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if you are banned from a subreddit (even a default one) the moderators can basically choose to ignore you and you are SOL

This touches an issue I'd like to elaborate on: the psychology of someone who is willing to moderate a Reddit subsection—or any similar site, like many mailing lists—is probably not good. It takes someone willing to spend a fair amount of time at a thankless task that is hard to do well and rarely if ever remunerative.

A lot of the people who start at that task do so optimistically but quit as their lives change or the task becomes more onerous. Who gets left? People with axes to grind; people with no sense of perspective; petty tyrants; and so on. I don't use Reddit much for many reasons, but one is the low quality of moderators. I don't bother messaging them anymore, ever, because doing so is largely a waste of time.

The problem with moderators is not dissimilar from the problem of users: people who regularly have something interesting to say and the means to say it well get blogs, as I wrote here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/social-news-sites-a... . Those who don't stay on Reddit.

You have an excellent point about who is willing to moderate versus someone who is actually fit for the job. I feel the concept it lost on a lot of people and too many look at it as another webforum or social media. There is something to be said about using curated link aggregation instead of a blog or forum. Ultimately expressing myself through other people's submissions is pretty cool and I like to think my ("my") subreddit has gradually reached that point.

Self-promotion is one of the really hard problems to solve. Some of my least favorite subs that I really want to like (/r/Entrepreneur is an especially egregious example) have this problem severely. If I see another self-aggrandizing blogger post a link promoting their system for making money on the internet with information products, I'm gonna catch their hair on fire.

So, you say "content creator", I say "people trying to sell me shit that I don't want".

I've got stuff to sell, websites I want to promote, etc. too. But, I accept that the cost of me having a nice community I want to be a part of, that isn't focused on consumption as the only purpose in our lives, means I shut up about it except when it's really relevant and someone else brought it up.

That's what the voting system is for though. If someone is abusing the system like getting fake upvotes then that's def. a problem but the spam system accounts for that. Otherwise if the highly upvoted content on /r/entrepreneur is a bunch of make money schemes then thats what the people subbed to that subreddit want and you should start/find a diff. subreddit closer to what you want.

Also, it's perfectly fine if other people post that content it's just not okay if you are the one who wrote it and posted it so it doesn't stop the content from being posted just WHO can post it.

Not sure if you've been on the other side of the "battle", but there is a heck of a lot of genuine spammers on the site, and shadowbans are one of the few effective tools.

Very rarely is it the kind-hearted entrepreneur showing off a new thing he built who gets hit with a shadowban. It happens, but it's rare. More common is people creating accounts to do nothing but advertise, usually neglecting to disclose their affiliation in any way. Even more common is spammers creating hundreds of throwaway accounts used to promote Youtube channels/affiliate links/click scams/article farms and other nonsense. If you use a regular ban they simply make a new account. So yes, there's a very good reason for shadowbans.

>There's the whole 90/10 rule

90/10 is a guideline, not a hard set rule. Moderators of a subreddit have wiggle room when it comes to defining spammers. Many subs allow self-promotion. If you're advertising in one that doesn't allow it, then you're in the wrong.

>I wish they would just let the upvote/downvote system do its job

Votes work decently to bubble up quality content (if you consider lowest-common-denominator "decent"), but ultimately it does nothing for preventing spam, trolls, doxers, spoilers and whatever else.

You are confusing mods and admins.

> For example, if you make a few self posts, make tons of comments, post links to 5 different websites, then post 1 link to your website, you are breaking the rule and if a mod sees it you can be banned (comments/self posts don't count towards the 90/10 rule so your 5 posts to 1 self promotion post is breaking the rules).

Some admin recently said that something like that has never happened. Only flagrant violators of that rule get shadowbanned by the admins.

A mod can ban you from their subreddit and that happens a lot based on a fairly subjective basis. There are even times where you just get caught by moderating bots then if the moderators don't bother to reply to you, there is little recourse. I have heard of cases from friends who have been banned for fairly bizarre reasons. I'm not saying you will be banned the first time you break the rule but people who post about content they create have to be extremely careful or they can be banned either from a subreddit or globally. When you are a moderator of a subreddit that has millions of viewers, I think it shouldn't be so subjective.

I'm a mod of quite a few subs. We have to submit spammers to /r/spam. It is a bot run sub that basically does link counts from your history, if you hit a threshold, you will get shadowbanned. Submitting a user there who has been around for say 1 year with 250/250 karma, they probably will not get shadowbanned as they don't fit the algorithm. Mod a sub for long enough and you can instantly look at an account and tell whether or not they would get shadowbanned. There are tons of egregious spammers on the site who will never get banned because they don't fit the mold.

I understand the need to fight obvious spam and shadowbanning being a good tool for that, but shadowbanning regular users that are trying to contribute actual content is very disrespectful to the users.

Sounds like you are a banned spammer?