When Peter Clark and his family decided to move to Colorado a few years ago, he turned to an unlikely source to help them choose which city to live in: Reddit.
Reddit is host to a network of thousands of online communities — often called subreddits — dedicated to different hobbies, interests and places. Clark has been a “redditor” for nearly 20 years, he told the Daily Camera.
“Everywhere that I’ve lived there has been an equivalent subreddit,” Clark said. “So invariably, when we were deciding to move to Colorado, when we were looking at different towns and cities, scouring these subreddits was this really valuable resource to get an understanding of what the vibe is like in each.”
“I asked a bunch of questions. Is there a good yoga studio? Whatap the best coffee shop? Whatap the library scene? All those kinds of things,” he added.
Clark’s family settled in Louisville about two years ago, and he continued to post in the city’s subreddit. He has built friendships IRL — internet speak for “in real life” — through the Reddit platform, and learned more about the Louisville community.
But last year, he noticed a change within the online space.
A new user had become the group’s moderator. On Reddit, moderators are users who volunteer to manage and oversee subreddits, and can enforce the site‘s rules and group-specific guidelines by removing content, approving posts and, at times, banning users for noncompliance.
“There was this increasingly heavy-handed moderation applied,” Clark said of the new moderator. “Bans really started accumulating.”
Over 200 users were banned from the Louisville subreddit in a matter of months, according to Clark — “pretty significant,” he said, for a group of about 2,500, only 126 of which are currently listed as “active users.”
While Clark himself was not banned, and did not want to comment on the nature of the moderator’s activity, other users who were banned from the Louisville subreddit have referred to a political leaning.
Clark first emailed Reddit about the moderator “abusing their privilege” in December and continued emailing the company for months with no response.
“As you can imagine, in these communities, you ban someone for a valid reason but that person might think they were banned unfairly, so I think Reddit gets a massive influx of these complaints,” said Clark, who works for Pinterest.
On April 20, he says, he found an email address for the Reddit CEO and sent a message explaining the situation.
He received a reply “in an hour or two … and we had the subreddit back first thing April 21,” Clark said. The moderator had been banned, and Clark was made the Louisville subredditap new moderator.The Daily Camera reached out to accounts that appear tied to the former Louisville subreddit moderator and did not receive a response.
A ‘local nightmare’
Clark said he was nervous when he became the new moderator, because he wasn’t a “tenured user.”
“I felt like I was land grabbing,” he told the Camera.
In an April post to the subreddit, Clark explained what happened. He had unbanned about 150 users that had been removed from the group, and asked if other users wanted to become moderators with him.
The received over 180 replies from others in the group, the majority of whom celebrated the regime change — an end to what one called the former moderator’s “frivolous banning.”
“Our long, local nightmare is finally over,” wrote a user on Clark’s post.
“The reign … is finally over,” another user commented.
“I can’t even begin to tell you how much I appreciate you doing this. I was even contemplating offering him/her/whatever money to give up control. As a Louisville resident and small business owner, it was a shame to lose such a great way to connect,” wrote another.
Platforms for information
Online spaces such as Reddit have become a critical pipeline for information, according to Casey Fiesler, an associate professor at CU Boulder who researches and teaches technology ethics and internet law, and policy within online communities.
“When we have fires here, how do you find out about what’s happening? Often the answer is social media, like a local Facebook group or a subreddit, or a hashtag on Twitter, or that kind of thing, and that can actually be really important,” Fiesler told the Camera.
In May, two Redditors posted in the Louisville subreddit with information about lost pets. Both animals were found and returned to their owners, according to posts in the subreddit.
“I’m not sure this would’ve had the feet to start moving if the subreddit hadn’t been saved and I (along many more people) were unbanned and free to post. … Thank you … for saving our small town subreddit,” a user wrote in the Louisville group.
Online politics
How Reddit groups are governed can depend on the users, Fiesler said, making them “community-controlled spaces.” The Boulder subreddit, for example, has an about rules for that group.
But that governance structure can put pressure on moderators to make sticky decisions, Fiesler added.
Reddit moderators are users who either create a subreddit or are added by existing moderators, giving them control over rules, posts and bans. Under Redditap rules, if a subreddit has had no moderator activity for 30 days or longer, another user can request control of the community through the company’s
“In the summer of 2020 in the middle of both COVID and Black Lives Matter, suddenly, the moderators of, say, the ‘Taylor Swift moms’ Facebook group, or your local HOA Facebook group, these volunteer moderators had to make decisions about what is racism? What are people allowed to talk about? It was actually very emotionally taxing for a lot of people,” she said.
In the Louisville subreddit, some users said the former moderator had used the group in an attempt to push a political message, with one saying they are “a libertarian who didn’t even live in Louisville and had taken over several small town subs.”
A February post from the former moderator reads: “We can make it so that you don’t have to vote for the least bad candidate. Give people a choice they can trust. Run For Office – Libertarian Party of Colorado.”
Another post from the moderator was titled “From the ColoradoLibertarian community on Reddit: A Brief History of the State of Israel with Cory Hughes.”
After Reddit removed the former moderator, one user expressed concern that the site “only steps in when the action helps the political left.”
A spokesperson for Reddit said any complaint to the company, “regardless of the channel through which it is received, is subject to the same internal review process.”
“To be clear, Reddit does not ban or remove moderators simply because users ask or because of community sentiment,” the spokesperson, who would not give their name, told the Camera in an email.
“We only take action when there is a verified violation of our Moderator Code of Conduct. … In cases where a moderator is warned and provided with guidance but continues to violate policies or refuses to collaborate, we move toward enforcement.”
Fiesler said from her observations, Reddit does “tend to lean a bit more left,” though she added that can “vary a lot between subreddits.”
In the popular “conservative” subreddit, for example, ideas might align differently. But in a group dedicated to a physical location rather than an interest or ideology, “it’s interesting because people don’t necessarily have anything in common aside from just happening to live in the same place,” Fiesler said.
Community beyond the screen
As a whole, Fiesler said, these online spaces “are a good thing.”
While platforms such as Facebook and Instagram often include a photo and full name for each user, anonymity in online spaces such as Reddit is “definitely a double-edged sword,” Fiesler said. Users on Reddit often go by randomized names, unattached from their real-life identities.
“Oftentimes people feel more comfortable being terrible people without using their real name. So that’s definitely an issue,” she said.
Not having to use real names in an online community also allows people to use those channels as “support spaces in a way they might not be able to otherwise.”
“Think of any health condition you can possibly think of. I promise you there’s a subreddit for it. And it’s the kind of thing that people might not feel comfortable engaging if they were using their real name,” Fiesler said.
“Before widespread use of the internet, the only way that you had to connect with people was if you happened to be around in person. … Now, people can connect with affinity rather than just geography. I think that’s been really positive in a lot of ways,” she added.
Clark felt the importance of trying to reclaim the Louisville Reddit group. It’s not just a place to learn about local events, businesses and government, but a place to find connection — other dads in the area, people to ski with.
“I personally really felt the pain of losing this subreddit, because I felt disconnected from the community,” he said.
“It really weighs on me, how isolated people are. I guess I just kind of see this Reddit community as a solution to that in a little way,” he said. “Bringing people together in a way thatap accessible and friendly, and I think, most importantly, not intimidating.”
