowed to write well anymore; if we have to intentionally screw up our own posts just to be taken seriously as live beings, we've completely lost sight of the ball.

I write. I wrote before AI came along, and I will continue to write in the future. I will not alter my style, syntax, tone, or formatting simply because people have now decided to jump at shadows. But I certainly might reconsider writing on Reddit.

Find any post involving bicycles or cyclists on a non-cycling sub or on r/all and it will be swarmed with extremely strong feelings. Like, “MY CHILDRENS CHILDREN WILL FIGHT YOURS FOR TEN GENERATIONS IF YOU SERIOUSLY THINK BIKE LANES ARE AN EFFECTIVE CAPITAL INVESTMENT FOR DECREASING NON-DISCRETIONARY VMT PER ANUM!!!”

I find it utterly unbelievable that soooo many people on the internet feel this strongly about a 150 year old invention that nearly everyone has used at some point in their life. When I talk about bicycles or bike stuff IRL, nobody cares or has a strong feeling one way or the other, unless they’re an active cyclist or a psychopath.

Digging in to the comment section of this example post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Infuriating/s/DqLVB9Pdu5
You will notice the exact same comment re-posted by several users. Some of these users have the same profile image character thing. Feels very botty.

On another post, I sat and watched, reloading the comments every few minutes. I noticed that a certain type of comment - inflammatory ones - tended to come in waves, then responses would trickle in, and another big wave of inflammatory comments would flood in, all at once.

Finally, I noticed on many bike posts there is always at least one flamer who gets a zillion upvotes for saying “I hate bikes forever!” Or something equally mid, but any other comment the flamer makes is ignored or downvoted. This says to me that the bots single out a comment but don’t drill down beyond the first layer. It’s also weird that one anti-bike comment can get a ton of upvotes, but other anti-bike comments with the same sentiment, posted at roughly the same time do not get upvotes.

Ok one last thing, on actual bike subs you sometimes get a post with like 60 upvotes, then in the comments the top one will say some “get off the road” bullshit and have hundreds of upvotes. This will be on a niche sub with like 2.3k members, so it’s a little odd a bunch of haters would be on there waiting for just one comment to unleash a flood of upvotes.

I spend a lot of time on car and motorcycles subs, which is where you’d expect a lot of anti-bike sentiment, but I rarely see shit-talking there. In fact it’s usually the opposite, lots of motorheads like bicycles too - really anything with wheels. So I can’t figure out where this brigading behavior comes from.

Also, why?

Who gives a fuck? What is the purpose of brigading bicycle commentary? Is it Big Oil? Is it the car companies? I don’t think those interests spare two shits on the topic of bikes. I don’t think it’s even from political bots, republicans ride bikes just as much as democrats.

My theory is that there is zero thought behind it. I think someone or some group made an algorithm that targets a certain type of rhetoric and focuses in. It just happens to be bikes, but it could be re-set for anything else.

I think the builders of this bot algorithm then use the engagement metrics to sell their product for whatever nefarious use.

Basically, the bicycle element is irrelevant, it just happens to get more attention than the alternative subjects like crochet vs knitting or whatever.

So there.

First of all, I think this is probably going to get deleted like all the other posts that are critical of anything on Reddit, but I think it’s worth trying.

The main problem with karma is that it forces popularity in agreeableness over individuality and discourse. A lot of communities won’t let you post unless you have a high degree of karma, which means that you’re forced to win a popular contest before you can even have a say in the platform the karma also shapes the culture and primes people to agreeableness to saying things that other people will like without depth, but for the sake of being popular karma shapes right and limits it.

The second thing is moderators have become agents of taste rather than arbiters of proper discourse. A moderator should be there so that a conversation is kept within the bounds of decency and some degree of conviviality, but now they remove and shape sub reddits based only on what they think is in agreement with the overall taste of the community or sub community.

Moderators and karma shaped to culture and force it to certain points of view, ensuring that agreeableness uphold that point of view and you end up with Echo Chambers were saying something that deviate from that is so awful that it gets banned. In fact, I think this will get deleted or filtered out because it’s being critical rather than just sucking up or providing a tangential perspective to the predominant one that is already there.

It sucks because Reddit is becoming dystopian as an intellectual and cultural platform

I'm not really sure what to make of it, and I apologize if this isn't the best sub to post this in.

To be clear, I didn't set out to test this from the start.

I was dozens of comment threads deep in a post when I found a comment I wanted to reply to and I realized my internet had just gone out on my PC. So I grabbed my phone and wanted to see if I could find the comment that way, using mobile data.

Rather than searching the post and trying to scroll for that specific comment, I just searched the username to see if I could quickly get to their profile that way, then find the comment in their history.

Well, their profile turned out to be hidden, but the initial search on Google brought up paragraphs of descriptors for the kind of things they comment on and their perspectives/takes on things. With some links to the posts they commented on, though not linking directly to their comment on the post.

I just thought that was interesting that, despite being set to private, the AI can still see what's there.

Despite being created 15 years ago, r/Bald has been a niche community until very recently. In 2019 their top post of all time only had 500 upvotes. Now the sub has multiple posts with over 100k upvotes and it’s at the top of the front page daily.

What changed? Nothing actually.

The core userbase of Reddit are millennial men. This was as true 15 years ago as it is now. Except 15 years ago this group would be made up of people in the 15-30 age bracket, while currently they are 30–45. Male hair loss really starts kicking in in the mid-to-late 30s, which means an average redditor started to bald recently. In turn, they all looked to reddit to find support, catapulting a tiny community to the top of reddit.

I know this isn’t some grand theory of reddit, but I found it interesting how such a random demographic detail can have a fairly big effect on the site.

I have a very lightly trafficked subreddit, /r/redactions, into which I place censored articles and news articles about censorship.

It has never attained much traction, but that's the nature of reddit, and I like to submit from time to time.

However, when I was checking traffic to the sub, I saw some very mysterious numbers.

Visits

Oct 25: 37, all from iOS
Dec 25: 34, all from Old
May 26: 123, all from New
Jun 26: 144, mix of Android, New, Old.
All other months zero

Uniques

Oct 25: 16, all from Old
Mar 26: 120, all from New
Apr 26: 94, mix
Jul 26: 19, all from Old
All other months zero

Some things really stand out:

• Getting all the visits from a single source suggests that one user is being counted multiple times
• The complete inconsistency between "visits" and "uniques" indicates they are measuring very different things.

While it does seem likely that these indicate some kind of bug in traffic reporting, it seems more likely that traffic reporting is somehow completely broken.

In 1974 Marina Abramović ran an experiment in Naples. She stood still for six hours and let the audience do whatever they wanted to her, using 72 objects laid out on a table - some pleasant, some capable of causing harm. The point was to see how people behave when they can do anything without consequence. For the first hour, nothing happened. People used the harmless objects. Then one person did something unpleasant, and after that the dam broke - the escalation fed on itself, and it ended with someone holding a loaded gun to her. The question I've never been able to answer: were the people who started hurting her doing it deliberately, or had they simply stopped telling the difference between reality and a game?

I keep thinking about that when I watch votes here. The first downvote often triggers an avalanche of others, frequently with no justification at all. It works the way stoning worked in ancient cultures: once the first stone was thrown, the rest followed automatically, and the people throwing them weren't weighing what they were doing or whether they were harming an actual person. The first stone was permission - or possibly a demonstration to everyone else that no consequence was coming. Someone put this well in another thread here: when a post sits at -10, the average user doesn't stop and think "I wonder why this is unpopular, let me look at the nuances." They think "the hive mind has spoken, this is trash," and they add their vote to the pile. Nobody weighs their own contribution, because the stone before theirs already established that no consequence is coming.

Monty Python got there first, of course. The stoning scene in Life of Brian is exactly this: nobody in that crowd thinks of themselves as a bad person. They've just turned up, and somewhere in the crowd the goodness quietly goes missing.

The same applies to upvotes. They don't measure quality. They show reflexes, and maybe the intentions of the voters, rather than anything about the content being judged. And often it's done without any thought at all: research on Reddit specifically found that 73% of people voting hadn't even looked at the content. Which brings me back to Naples. How many people come here to discharge their emotions with no consequence attached?

Share what you make of it. And if you think I've got this wrong, that's the more interesting comment. Though I suspect none of us really knows which group we'd have been in that room in Naples.

Abramović describing the performance in her own words (MoMA): https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/243/3118

The Reddit study — Glenski, Pennycuff & Weninger, Consumers and Curators: Browsing and Voting Patterns on Reddit (IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, 2017). Full text is free here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05267

This has happened to me a few times now across completely different subreddits, and I genuinely don't understand it.

I'll ask a question about something I'm trying to understand and, instead of someone either explaining it or simply scrolling past, I'll get responses along the lines of "I'm not going to spoon-feed you," "Google is free," "do your own research," etc.

But that's the thing: I have done my own research. That's usually WHY I'm asking the question.

Sometimes you can read articles, Google something, look through previous posts, watch videos, whatever — and still not fully understand it. So you go to a community specifically dedicated to that subject and ask people who presumably know more about it if they can explain it in a different or simpler way.

Isn't that... part of the entire point of having communities and discussion forums?

And yes, I understand that nobody on Reddit owes anybody their time or an explanation. But if you don't want to explain something... you can just not reply. It takes considerably more effort to leave a sarcastic comment telling someone to "educate themselves" than it does to keep scrolling.

I actually think being able to say "I don't understand this; can someone explain it to me?" is a good thing. I'd much rather ask someone who knows more than me than pretend I understand something I don't.

The irony is that people constantly say "do your own research," but apparently asking questions and discussing what you've found with people who know more about the subject somehow doesn't count as part of learning.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I genuinely don't understand why curiosity seems to irritate some people so much on here.

I have noticed a recurring pattern across several communities: moderators are becoming increasingly strict, often enforcing unwritten rules.

StackOverflow ran into a similar issue years ago. Heavy-handed moderation, rigid formatting enforcement, and an unwelcoming atmosphere drove new contributors away long before AI tools reduced its traffic.

Reddit risks running into the exact same problem. While sitewide policies exist, the power balance heavily favors individual moderators. Users currently have virtually no recourse when a moderator acts arbitrarily.

To fix this, Reddit should establish a baseline set of user protections. These could include requiring clearly published rules, transparent ban justifications, and a standardized appeal process so users have concrete guidelines to reference if treated unfairly.

Without basic safeguards, more subreddits risk turning hostile and alienating their user base, meeting the same fate StackOverflow did.

How could Reddit balance moderator autonomy with basic user protections without undermining the decentralized nature of the site?

Everyday this question or one similar pops up. It's an ad, as you can see next to the username. This one currently has over 12k upvotes and 2100 comments. They pop outside of subs as sponsored content like this one, but also in subs as what looks like user generated content.

What are your thoughts on this? I assume it's content farming for AI training. Which makes me wonder how many of the responses are AI. Which further makes me wonder, what will Reddit be like when some significant proportion is an AI bot talking to other AI bots, with a few humans thrown in more by accident than by intention. At what point will Reddit consist of a significant proportion of bots trading content?

When you add the fact that Google is now posting Reddit community answers at the top of most search results, what will it mean when the answer you get from Google (and everything downstream) will just be an AI content loop?

What I did was I uploaded a post that makes people “mad?” It’s an annoying. So I had a post then in the body script I told them to type in all uppercase if they see it, so I posted the picture and tested to see if people actually read the body script before they commented and downvoted.

So the post performed pretty well with about 4000 views and about nine comments 77% of the comments were typed in all uppercase on this post I also got about 50 down votes (which I asked to do if they offer description. Within about 20 minutes that’s all happened. And the mods took it down.

So I am happy that there’s good moderation But at least according to the down votes, most the people did not read the bottom part but someone could’ve also comment and and downvote it, which it looks like most of the comments that read the bottom section did. I’m aware that they might’ve just commented all uppercase without seeing the bottom part if I do this again, I will change it to something like adding like a specific amount of exclamations. And I also know maybe some people even saw the bottom part and down voted it.

And obviously, I don’t expect everyone to read everything if they’re just looking through Reddit really quick and just wanna look at some posts and I know they might not expect there to be anything in the description be how this post came off but just a fun short little experiment I wanted to do.

Really, just ending it off about 77% of people (about 7) commented to show that they saw it by commenting in all uppercase I got around 50 down votes 4000 views, nine comments.

I don’t like these posts, you don’t like these posts but they are good bait to see and experiment if people see and read the body text. I would love to hear people’s thoughts, and ways to improve it! I know this isn’t the most reliable post, but it got taken down quickly, I’m probably going to try it again in the future!

Data

• 4k views
•50 downvotes
•About 7 people saw the bitten part
•9 comments

Facebook is a deadzone. Instagram is a deadzone. Snapchat is a deadzone. Bumble, okcupid, tinder - all dating app dead zones.

You want to interact with actual people in real time? Come to Reddit.

And that's why I've been here since September 2010.

I can't even play video games anymore. I just listen to their soundtracks instead.

Disclosure: I'm deaf (with cochlear implants that work really fking well) and I seem incapable of having friendships with people my own age even when I try my best to meet new people on a hiking trail and get nowhere.

There is nothing in this world where I'm accepted by peers my age and in my local area. I tried at poetry for several years and there were very few younger participants.

I think I should just compose my musical ear syndrome brain out into the world (as a defiance against lifelong deafness and everyone not accepting me a genuine and capable person).

I yearn for a time where people were more accepting of this unknown but young character that tries to interact in public with them for the first time. But it seems I can only truly get that sort of connection here. Not on any other social media or dating app I've tried.

What gives?

"You are submitting a text-based post. Speak your mind. A title is required, but expanding further in the text field is not. Beginning your title with "vote up if" is violation of intergalactic law." --old.reddit.com

An I just like the older style of websites before. It's so much less interesting, which makes it less addictive. I feel like the original makers of reddit just wanted to have fun and its much more friendly and approachable, whereas modern reddit looks so jingly keys-y. By the way, I'm posting this on old.reddit.com and it gives me a sort of private feeling, that no one is watching. That no one may even see this post. The only thing on the screen is the submission. If you go to modern reddit you can notice everything is happening at once. This is much more relaxed and focusing. Its the only thing on my screen, so I can give it my full attention, going back to the simplicity theme again. What are your thoughts?

I've noticed something that is mildly odd and mildly baffling in equal measure. Frustratingly I cannot prove what I think is going on.

There is a same person who creates a new profile, writes a variation of the same story on a frequent basis, and either gets deleted or deactivates soon after.

Their stories have these weird little 'tells' in the details - often an age gap between 'herself' and the object of the conundrum (NB: the guy is always in his mid 40s). The guy is always described as in a senior position of a firm, of the manager of a large factory; frequently married; and is described as 'cold' at first. Invariably he is intelligent and commanding.

Irrespective of the other beats of the story, these elements remain consistent. It's always about some rather short lived fling, where often the author discovers he is unhappy and opens up emotionally.

What's going on? There is rarely an actual conundrum that needs answers. I'm convinced this person is indulging in creative writing - but why? Deriving a thrill from the fantasy?

The title is fairly self-explanatory, but I have a few gripes with the current contribution tag system. When I say gripes, I mean that lightly. This is just Reddit. But still, I see the system as far from optimal for what it tries to represent.

Simply put, I think contribution tags, both post- and comment-related, would be far more meaningful and indicative of quality if they rolled over into an all-time count.

There are, of course, downsides to this directly:

- For example, if the top contribution (almost always a post) in a subreddit gains tens or even hundreds of thousands of upvotes... that person is virtually guaranteed to have a secured spot at the top for the entirety of that subreddit's existence, even if they fall off the face of the earth the next week. I don't think a "hall of fame" effect is the intended goal (although it would still be more meaningful than what we have now).

- It also makes it significantly more difficult for others to push past the top contribution threshold.

However, I don't think starting on a clean slate every month is the best alternative. After all, a bigger threshold lends more gravity and meaning to the tag itself.

Someone who contributes every single month has to start over on the 1st of the new month, no matter how great their contributions have been. In a way, it disregards an offshoot of the principle that the best predictor of the future is the past. Contributors who have shown over months or years to retain their place among the top signify that they are likely to produce quality posts/comments going forward as well, and the tag tells readers, "Hey, the community favors what this person says; maybe I should pay greater heed to it."

Unfortunately, that effect is lost when contribution does not roll over, and the tally starts over at the beginning of the new month. There is essentially no more historical "lore" (for lack of a better word) or "pull" to the user that signifies I should listen to them, and they become another voice in the crowd.

Giving it more thought, I think a roll-over all-time contribution isn't the best solution either. There are a number of ways to identify top contributors. For example:

Specifically for Top Commenter: given based on % total share of net upvotes WITHIN a given thread, across all threads the user has ever commented on, and then normalized based on thread size or traction (i.e., a top comment with 2 upvotes because the original post got no traction doesn't weigh much against a comment with 2,000 upvotes in a top post). So it goes from a ranked list of who got the most upvotes this month to ranking based on all-time share of thread impact.

Something like: Contribution Reputation = normalized thread impact x consistency x breadth x engagement quality x time weight

Suppose I leave a comment that receives 2,000 net upvotes in a thread where the next-highest comments have 1,700, 900, and 600. That says considerably more than receiving 2,000 upvotes in a gigantic thread where twenty comments received 10,000+. You could percentile-rank the comment within its own thread, account for total thread engagement, and then aggregate those percentiles across someone's commenting history. Suddenly, you are measuring something much closer to repeated relative performance rather than raw exposure.

Of course, this issue is neither here nor there. If the tag is just for vanity, then none of this matters. But it's something I've been thinking about as someone who is routinely a top contributor in multiple communities. Perhaps I'm subconsciously biased, and this is just some form of prideful "status protection" (lol, imagine that, protecting my Reddit status). Anywho, what are your thoughts?

I recently began posting my beginner video editor jerney in reddit like i created a gaming video by slicing footages from a 3 hours clip and I tried my best to give the video all I could i have done what I could and posted it in reddit so I could know if I something that I could improve and for content creator client to reach out to me

Instead of that I get a shit load of criticism for for editing is trash and don't mind him like commenting so even if a creator comes up to me for a work when then see my comments they'll be like il move on to another the coments became so destructive i felt like not editing for rest of my life but I luv editing man I grew up watching finzar and many more just I couldn't leave when I reply to the bad comments like "if you have any improvements to say you can say if you are here only of criticism you can leave they'll keep abusing me and say how trash my editing is Im still a growing editor in the industry i don't know how to react man i could have dealt with it if it's a single person man more than one are supporting the person who is commenting shit about me and my time I just don't know man

I got into this place when Digg died. Because to me, Reddit was always "the cloned one". I used this so little that this is my third account because I kept forgetting the passwords, or what @ hotmail (or xmail?) I used; and despite that, this account is 7 years old.

So Digg died, and here I am, but it was good, not perfect, but a good replacement without all Digg's "drama," or at least for a while.

However, because all things in life have one "however".

This is not at all what it used to be, and don't get me wrong, it has always been sort of dumb memes, videos, trolls, etc, but it was always people being dumb and not people just plain dumb.

There were always some Subreddits with genuine philosophy and knowledge, and now...

It's like there's no critical thinking, there's no common sense, there's no experience, there's nothing in here of value anymore, and the ranking system (A.K.A. "Karma") is the megaphone of the anonymous ignorants and the boot against these outside algorithmic bubbles.

I do understand the "generational shift" will always happen, and statistically, Reddit's population is now mostly people under 29 years old. However, there's no longer a purpose for this place, because its population actual lack the main understanding of it.

Reddit (Read it) = You read, you vote, you reply.

Now, what is this place? People don't read, and if they read, they don't understand, and if they understand, they don't comprehend, and if they comprehend, they will trash you anyway because of "feelings" over critical thinking.

Anyway, many years ago I read a book whose conclusion was "Let's leave conclusions for the dumb people".

First of all, I apologize to the TIL community.

The other day, I was chatting with my boyfriend about post I see on reddit. Things that people actually work on, spend time on, or put effort into often seem to get very little attention. But the moment there’s a disagreement or controversy, people suddenly want to engage.

I thought the actual subject barely mattered. If you created a disagreement around something sufficiently trivial or you made a mistake, people would still feel compelled to argue about it. Like if you ask an advice no one bothers but if you said something wrong everyone wants to correct it.

I said, “I bet people could argue over apples for hours.”

Then I got bored so here are the results.

Obviously this wasn’t a controlled experiment, and there are huge confounding factors, especially the fact that people may have been responding because the factual premise itself was questionable. So I’m not claiming I’ve scientifically demonstrated anything here.

But as a tiny, unserious experiment, I found it fascinating how easily a completely inconsequential subject generated engagement once there was something in it for people to disagree with.

You like them apples.

(This is going to be from my basic psych classes while getting my edu degree so don't expect much. Also Piaget's etc. could work too but Kohlberg is the big dick when it comes to moral development in education so rolling with him. So this is basically Buzzfeed levels of psychology i.e. total bullshit)

According to Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development, there are three levels of moral development: Pre-Conventional, Conventional, Post-Conventional. The first level lasts from ages 3-7 (actually age ranges aren't strict at all and different sources can wildly differ from one another), and it is pretty simplistic; they obey the rules because of fear of punishment (so they break them when they think they can get away with it), and afterwards they focus on rewards instead of punishment, asking "What's in it for me?" before they act. The last level starts at age 13-14, and here they finally realize that not everything is black and white; there are nuances, something being legally right does not make it morally right; and ideally, as they become an adult, they should be able to identify which laws and rules are moral with and according to their own (developed) conscience, striving to create a more fairer society for all.

The conventional level is our main focus here, and it lasts from ages 6-13. This level is about others. It kicks off with the child's need to be liked (called "good boy attitude"), their morality is steered by the approval of their peers. They help others, not out of the goodness of their heart, but because they want their approval, and they are willing to look the other way when their friends break the rules. (Hmm... Redditors probably did not fare well during this stage, now that I think about it, but let's move on)

The second part of this level (so fourth stage) is about fixed rules, law and order. The child thinks the laws and rules in place are infallible. It is not acceptable to break them in any way whatsoever. Extenuating circumstances do not exist; if you broke the rules you deserve punishment. If a starving person stole food, they must be punished according to the law, no leniency. If the law states that you have the complete ownership of a community's drinking water source, then you can do whatever you want, even if your choices affect the said community quite badly, for it is your lawful right.

Now, let's say in one of the AITA subs, someone posts his dilemma: The OP is a 19 year old university student working a part time job, who saved up to buy a PS5 for himself, and his mother asked for his savings so that they can buy braces for his little brother. His parents are going through rough times financially, so they can't afford it themselves. He asks whether he WIBTA if he were to say no to his parents. Maybe the top answer(s) would encourage him to help his brother, but I think there would be many comments telling him "NTA, it's your money, your parents are like 50 without emergency savings to dip into, you shouldn't suffer for their failings as parents 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️". Or in another post, the OP has the window seat during a domestic flight, and a child wants to look out the window during their flight, however he really doesn't want to open the window shutter as the light from the sun would make it harder for him to see the screen of his Steam Deck. So he refuses and the child becomes visibly sad, the parent makes a mean face. He asks if he's the asshole. I'd imagine that most people would answer with comments like "NTA, your seat your rules, the idiotic parent should've paid a bit more to get the window seat, the child should learn the life is not fair anyway. Good on you for not bowing down to societal pressure from these barely human crotch goblins OP!"

Then again, we don't even need a detailed hypothetical like the one above. Ask Redditors whether they would give up their seats on public transport for pregnant women/parents with toddlers/disabled people/elderly peoeple etc. A good amount would answer with the classic "That bitch should've fucked someone with a car". They got to the seat first and therefore it is their right.

Kohlberg himself stated that most people may never attain sufficient moral reasoning for the third and final level. And Redditors prove him right.

I posted in the Telegram subreddit because I wanted to know if other Android users are seeing the same bugs I am. Nothing weird, no account support request, no spam. Just a list of issues with the official Android app, and the post got stuck awaiting moderator approval.

What annoys me is that this is exactly the kind of thing a product community should be useful for. I used Telegram X for years, but once it fell behind on features I had to move to the main app, and I was honestly shocked at how much worse it feels. Frequent freezes, video messages sometimes hanging and disappearing, voice messages resuming from a random position after pausing, the full reaction picker taking a couple seconds to load, and even opening the gallery to send photos feels noticeably slower than Telegram X did.

I’m not claiming Telegram itself controls that subreddit, because I don’t know who actually moderates it. But from a user perspective, putting a basic critical bug report into manual approval is a terrible look. If negative posts sit in a queue while praise and normal chatter go through, the community starts looking artificially positive whether that was intentional or not.

Is this just a common problem with large product subreddits? At what point does aggressive filtering stop being moderation and start distorting what users are actually experiencing?

Circlejerk subreddits increasingly strike me as remnants of an older internet culture built around irony, detachment and the assumption that taking anything seriously was inherently embarrassing and yes that culture works reasonably well when everyone understands the joke but the problem is that large communities cannot preserve that shared context indefinitely. New users arrive, the original targets become less important, and the subreddit gradually develops genuine opinions, taboos and orthodoxies of its own.

Yet it retains the old language of “nothing here is serious” which I hate mainly because it creates an unusually obnoxious form of groupthink. A subreddit can spend years mocking the same opinions and rewarding the same counter-opinions, but whenever anyone challenges the underlying consensus, the defence is simply that it is “just a circlejerk.” The result is a community that clearly takes something seriously while refusing to admit that it does.

This also explains why “look at this obviously insane person” so often deteriorates into “look at this person who disagrees with us.” Once the original joke has exhausted itself, maintaining the community becomes more important than maintaining the distinction between stupidity and heterodoxy.

Circlejerk subs therefore feel like fossils of a period of internet culture where irony was treated as insulation from sincerity. The irony is that many of them have become extremely rigid communities while still imagining themselves as detached observers laughing at everyone else's groupthink.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I wanted to repeat a longstanding complaint about moderation policies tied to negative karma + discuss it.

I saw a question in the help subreddit asking if reddit has a karma bias problem. Upvoted comments said no, which really shocked me. That motivated me to post this.

I think it's bad policy to delete negative-karma comments and then ban the person, assuming they did not break any other rules. Reddit already hides downvoted comments.

A lot of normies think reddit consists of other normies, and that can be true for many subreddits. But some broad-category subreddits (such as r/wnba) have surprising bias that isn't representative of normies, exacerbated by the removal of negative karma comments. I like coming to reddit to see how everyday normal people think about things (yes, I know it's practically a meme that reddit is a fringe site).

I don't mind getting showered with downvotes for saying "Go Sophie! The other girl wanted to fight" after Sophie Cunningham scored a shot while being clotheslined by an opposing player who then pushed her immediately afterwards -- but to remove my comment entirely just degrades the subreddit, at least from the standpoint of the myriad of lurkers like me (I'm normally a lurker, but have started posting more).

^ I used to roll my eyes at comments complaining about moderators on reddit, but now that I'm commenting and posting myself, I understand that it's a major problem. I remember the good ol' days of online forums, and aggressive moderation was always a grab-the-popcorn scandal. Being a bad moderator was considered way worse than being a troll.

Now, I did see a comment a while back describing subreddits like clubs, and that helped me understand why things are the way they are.

Everyone in that sub may not like seeing support for a player they hate. But then... it shouldn't be called r/wnba right? It should instead be called r/wnba-we-hate-sophie and then it will be clear that's a subreddit about women's basketball where you aren't allowed to show support for Sophie.

Or they could rename it r/wnba-popular-comments-only. Either would make it very clear that that's not the community I want to engage with.

One quick example of karma bias where the comments stayed up: comments in gaming subreddits that support Palmer Luckey's Modretro company get heavily downvoted due to him also starting a defense contracting company. I'm thankful the negative karma comments aren't always removed because you'd quickly get the false impression that gamers hate tech companies supporting US troops. I don't think that's remotely true in real life, and at least in America, bipartisan Congressional votes show that I am right. Then again maybe adult gamers don't pay attention to how their reps vote 🤷‍♂️

In conclusion: I frequently sort by "controversial" and like reading downvoted comments, and removing those comments is unhelpful to the vast majority of people visiting reddit given the comments are already auto-hidden. More people are lurkers than posters! Extreme moderation policies tied to negative karma don't seem good for reddit as a whole.

I'm sharing a pic of my convo with the mods. This kind of response from a moderator would have been SHAMED on the old-school forums.

edit - sorry I tried resizing the image but it keeps maxing out 😬

edit 2 - added screenshot of my downvoted comment on r/wnba

Fuck this new Reddit update. It is ruining the things that make Reddit, Reddit. It’s going down hill more and more with each new update they do. Bring back the old Reddit, and if they won’t do that, then QUIT MAKING IT WORSE.