Daily Bard Digest 2024-07-03

At 2024-07-03T16:59:14+00:00 on /r/modnews with a score of 5 points:

In previous posts years ago you even said it wasn't OK to ban people based on posting in other subs,

This has been a complex issue.

In the 2015-2020 era, before Reddit was kicking bad actors & hate/harassment groups off the site, automatic blanket bans for participating in those groups was the best tool good faith subreddits had for preventing being deluged in derail / forum slide / flood the zone tactics.

That was when there was a literal conspiracy by a group of operators of /r/the_donald, /r/cringeanarchy, /r/metacanada, and more to extort and harass good faith moderators off the site, most famously with the "five mods control 500 subreddits" meme -

https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/gxas21/upcoming_changes_to_our_content_policy_our_board/ft08mel/?context=8

The admins had addressed this kind of strong-arming in the context of automated bans (banbots) before:

https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/9ld746/you_have_thousands_of_questions_i_have_dozens_of/e76jqa3/?context=8

Those make clear that they were always unhappy with automated bans because those bans could be viewed as antagonistic, but that "things" had to happen before they could address that aspect.

Sitewide rule 1, kicking off hate & harassment groups, crowd control, cqs score, & Mod code of conduct were those "things".

Addressing the antagonistic aspect / uses of automated ban messages is possible now because the larger issues have been mostly tackled.

Even now, however, importantly, community moderators are people who pick up the responsibility of setting and maintaining a community's collective boundaries — which legitimately includes recognising that a given other community, collectively or severally, is inherently incompatible with the moderator's community.

Blanket bans are still necessary in those situations, and explaining to banned users the facts of the antagonistic community's malfeasance is necessary.

I'm not going to tell someone "our banbot banned you because you commented in a subreddit for [podcast] _and you're going to have to figure out why that is on your own_", I'm going to tell them "our banbot banned you because you commented in a subreddit for [podcast] which has a lengthy history of transphobia being promoted on the podcast and by the subreddit's audience".

Reddit now handles internally a lot of the content policy enforcement that meta subs used to opensource, and hate & harassment subreddits are now banned, but that doesn't mean hives of scum and villainy are entirely absent from the platform, & individuals & communities are entitled to represent their history when telling people why the boundary exists.