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Comment by abat | Hacker News Reader

Only if Reddit.com blocked the sites.

Each subreddit is its own privately moderated world. Some subreddits only allow self-posts, which means you can't post third party sites at all. Some subreddits only allow scholarly journals. Some subreddits filter based on political bias.

Everyone chooses what subreddits they want to subscribe to, and if you want a different set of rules you can create your own subreddit.

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Admins and members of subreddit tend to have a slightly confused idea about what a subreddit it supposed to be. On one hand, the fundamental idea is clearly that the quality of articles is determined by the aggregate of users' votes. On the other hand, many people still appeal to some individual or objective measure of "quality," and insist that admin moderation is necessary to maintain this level of quality.

Enforcing measures of quality help subs avoid catering to the least common denominator. For example, without strict rules, /r/askscience would likely fill with many well-meaning commentators who don't actually know what they are talking about. This is bad for everyone, including those well-meaning commentators. Everyone wants the sub to be good, but that by itself isn't enough.

But by using moderation to avoid the "least common denominator," you're dealing with content that is less satisfying to users. Of course, this is only true is you judge "satisfying" by upvotes and downvotes, or perhaps other metrics like number of comments.

this is only true is you judge "satisfying" by upvotes and downvotes

Right, exactly, they are saying you cannot properly (completely) judge "satisfying" by up/downvotes.

That's true but r/politics is a default subreddit.

Actually not anymore. They recently updated the defaults, imho for the better. /r/atheism is off the default list, too.

Not as of a few months ago. It was removed from default for... obvious... reasons.

Not only has r/politics not been a default for a while now (at least a couple months, I think), it wouldn't matter if it was -- default subs are still not managed by the Reddit admins. How a sub is run obviously can influence which ones are chosen as defaults, but being a default doesn't itself change anything.

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