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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.

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.

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.