Reddit: bad moderation, black-listing of Substack, and the shilling for Hearst

Reddit and it's war against Substack fought for corporate media.

After performing around three to five hours of work locating all of the different cabins in Camp Mystic I created an article with my findings in a map and posted it to the community r/Texas on Reddit. Within minutes it was removed. This is a story of bad moderation and an insane bias against independent media — even when the result is superior.

Reddit is a network of communities. These communities are called subreddits. This article addresses two of them: r/Texas, and r/politics.

Bad Moderation at r/Texas

Immediately after posting my map

Your post from texas was removed because of: 'No Reposting'

Hi u/EvanCarroll, We have countless maps available, this one is extremely similar. Not to mention you’re soliciting views for your sub stack.

Reposting? It was original content. I appealed, and said

There is no other map available that shows where the cabins are located and what their names are. That's the only map. And I'm comparing it to the New York Times map in the blog entry you removed.

The mod was resistant and replied,

There are half a dozen over the past few days, it’s completely redundant at this point.

It’s important to point out that the rules do substantiate the mod’s opinion against reposting. But it’s not a repost. I literally created and it required auditing brochures and logos in pictures from 1995. There was nothing like it.

We went back and forth a bit. This post is the one the mod said I was duplicating. It’s an areal photo. I’m obviously not copying that.

Aerial photo that doesn’t show cabins at all, nevermind their names. Also misplaces the label for “Cabins on the Flats”

Their photo doesn’t name any of the cabins. In fact they’re not even visible there — the cabins are hidden behind the treeline. This is the map I produced, click to expand

A map of all the cabins with their names. The area enclosed in bright yellow is all “Cabins on the Flats.”

By any means, when I pointed this is what I was told.

to be frank you shouldn’t be soliciting our sub trying to get views on your sub stack

Reddit and the bias against community work

First, “soliciting?” Can you imagine telling someone doing something for free for the community that they’re soliciting? What am I trying to sell? Influence on the merits of my best-in-class contribution to the open-source OpenStreetMap? And even if that’s your frame, so what? What’s wrong with "trying to get views.” That’s just a slimy way of saying I’m trying to give back my contribution to people who may be interested in it. Reddit is after all first and foremost a link-aggregator.

Moreover, what makes for a better world,

• The Corporate MSM mode of production,

  1. Corporate media hires cartographer to make a crap map

  2. Map is produced

  3. Map is used in an article which is typically paywalled

  4. And then it’s promoted by some nerd in PR using a corporate account because no one subscribes to that garbage. This is currently what’s happening anyway. The MSM is promoting their own posts on their front page from corporates accounts. It’s naked self-promotion,

     • Post by /u/nbcnews

     • Post by /u/ExpressNews - expressnews.com is owned by Hearst

     • Post by u/MySA_dot_com - mysa.com is owned by Hearst

     • Post u/Houston_Chronicle - houstonchronicle.com is owned by Hearst

     • Post by u/peoplesmagazine - owned by Dotdash Meredith

• Or, this mode of production.

  1. Something interests me, and driven by passion I write about.

  2. Everything is released as CC-BY-SA. I contribute to open source projects to produce content, like OpenStreetMap.

  3. I do all the work myself.

  4. I publish all of my work on Substack for free. I have no paid content. Nothing is paywalled.

  5. I share this content in a very targeted fashion with others interested in the topic.

  And the result is superior quality! I mean come on, look at those maps I made. I’m a schmuck running circles around the NYT.

Unfortunately, I get greeted often with hostility on reddit. I’ve similarly had submissions to r/politics removed for no reason other than a proclamation that Substack is a “personal blog site" and in violation of their rule.

And, it’s not just Reddit

As any of my readers know, I vote almost exclusively Green Party. They’ve had my vote in every presidential election since 2012. But even the Green Party Discord has been infected with this kind of “moderation”,

I subsequently gave the moderators a link to this article — updated with the substance above — and I was warned that on the next violation of the “no self-promotion” rule I would be banned. I know when I’m not welcome; and, that was the end of my involvement with the party I previously blockwalked for. If it’s “self-promotion” to seek political engagement from party members on Discord talking about the very topic I am writing on, what is when I blockwalk for them and knock on doors uninvited seeking support for their candidates?

Not to dwell too much but my local Linux Users Group’s Discord has twice as many people (1k+) and is quite possibly more active in the #politics channel. When Houston’s local Linux group is better at building a political community than the Green Party USA, we’ve got problems.

Conclusion

This is how Reddit dies, and online community at large. Does Reddit (et. al) want to piss off the community by excluding the most passionate members who have elevated themselves to contributors on select topics, merely because they have other day jobs?

What Reddit needs to do is prohibit all rules against self-promotion. Not because these rules are wrong in what they’re trying to achieve, but because the implementation of them fosters toxicity, and exclusivity, and leaves too much room for self-interest from traditional media.

This kind of bad community moderation, mixed with a corporate culture of indifference to bad community moderation feels a lot like Stack Exchange. Members of the community and individual contributors should not be put into confrontation with moderators on bizzare grounds like “soliciting” and “promotion.” These elements should be things that the community handles naturally with technical input garnered from upvotes and downvotes.

Scientific Journal of Objective Truths and Proof 2025:7-8.1.1. Updated to add example of Green Party Discord.