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> straight-up disinfo (I tend to look at their profiles for context) gets deleted quickly.

That makes me extremely nervous. One can imagine a perverse mod who simply deletes comments based on which political subs they post in.



Edit up front to say, it's unfortunate that you read that one line and got extremely nervous rather than take anything else I had put into consideration.

I personally don't care where you post if you're being polite on the sub I moderate. I try to think of it like being the chairperson of a meeting, or the bartender at a local bar: Let people debate and disagree and even say stupid stuff, but if they say something obviously offensive or start name-calling, you get modded.

And if I then look at your comment history and see a stream of vitriolic behavior, that shows me it wasn't "just one time" you got out of hand, but a pattern of undesirable behavior.

I do know other subs, mostly political, that will instantly ban you if you have a different set of beliefs than they do. It's very frustrating. But that's not what I'm discussing here.


I was hopefully tactful enough in my wording to raise the concern with the sentiment but not make it an accusation. I'm obviously reading into a statement you made a bit offhand. Please understand that I'm not saying you engage in any malfeasance.

However, different subs run differently. I may well engage in a nuanced and sourced debate in one subreddit, and frankly tell someone off in another. Subreddits are communities and communities have different standards of behavior.

Likewise, community membership is a terrible proxy for actual opinions or beliefs. I belong to many communities I disagree with, but I find monitoring them to be useful and sometimes engage in debates. I've found my debates with anti-vaxxers to be very enlightening - I still think people should get vaxxed but I understand my opposition.

All of this to say that a top down examination of a profile without context is worse than useless - it is actively misleading.


Honest question: what's the alternative? Maybe sign-off from multiple mods on every action? That'd be a tough sell to require double, triple, or more time from mods. Some sort of random review of x% of mod actions maybe?


Have a N strikes policy, track in-sub user infractions.

Have a public moderation log.

Reddit is unfortunately woefully under-equipped for moderators so the above is a strictly out of band process for Reddit specifically.


There's definitely some "politics" where that's an extremely wise move. For example, people who regularly post in a subreddit dedicated to holocaust denial don't really deserve benefit of the doubt when they've already posted something bad enough to require moderator interaction in /r/lego.


I don't have to imagine. Many subs automatically ban you if you post in few specific subs.




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