This episode exposes a weakness in Reddit's overall structure, namely the opaque process whereby moderators are chosen. When domains are banned completely and against the wishes of the broader community it shows that Reddit's otherwise democratic processes can be fairly autocratic.<p>The solution is a system where users can vote on who is a moderator. Between this and /r/worldnews Banning of Russia Today it is apparent that moderators have far too much power over the content of various subteddit's.<p>Such voting could be limited to once per month, and two users who have a certain karma. There might even be an opportunity for a competitor site which does this very thing.<p>Edit: The number of moderators should be a function of the number of subscribers as well.
It's not Reddit's "politics section" but one of the many subreddits - independently managed forums, each with its own policy.<p>This distinction should be obvious to anyone familiar with the platform and a more accurate title would be "the /r/politics subreddit bans..."
Site-wide bans really rub me the wrong way. It implies a very simpleminded, idealistic understanding of organizations, as if all the writers and editors were a single hivemind -- as one spams, so do all the others. But the reality is more complicated than that, and while there are pragmatic considerations at play here, it's sad that there can't be a more granular-kind of ban, because each of these organizations put out some fine works of journalism, no matter what your gut reaction to the organization may be.<p>Huffington Post, for example, won a Pulitzer last year for an extremely important (and still undercovered) topic:<p><a href="http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2012-National-Reporting" rel="nofollow">http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2012-National-Reporting</a><p>As far as HN goes, I wish HN could remove the site-level ban on Buzzfeed. Yes, mercilessly flag the shit out of its "23 Gifs about some Linkbait topic" articles, but they've been investing some money and resources into serious and original work.<p>They have a longform section:
<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/longform" rel="nofollow">http://www.buzzfeed.com/longform</a><p>They were the employer of Michael Hastings, the late-investigative reporter who died in a LA car wreck: <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/michael-hastings-rolling-stone-contributor-dead-at-33-20130618" rel="nofollow">http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/michael-hastings-r...</a><p>And they recently hired one of my former colleagues, Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Schoofs, from ProPublica, to lead a new investigative team:<p><a href="http://jimromenesko.com/2013/10/21/mark-schoofs-leaves-propublica-to-head-buzzfeeds-investigative-unit/" rel="nofollow">http://jimromenesko.com/2013/10/21/mark-schoofs-leaves-propu...</a><p>Then again, you could always argue that BuzzFeed's (and their linkbaity peers) good contributions aren't yet enough to outweigh the burden of modding their junk.
The second to last comment says it all:<p><i>This sort of violates the point of Reddit, right? Users are supposed to upvote material they find interesting, rather than have editors sequester content they find relevant.</i>
I would hazard a guess that it's more to do with the reaction of the commentators on r/politics to the articles these sites put out than anything else. Here on HN there are certain topics which tend to descend into pointless roundabout arguments and typically these tend to disappear off the front page fairly quickly.<p>I'm guessing the mods got fed up with policing the same tedious/endless/toxic conversation and decided to kill off the major causes of them.
It seems quite ironic that this was written in Slate - I have seen just as many examples of bad journalism from Slate as from HuffPo/Mother Jones.
This is great. Salon has just gotten so bad. The series of editorials bashing Sam Harris were really over the top. Every day I see articles on Salon that are so biased it's just hard to stomach.
It's worth noting that /r/politics is only the 13th biggest subreddit, by number of submissions. It's a relative drop in the water.<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/9FLPgsW.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/9FLPgsW.png</a>
<a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjPFdCURhZvddGQzd0dIQkk1aXRRRkxEY3g0ZmQtWGc&usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjPFdCURhZvddGQ...</a>
I suspect that reddit's management is looking for the kind of audience that's perfectly content just staring at a TV screen no matter what's on. This appears to be an active push to chase away people with higher functioning intellects.<p>The market for dumb is huge. I can't say that I blame them for going after it, but I won't be one of their users anymore.