I’ve been here since that time, and I’m pretty sure your guide to the Fediverse was a huge help in understanding how the Fediverse works. Thank you very much for it.
Politics-wise, I still frankly see some frankly rather alarming takes on here, but that just makes me more committed to building this up to be a better place. I’m certainly glad to see another friend here as well!
Eh. That seems more like typical out-of-control jargon and labeling ideology than any admin malfeasance. It’s unfortunately something I’ve seen a few times - I had several debates with people who likewise insisted that even using it in the sense of ‘to slow something down’ was improper, or that using potentially insulting words in any context caused “harm”. It’s a mindset that goes beyond any Reddit issues.
Back when I used to mod Reddit, starting maybe a year or so ago we’d occasionally get users who would be inexplicably targeted by the auto-filter.
The accounts weren’t new, weren’t shadowbanned, weren’t using any filter-triggering words (that I could guess at), and an examination via Pushshift didn’t reveal any kind of spammy behavior. Nonetheless, their posts would get silently removed by the site-wide filter, and frequently we wouldn’t even know until they modmailed us.
Now I can’t help but wonder if this was a result of a beta-test of something like this. Something they had done had invisibly lowered their “Reddit credit”, leaving us as confused as them.
I remember plenty of pre-Reddit forums also being exactly the same way.
If anything, the big difference was that whoever was in charge tended to end up just banning whoever disagreed with them. So most people either learned not to contradict “what was known”, or got kicked out. (In fairness, Reddit also had that problem, but subjectively not as often.)