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Comment by 101011 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that's true. r/nba, a top 10 active subreddit at the time of going private, put it to a public vote where the overwhelming majority of the community voted to suspend indefinitely.

This was during the NBA finals, mind you. Hard to put that sort of result on a small group of mods.

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> put it to a public vote

Those votes were brigaded by people pushing the blackout, they are not representative of the overall community.

The average user of Reddit completely ignored/scrolled past those polls because "whats this doing in the NBA sub"

I find it hard to have any faith in those polls considering one of the subs that I mod that has ~3500 members got just over 4800 votes on the poll.

The other sub I mod with 1300 members got 800 votes (which averages 10 posts per week from a core regular group of users)

I do not believe for a second that a sub with less than 100 'active' monthly members had more than 60% of the total lifetime population of that sub come online all of a sudden and vote in the communities best interest.

Then on the other side of it, you've got subs with millions of members that had 20k responses. The average user did not (and does not) care. Now that those subs have been re-polled without being flooded by protesters, it's a overwhelming "No, leave us out of this"

Is this more rigged election without evidence talk? I browse Reddit maybe 20 minutes a week, on the weeks that I think to use it. I'm subscribed to maybe a dozen subs. I voted in favor of the strike in the one sub that was kind of late to asking about the protest and I noticed in time.

I understand the value of the site even if I don't use it that often. It seems to be on the road to death and was hoping that it could be saved.

>Is this more rigged election without evidence talk?

I mean, the user above just provided his personal testimony on the subject.

In any case, why should we have a presumption that a poll with say 10k votes on a sub with 10m users is a representative sample of user opinion? Not only would I say that we shouldn't, but I'd say that we shouldn't for reasons that the pro-blackout people often point to - that even if the changes don't impact most users it does disproportionately impact powerusers and mods.

But when someone says "maybe powerusers and mods are disproportionately influencing these polls" then we're suddenly asking for strong evidence??

If you're just someone who browses 20min/week, I'm not sure you represent the average user in any of your subreddits either much less one that should be weighing in on whether other people get to use the subreddit. ;)

"I barely visit Reddit so I'm completely cool with them staying offline" is kind of a given.

So you're a mod. Who's to say you personally did not brigade or tilt the poll in the other direction? I'm curious what makes you immune to random calls of conspiracy and corruption. It's especially ironic since you claim most mods are scum and corrupt, so I'm curious if you think you somehow are not.

Now if you have actual evidence of brigading then by all means. Post it. Post those 're-done' polls.

> they are not representative of the overall community.

I would suggest that they are representative of the most invested users.

I don't have a Reddit account. I just scroll and pass the time. But contributors have different needs / concerns than I. (I'm in favor of u/spez being replaced, however. What a dick.)

I read (and very occasionally contribute to) a large number of subreddits that I'm not subscribed to. Recently I use redreader, but I'm the past I did it via the main Reddit website, simply by visiting /r/a+b+c+d..... to show all the posts on the same page.

8000 votes out of 7.5 million members. I'm on r/nba every day and didn't see the poll.

People will say statistically 8000 votes is sufficient for an accurate sample, but only if the voting isn't brigaded.

All comments on other basketball subs at the moment are overwhelmingly in favour of re-opening the sub.

r/nba and r/hockey are particularly interesting examples because the threads before the shutdown were overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the subs open and all the upvoted posts were openly trashing the mods over their decision. The poll was also posted in the ModCoord discord servers so was almost certainly not representative of the average r/nba or r/hockey user.

Selection bias, most casual users are not going to fill out a poll. The only ones who would are those who are likely to support the protest. This is clearly visible when you look at how many total votes there are compared to how many subscribers the subreddit has.

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