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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33460 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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For reddit, the answer is "looking at who the mods are, and what their political alignment seems to be".

It's commonly accepted on reddit that the same handful of moderators moderates most of the large subs. However, I did realize I haven't verified that myself, so I hacked together a quick script to do so.

For reference, reddit proudly lists what their top communities are, and how many subscribers each one has. If you navigate to that page, you can then go through and look, for each community, at who the moderators for that community are. For example, for /r/funny, the url would be /r/funny/about/moderators, or, if you want to scrape the data, /r/funny/about/moderators.json.

So by navigating to the top communities page and then running this janky little snippet in the javascript console, you can reproduce these results.

Looking at the top 10 (non-bot) mods by number of subreddits modded, I see:

So that's 2 / 10 most visible mods that moderate extensively on the basis of their own personal politics.

That's actually not nearly as bad as I thought. Interesting.

I guess the problem with reddit is the redditors.

You don't need half of the battalion to be commissars. All the political actors here lean the same way. That's enough to push the discourse in a certain direction by only allowing the extremes of one side.

Yes, cult dynamics happen so easily in online spaces

This, so much. This is how it works everywhere. In academia, everyone is broadly leftish but mostly apolitical. A small minority of far-left is not only tolerated & rarely challenged, but is allowed & financed to actively proselytise. Anything remotely right is ostracised or at best tolerated as long as its just talk among colleagues. If you try to point this out, you will be reminded "well, the last inequality retreat was very badly attended, so clearly we need to Do Better". The fact that this inequality retreat was actively financed by the university, mostly peddles extremely shoddy science that wouldn't be tolerated otherwise and that there is absolutely nothing remotely comparable that the average person would consider right does not even occur to them.

It's the same on reddit; I'm fairly confident that a) the great majority of the other mods, if not all of them, are still broadly left-leaning b) critically, the non-political mods almost never challenge the political mods, and almost all political mod actions are broadly the left cracking down on the right, never the other way around.

I guess the problem with reddit is the redditors.

Survivorship bias. Go to these subs and (courteously) post something anti-progressive, and see if your post gets deleted.

At the very least look up their mod logs from before /r/TheDonald ban.

I only ever got banned from /r/sneerclub (for pointlessly arguing with them, and they even warned beforehand TBF), /r/drama for... drama? (I never commented there) and one other subreddit for reasons unrelated to CW.

Really, it doesn't seem to be as simple as posting something anti-progressive. Maybe it's a risk, but fairly low one.

Maybe, but OTOH you never struck me as a particularly anti-progressive poster.

Do you know a good way of doing this that is not "sort by new and then scroll through 500 pages to get that far into the past"?

Edit: I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. I literally would like to know, because if there is such a way my plan is to just straightforwardly do that, and then post the results. The problem with the "sort by new" approach is that, instead of using a limit/offset pattern where I could just put ?sort=new&count=25&page=500 in to go to page 500, reddit instead does a pagination pattern where you give them a sort option and an after param, and the after param takes a comment id (non-sequential, I checked) that you're supposed to pass the id of the last comment on the page, which means to get to page 500 you _literally need to click "next" 500 times.

And these mods write a lot. 500 pages was not an exaggeration, to get back that far in time.

There is or was a link to a site that tells you any of your own posts that have been deleted. I searched it and was amazed how many of my extremely benign posts that I had all but forgotten were wiped. I know without a link this isn't particularly helpful (when I am on an actual computer I can check if i still have it somewhere.) It's also only useful for checking your own posts or posts of specific users.

I guess the problem with reddit is the redditors.

Twas ever thus, but hats off to you for actually going through the effort.

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