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Comment by czechdeveloper | Hacker News Reader

I use Reddit long term and /r/all was always bad and you should find your subreddits to care for.

I have been browsing /r/all for years, but I aggressively filter subreddits out that hold no interest for me. It allows /r/all to be semi-curated content for me, while I still will see something that breaks containment from the niche subreddits.

I don't feel that this makes reddit a great news source or anything - but it does make it palatable entertainment.

I do this same thing, it has worked really well. I browse the all subreddit and aggressively block/filter subreddits that are of no interest, then smaller subreddits start bubbling up and all becomes relatively good for finding new content actually. Blocking the main default subreddits and subreddits where they just keep posting memes and all subreddits that have anything to do with gaming or new games gets you like 80% of the way there. It's nice seeing small subreddits on all after that curation.

And hope it does not get quarantined then disappeared? No thanks.

Has this happened to you ever? I’ve been on reddit for 10 years, and this never happened to me.

I've also been on reddit for more than 10 years and it's also never happened to me, but I know what they're talking about. Let's not pretend like it doesn't happen.

I have seen it happen through complaints reaching the all subreddit. However it only seemed to happen to subreddits that were peddling deep hatred against outgroups like people of color, overweight people, or were just vile. Your comment makes it seem like any given subreddit is in danger of quarantining, but anecdotally that doesn't seem to be the case. However, I have an open mind: would you give me an example of a subreddit that was otherwise innocuous yet got quarantined?

innocuous to thee but not to meee

Instead of being glib, take the challenge: name a subreddit that got quarantined that you think shouldn't have been.

/r/2balkan4you (banned, not even quarantined)

the most recently banned subreddit to my knowledge was about disagreement with public policy for covid lockdowns. the ability to protest public policy is essential to a functioning democracy.

/r/chapotraphouse wasn't any worse then say /r/conservative or /r/politics, but it got banned.

/r/DarkNetMarkets. Just for discussing DNMs, AFAIK.

/r/shoplifting

/r/stealing

/r/beertrade: for trading beers

/r/gundeals for a bit. Several other gun buying subs are still banned.

/r/fakeid

/r/scotchswap: for trading Scotches

/r/cigarmarket

There's more, too.

IMO Chapo was banned as a misguided attempt at balance for banning /r/The_Donald, though it's not like they weren't an unruly bunch. Calls for violence weren't exactly unheard of there, ironic or not.

The rest of those are just banning discussions of illegal activity. Seems like a reasonable policy to me.

Trading beer and scotch isn't illegal, is it though? Neither is buying guns, or visiting/discussing dark net markets.

And it's not like there aren't thousands of other subs that discuss illegal activity. They haven't banned all the drug subs, or the hacking subs, etc. Pretty much any illegal activity you can still find subs for it. /r/streetracing, /r/piracy, etc.

> IMO Chapo was banned as an attempt at balance for the misguided banning of /r/The_Donald

FTFY

Nah. If anything that subreddit was kept around for way too long in a misguided attempt to not appear biased.

/r/chapotraphouse was calling for death on people on the reg with the full support of their moderators. That's why they got banned.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitPoliticsSays/comments/9m30os/rc...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitPoliticsSays/comments/bmtdqb/ch...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitPoliticsSays/comments/c66x0w/1_...

They cracked down on the baseball thing way before they got banned though; after they got quarantined. Yeah, they were saying killing slaveowners is good, but who doesn't think that? It's what the American Civil War was. It's self-defense, and no worse then everyone on reddit that is cheering for Ukraine to win the war against Russia (by killing Russian soldiers) or all the people that said what Kyle Rittenhouse did was good, or countless other calls for violence that occur on all types of subreddits.

This defense falls apart once you remember that this is a pro-communist subreddit that believes 'wage slavery' is a thing. And besides, this is hardly the only instance where content that breaks the sitewide rules was left up by the mods even after being reported.

>They cracked down on the baseball thing way before they got banned though; after they got quarantined.

And the_donald literally disallowed submissions for months before being banned. When reddit has a sub in their sights, they will find a reason.

/r/bigchungus (pictures of fat Bugs Bunny? wha?)

/r/mgtow

2balkan4u was nothing but making fun of the ingroup for the atrocities and other bullshit their contries were pulling

r/watchpeopledie, despite the horrible name it is a very "educational" sub that helped me become painfully aware of my mortality and in many cases helped me become much more aware of my surroundings when I cross the streets, when I'm around elevators and big machinery and so on.

Though technically it wasn't banned, r/star_trek recently got locked from having new posts, and only just the other day became unlocked because the mod agreed to not allow discussion related to r/startrek.

Wait, huh???

r/startrek, without the underscore, is the official Star Trek community. r/star_trek is an alternative community created because r/startrek is very hostile to anyone who doesn't just slobber over anything Star Trek.

So people would join the alternative community and bring up why they got banned on the official one, or how people were being ridiculous in general on the official one.

But I don't buy that there was any meaningful amount of brigading that was happening. I think the official community, being its pious self, didn't like that people were exposing the mods for being arbitrary and condescending, or that anyone was exposing the likely possibility that they were highly controlled by ViacomCBS.

When it got locked, for all intents and purposes it was banned, if not temporarily.

I also know it happens. And I'm also mostly like "Yeah, that makes sense".

X: They keep banning my favorite subreddits

Y: Like /r/programming?

X: No, not that one

Y: /r/movies?

X: No

Y: /r/lego?

X: No

Y: /r/nfl?

X: No

Y: Well, which ones?

X: /r/letsmockminoritiesanddisabledpeople

The concern is with the subs, users (including mods), and behaviors that are miraculously exempted.

For instance, reddit has a raging hardon for Sinophobia, but Asians in general aren't treated as a protected human class. Incredibly vile, vitriolic content and comments get huge acclaim as long as you frame anything Asian as being tacitly un-American.

Look through the Olympic speed skater threads, or the recent "the result of Chinese lock down policies" video that's just a compilation of Asian people committing suicide, totally unrelated to lock downs.

I get nobody wants to feel like they're surrounded by closet xenophobes and ethnopurists, but all it takes is seeing the collective blind-spot in "remember Russian people are innocent, it's just Putin we hate!" versus "makes sense, Chinese are all freedomless brainwashed moral aliens" to drive home how rotten it is.

This is just one example. Terrible behavior by megamods going unacknowledged and unaddressed weakens the platform, and reddit stoking the tribalism that makes people feel like they're safe and powerful there lends itself to harmful extremism. It's like nationalism is okay as long as it's not white nationalism.

I'm not sure when it started, probably around Trump's time but the Sinophobia on reddit is becoming unbearable. Any random "China bad" thread is upvoted to the sky even with sketchy or non-existent sources, and anyone expressing skepticism or asking for source in the comment is immediately personally attacked and called names like tankie/50c army/Chinese bot/etc. Unlike HN, when it comes to politics everyone on reddit seems to immediately assume bad faith when discussing with someone who doesn't agree with your political view.

Right but the solution isn't to go backwards and say, "well we think it's fine to be xenophobic to the Chinese and so to be consistent we should allow xenophobia across the board," that would be absurd. It should really go the other way and I think you would get a whole lot of support for it.

> It's like nationalism is okay as long as it's not white nationalism.

I think the issue is because "white" isn't really a race, nobody is trying to cancel someone proud of their Polish heritage. Black ended up becoming a de-facto race to deal with the descendants of slaves who had their ancestry erased so they're not really comparable. I can only speak to the US but "white nationalism" (hell even "American nationalism") just became the rallying cry for white supremacists. Which sucks for anyone who was benignly proud to be an American but this is just the reality we have to deal with. It's political suicide to run on "I'm racist and proud" anymore so we're surrounded by dogwhistles and people organizing under informal banners and "you know what I mean wink" type policy.

> "remember Russian people are innocent, it's just Putin we hate!"

That's pretty much gone in the comments section on r/politics.

The vitriol directed against Russians is often over the top now.

As someone who remembers the hatred towards Russians by the American Right during the 80s that is fairly disturbing to me.

Of course the Hacker News threads which try to play down the consequences of a nuclear exchange with Russia are probably worse.

This is a “razors in candy” kind of problem.

Disagree. Reddit is not a safe place for political movements, minority groups, etc, for this reason

Which minorities

How do you discover subreddits if not by browsing /all? I mean I for one don't know what I'm missing.

This is one way: https://old.reddit.com/reddits/

Another is subreddit search engines like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22823109

Just to note, some subreddits decide not to appear on /r/all, so even there you're missing stuff.

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