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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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The problem with Reddit's business model is that it relies on massive amounts of volunteer labor (subreddit moderators). Moderators are unpaid, so these positions will be filled by people who value power and status over money, i.e. progressive activists.

In theory, this is solved by people who don't like the mods of one subreddit making their own subreddit with their own mods. In practice, mods of the largest subreddits, being progressive activists, will demand that site ownership take down dissenting subreddits. Site ownership can't afford to piss off the moderator class too much, because then they lose their massive source of unpaid labor, as very nearly happened before. This inevitably degenerates into the situation we find ourselves in now, where major subreddits simply lock any potentially controversial thread and ban anyone who complains about it.

The problem with Reddit's business model is that it relies on massive amounts of volunteer labor (subreddit moderators). Moderators are unpaid, so these positions will be filled by people who value power and status over money, i.e. progressive activists.

How exactly do you know their political alignment and level of engagement?

For reddit, the answer is "looking at who the mods are, and what their political alignment seems to be".

It's commonly accepted on reddit that the same handful of moderators moderates most of the large subs. However, I did realize I haven't verified that myself, so I hacked together a quick script to do so.

For reference, reddit proudly lists what their top communities are, and how many subscribers each one has. If you navigate to that page, you can then go through and look, for each community, at who the moderators for that community are. For example, for /r/funny, the url would be /r/funny/about/moderators, or, if you want to scrape the data, /r/funny/about/moderators.json.

So by navigating to the top communities page and then running this janky little snippet in the javascript console, you can reproduce these results.

Looking at the top 10 (non-bot) mods by number of subreddits modded, I see:

So that's 2 / 10 most visible mods that moderate extensively on the basis of their own personal politics.

That's actually not nearly as bad as I thought. Interesting.

I guess the problem with reddit is the redditors.

You don't need half of the battalion to be commissars. All the political actors here lean the same way. That's enough to push the discourse in a certain direction by only allowing the extremes of one side.

Yes, cult dynamics happen so easily in online spaces

This, so much. This is how it works everywhere. In academia, everyone is broadly leftish but mostly apolitical. A small minority of far-left is not only tolerated & rarely challenged, but is allowed & financed to actively proselytise. Anything remotely right is ostracised or at best tolerated as long as its just talk among colleagues. If you try to point this out, you will be reminded "well, the last inequality retreat was very badly attended, so clearly we need to Do Better". The fact that this inequality retreat was actively financed by the university, mostly peddles extremely shoddy science that wouldn't be tolerated otherwise and that there is absolutely nothing remotely comparable that the average person would consider right does not even occur to them.

It's the same on reddit; I'm fairly confident that a) the great majority of the other mods, if not all of them, are still broadly left-leaning b) critically, the non-political mods almost never challenge the political mods, and almost all political mod actions are broadly the left cracking down on the right, never the other way around.

I guess the problem with reddit is the redditors.

Survivorship bias. Go to these subs and (courteously) post something anti-progressive, and see if your post gets deleted.

At the very least look up their mod logs from before /r/TheDonald ban.

I only ever got banned from /r/sneerclub (for pointlessly arguing with them, and they even warned beforehand TBF), /r/drama for... drama? (I never commented there) and one other subreddit for reasons unrelated to CW.

Really, it doesn't seem to be as simple as posting something anti-progressive. Maybe it's a risk, but fairly low one.

Maybe, but OTOH you never struck me as a particularly anti-progressive poster.

Do you know a good way of doing this that is not "sort by new and then scroll through 500 pages to get that far into the past"?

Edit: I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. I literally would like to know, because if there is such a way my plan is to just straightforwardly do that, and then post the results. The problem with the "sort by new" approach is that, instead of using a limit/offset pattern where I could just put ?sort=new&count=25&page=500 in to go to page 500, reddit instead does a pagination pattern where you give them a sort option and an after param, and the after param takes a comment id (non-sequential, I checked) that you're supposed to pass the id of the last comment on the page, which means to get to page 500 you _literally need to click "next" 500 times.

And these mods write a lot. 500 pages was not an exaggeration, to get back that far in time.

There is or was a link to a site that tells you any of your own posts that have been deleted. I searched it and was amazed how many of my extremely benign posts that I had all but forgotten were wiped. I know without a link this isn't particularly helpful (when I am on an actual computer I can check if i still have it somewhere.) It's also only useful for checking your own posts or posts of specific users.

I guess the problem with reddit is the redditors.

Twas ever thus, but hats off to you for actually going through the effort.

Well how exactly would we find out other than observing who is banned anecdotally on the subs they moderate?

Its not like reddit is going to publish a comprehensive report on their unpaid volunteers who are (probably) doing it as much as the average joe does their full time job. If it became well known that the average powermod worked 12 hours a day modding the SEIU would unionize the place in 30 days or less.

You could, among other things, look at how they speak and act, especially when they put on the green hat. It's not ever going to be concrete, people get banned for political reasons even if they don't say it. Hard work, yes, but not impossible. I would probably start with checking out TheoryOfReddit, they seem to be a place for doing analysis of Reddit itself.

Go ahead then?

Why would I? I'm not the one making the claim about them.

You're the one who's disagreeing with what is akin to traditional knowledge about them. And then you ask people to do lots of work to prove to you that something as common sense as "don't walk barefoot in the city" is based on evidence. And people have seen this pattern before, and generally understand that people who make such claims rarely change even when presented with the evidence that required 12 hours + of data analysis.

You're the one who's disagreeing with what is akin to traditional knowledge about them.

Yes, and I'm sure that the Christian just knows that God exists. It's irrelevant, however, if we're claiming to be a space which is neutral. There's not supposed to be a consensus, meaning a question like mine is entirely appropriate. If I were to make the claim that actually, Reddit mods are all conservative Trumpists, would you be here defending me against another person asking me to prove my point?

And people have seen this pattern before

Yeah, and people on the left have seen a pattern before in how anti-abortion people don't actually seem to care about women despite their words. Regardless, it would be entirely uncharitable to at least not take someone at their word to start with here if they said they really did care.

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How exactly do you know their political alignment and level of engagement?

It's an old canard, but I always thought it had unimpeachable logic:

The more time a person can spend powermodding on Reddit, the less likely it is that they have a job, and the less likely it is that they have a job, the more likely they are to be poor, and the more likely they are to be poor, the more likely they are to be leftist.

TL;DR: conservatives have less time for Internet drama because conservatives go to work for 8 hours a day.

It's not a PROOF of their ideological bent, but it's a constraining of their probability density in a leftwards direction.

t. Monarchist neoreactionary phoneposting from his directly taxpayer funded job

You're ignoring a big factor - age. Young people have time to moderate, older people don't. Young people tend to lean more progressive than older people, so age replicates the claimed political dominance of the left without relying on claims of progressive activists going after moderation positions on Reddit.

So... the solution to accusations of Reddit bias is to get retirees to become mods?

It could help counter a progressive sway among the general group of moderators. Would probably have other issues though.

And to be clear, your problem is with the claim that keyboard warriors are more likely to be progressive, right?

When did "keyboard warriors" enter the equation? We're talking about moderators.

And I think this proves too much. If it's age, shouldn't we see a reddit moderation as the userbase ages? Or is the youth growing faster and the olds leave? Would that account for getting ever more extreme instead of some standing-wave balance?

No, not necessarily. Even as people age, they don't necessarily become as conservative as their parents or grandparents at the equivalent age. So in 50 years, a 75-year-old is much more likely to be pro-trans than a 75-year-old today.

Well this is somewhat contained within the Venn diagram of joblessness. Why do the yoof have more time? Because they don't have careers.

Right, but the canard loses some of its power then. It's a put-down against leftists by saying they're jobless leeches with no constructive addition to society. If we say instead that "youth don't add anything to society while old people do", the obvious answer to anyone should be that it's absolutely not the norm for kids to be making careers at their age.

Right, but the canard loses some of its power then. It's a put-down against leftists by saying they're jobless leeches

The canard here is being used to support the proposition that "mods are leftists", not that "mods are losers". If your counterargument is "Ah-ha, but mods might have a lot of time on their hands because they're young, not because they're jobless adults", then this is no counterargument at all, because young people are also reliably leftist; probably MORE reliably leftist than the unemployed.

It's typically not considered a neutral statement to say that some group of people don't have time for drama because they go work.

The point I'm getting at, anyways, is that there's a plausible alternative to the "conservatives work, progressives are welfare leeches", and that's the age of those involved. "Older people work, and younger people don't, so the latter do volunteer work and get involved in drama" punches far less hard.

That does not explain what was mentioned in another comment - how banning words like "retard" was the butt end of a joke when originally implemented by woke sub's.

Also, have you seen how many subs some of the powermods moderate? No one functional has that much free time.

Progressive activists absolutely have sought out moderations position on reddit.

Also, have you seen how many subs some of the powermods moderate? No one functional has that much free time.

Are we talking about powermods or mods in general? The original comment didn't say powermods. I agree that those people are more suspect in general - GallowBoob's deletion of critical posts and articles, the way that criticism of chtorr's removal of Marsey was itself removed, etc. But they don't constitute all mods by definition. But I know that GallowBoob gets paids for shilling, and getting paid to be an influencer isn't unheard of.

Progressive activists absolutely have sought out moderations position on reddit.

Again, are we talking mods or powermods? Pick one and show me proof that this is being done out of service to the ideology.

Again, are we talking mods or powermods? Pick one and show me proof that this is being done out of service to the ideology.

Fair enough. I was thinking more about powermods and even admins. Low level mods probably act more organically, but there's also a selection effect, where subs that go too far off get banned. I think I even heard stories of admins helping to orchestrate subreddit coups, but that was too long ago for me to have the details.

Evidence of it being ideological is hard to give without access to their internal communications, but their actions are a little too deliberate for me to categorize it as even "biased but well intentioned".

Fair enough. I was thinking more about powermods and even admins. Low level mods probably act more organically, but there's also a selection effect, where subs that go too far off get banned.

Yeah, if the discussion is powermods, then I just don't have as strong a prior about those people being neutral. Mind you, you don't tend to hear all the cases of "and then this powermod did boring normal things", you hear the exact opposite. Gallowboob's sponsorships, chtorr's fucking with /r/place to remove Marsey, etc.

I think I even heard stories of admins helping to orchestrate subreddit coups, but that was too long ago for me to have the details.

I don't know about a coup, but after the antiwork meltdown, the now deleted powermod account /u/EphraelStern made a post to the subreddit talking about how there was an income disparity between trans workers and cis workers, among other things. I don't object to powermods having perspectives and taking part in the subreddits they moderate, but I find this post objectionable for doing precisely what led to the "women make 77 cents per men's dollar for the same work" idea. Also because it focuses on equalizing income before workers are even necessarily doing better.

To be honest I am awed at how much time some of the regular post-ers here seem to spend (almost daily) on constantly making longform, thought-provoking, well-put-together posts. I never assumed it might be because they simply don't have jobs...and still don't. Maybe powermodding and making long posts are such different diversions the comparison (that I have made here) isn't apt.

modding is rote work, the only real input is time. Effort posts can be on things found during a coffee break and written during a lunch break.

I thought about linking this Richard Hanania article in the above comment. Basically, it's because liberals, and progressive activists in particular, care more about politics than conservatives do. Therefore, they will disproportionately be attracted to positions where they can wield power. Curtis Yarvin would likely make the argument that causality runs the other way, and desire for power attracts one to progressive politics. This doesn't matter for my specific example, since as long as there is a correlation between progressive politics and desire for arbitrary power, internet moderators will tend to skew progressive.

Hanania's article fails at some level because his examples involve Trump. Trump was uniquely bad and galvanized many people (including some who weren't even left-wing), and that's not going away even after he ultimately fades from the spotlight. He's hardly the standard for making this kind of judgment, unless he sets the norm for every conservative nominee going forward. I'd like to see the same analysis performed on sentiment of, say, Obama and Romney.

Therefore, they will disproportionately be attracted to positions where they can wield power.

Even if I grant this to be true, it's step 2. Step 1 is demonstrating that moderators are largely progressive activists.

I think we should stop pretending that we here on this page agree on Trump being uniquely bad.

When I say that, I mean that he generated an unusually strong response from people on the left, and even some in the center and right. It messes with the analysis if you use someone who isn't making people think the way they typically would.

I hope we can agree that Trump is uniquely bad from a mainstream centre-left perspective, given the behaviour of the mainstream centre left. Scott Alexander defended Trump against the charge of being uniquely racist here, but not against the charge of being unusually bad, even by Republican standards, for other reasons. Trump is uniquely bad (from a mainstream centre-left perspective) or good (from a burn-it-down right-populist perspective) because of his willingness to violate norms, and because he doesn't believe in American democracy as it currently exists.

I poasted that the scary thing about Trump is that he treats elections as kayfabe - and nobody disagreed, because post-Jan 6th it is obvious.

No. The mainstream center-left will find "uniquely bad" whoever is currently the standard-bearer of the other side. At one time it was Bush -- both of them, though especially W. Before that Reagan. At one time it was Mitt Romney for crying out loud. And somewhere in there was Newt Gingrich. Right now it looks like Ron DeSantis is being set up for that position, though Trump is still around making that harder.

My memory of the Democrats' response to Bush II was that it was a lot more co-operative than to Trump.

  • The Bush tax cuts got 13 D votes in the house and 12 in the Senate, the Trump tax cuts passed on a pure party line vote.

  • That centrist Congressional Democrats were willing to carry water for the Bush administration on Iraq (as was the Deep State, which I think we both agree counts as part of the mainstream centre-left) has been the cause of much Democratic infighting after the Iraq war turned out to be a mistake - Trump didn't try to fight a war of choice, but the idea that he would get the level of bipartisan support that Bush did over Iraq seems far-fetched.

  • Pelosi didn't impeach Bush after the Dems took control of Congress in 2006 - despite widespread calls for impeachment from the left, the media, and from a noisy minority of former conservatives driven into shrill unholy madness by the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, or simple disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration. Pelosi impeached Trump the first time on semi-bullshit charges - the left wanted her to pull the trigger as soon as the Dems took the House in 2018, but she held off until the Deep State were annoyed as well.

  • She then impeached him again - although I am comfortable he deserved it the second time, it was in practice pure partisan theatre given there wasn't time for the process to complete before his term expired.

  • Congressional Democrats shut the government down twice in order to force concessions from Trump on immigration policy. There were no shutdowns under Bush II.

IF you go back to Reagan, he got broad bipartisan support for his tax reforms, and he wasn't impeached for Iran-Contra even though he should have been. There were a lot of budget battles between Reagan and Congressional Democrats with multiple government shutdowns, but I think they were all about the budget, rather than the Congressional Democrats shutting down the government to extract concessions over something else.

You are conflating the overheated partisan hatred that the Very Online progressive left has had for every Republican president since Reagan with the overheated partisan hatred that the mainstream centre-left (Dem Congressional leadership, the NYT, the Deep State etc.) has for Trump.