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Comment by ciarannolan | Hacker News Reader

> Aggressive moderation on some subs makes it hard to post. Posts might be deleted for arbitrary reasons. Sometimes questions are sent to a generic 'Ask a Question' thread, which isn't great for finding questions later via search.

This is my biggest problem with the site, and the reason I don't use it. Each community is at the mercy of a small number of moderators who are free to shape the conversation in any way they wish.

There's also a small number of people that control what is posted and commented on in all the main, default subreddits (news, politics, technology, etc). Browsing reddit is just ingesting the information diet of a small number of ideological moderators.

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A lot of forums also have tyrannical mods, but the key difference is that a forum doesn't have the same unique authority that a subreddit with the best name for the topic has. If a forum has bad mods, other forums are on a bit more equal footing as competitors. The discussion thread format is also less prone to bad moderation than reddit's link/image focused post threads are, and usually also forces the mods to actually participate in the community. Plus if someone breaks a forum rule other than one related to creating threads, other users can come scold them for it more easily (necroing is a common example).

Reddit isn't built for community discussion and is getting worse at it as the admins try to turn it into instagram.

I can only speak to the one (top 10 by subscriber count) subreddit I am a "mod" in, but they also routinely engage in vote manipulation to control what their front page looks like through a more "organic" approach (edit: rather) than simple thread deletion. I'm sure this goes on in all of the major ones.

Not to mention rules are inconsistently enforced, rule breaking that aligns with moderator ideology tends to get shifted to the bottom of the priority stack.

Are you saying the mods of the subreddit are themselves purchasing votes from bot farms to influence the posts? Or am I not understanding you?

No, sorry for not clarifying. They would share links with "upvote this please" in moderator only channels to push things to the top of the subreddit. Which afaik is against reddit TOS.

> This is my biggest problem with the site, and the reason I don't use it. Each community is at the mercy of a small number of moderators who are free to shape the conversation in any way they wish.

Isn't this also the way with forums, especially niche ones?

Yes, definitely, but most forums aren't one of the most popular websites in the world.

Is this different from what mods/admins on old-style community forums used to do?

Some of the moderators are even there for 10 years. Reddit should have an obsolescence plan

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