I don't know if this makes me biased, but I for one welcome fewer low-quality, link-bait, and/or recycled-story articles.
It was unwanted. The mods' announcement was even downvoted to zero by the community:
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1pedlv/concerning_...
r/politics is the opposite of a place you would visit for reasonable political discussion. It was so bad that it got dropped from the list of default subs, and even before that, people created accounts just to filter out stuff from that sub. The sub needed quality control for a really long time, and now it's finally getting it.
Since mods come from the userbase, what does that say about the mods?
> The users on the thread you linked think that filtering out shitty new sources is some kind of right-wing conspiracy.
Some do, sure. Many others, including ex-mods, see it for what it is: censorship.
"Censorship" is a biased word, usually chosen by people who don't like what's being enforced. I would perhaps use the word "filtering" and it's perfectly common in a lot of subreddits. I don't think "censoring" is fair because all the same topics and events will still get discussed. The theory being that now, discussion starts with - on average - better reporting.
Only to someone in favor of censorship.
That wasn't the issue. The issue was the word 'censorship' being perceived as a biased word. Only censors or those with the predilection to censor would think the word is "biased".
I'm positing that filtering has neither a positive nor a negative connotation; that all information gets through anyway, it's only low-quality sources of the same information that are filtered; and that calling it censorship in a comment inappropriately pre-disposes the reader to a negative reaction.