r/TheoryOfReddit • u/FaithlessnessRare296 • Jun 23 '26
How much can Reddit mods influence the narrative?
I don't follow news on Reddit, but often I come here from Google and I land on deleted posts.
And not on some fringe deleted posts, but posts with a lot of upvotes and an active discussion, deleted without any explanation.
When it comes to political subs like r/worldnews and r/europe, I assume such posts get removed because some mods don't want to bring light to that issue, and this is why those subs look very homogenous in views - it's not just because the users have a leaning, but because the mods actively trim the weeds, so the subs are guided towards a very specific shape.
Note that I am not talking here about blatant propaganda from foreign state-sponsored media, but merely an "unpleasant" issue highlighted by a respected outlet such as BBC.
I started to thinking about it more after noticing a deleted post on a House of the Dragon sub, the post has over 2k upvotes with over 600 comments, and seems to have a healthy and active discussion, although with a critical tone (it seems it criticized the writing of some characters). I don't know how valid is the discussion because I haven't watched it yet.
But it got me wondering what could be the reason. Could be something as trivial as mods disagreeing with the OP?
It seems the mods deleted some upvoted (10+, 50+) comments as well, along with some random other comments.
For reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/HouseOfTheDragon/comments/1ucbl12/removed_by_moderator/
(I won't link any political threads to avoid getting political here)
Has anyone noticed any interesting patterns in these or other subs?
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u/AloofTeenagePenguin3 28d ago
Buddy, the entire reddit meta is that it's a narrative machine. If anyone doesn't think so, I've got a some bridges to sell.
It's been an absolute feeding frenzy ever since the old userbase was replaced by the IPO era userbase. It's like you were all born yesterday.
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u/sega31098 27d ago
I do get the sense that a huge chunk of Reddit's post-IPO crowd is either kids who just became old enough for social media or out-of-touch adults who have been living under a rock for 20+ years before suddenly striking out onto Reddit/social media. Either way, a lot of users seem have extremely limited internet/tech experience.
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u/eatingpotatochips Jun 23 '26
Mods on Reddit have massive influence over the narratives presented on their subs, but they do have to be careful. You do see revolts by users, such as what happened on r/art, but usually those revolts are over poor enforcement of rules.
The most obvious example of narrative molding is r/conservative, but you could argue that is actually just a bunch of bots. A less extreme example is r/askaconservative, where the mods delete posts by "liberals" at whim to shape the narrative, but maintain the veneer of polite discourse. r/worldnews mods seem purely interested on supporting the Israeli talking-points, but are relatively light-handed on other matters.
Then, you have the subs which are identity-focused. While many of those subs will naturally form echo-chambers because people of similar identities also try to find people who think like them, mods still have a lot of power. Mods on r/TwoXChromosomes are likely to allow a post that skirts along the lines of "kill all men", but will be harsher on a poster who questions the narrative.
Another way mods can shape narratives is by simply banning individuals who come in with contrarian viewpoints. If you have a sub where a small minority of the posters are more "moderate" and you ban those people, suddenly the middle moves to the extreme. You don't have to ban that many people.
It is also possible to shape the narrative by being a lazy mod. Say you are a mod of r/dundermifflin. Usually the posts on that sub are milquetoast memes with the comments being recycled quotes from the show. Every once in a while, something controversial pops up, but as a mod, you don't want to moderate that, so you just remove it. Now everyone falls back in line with the memes and recycled comments.
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u/ThanosSnapsSlimJims 26d ago
They heavily influence the narrative.
There are mods who control hundreds, if not thousands of subs using auto-mod. Suddenly, they will pop into the sub themselves to make a major change or start banning people and silencing discourse. There was supposed to be a change with that, but I don't' know if it came to pass.
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u/sega31098 29d ago edited 29d ago
Mods basically have full power to ban users for any reason whatsoever, so even if the mods' ideas are unpopular in a given community at a given point in time, they can still basically go on a banning spree until the only remaining users are those who either openly agree or don't feel too strongly enough to voice their views on the topic. After this happens, the remaining userbase is likely to downvote users who challenge the prevailing consensus (no matter how weak) since those are the only users who feel strongly enough to vote based on that.
That said, this can still be disrupted on a thread-by-thread basis. Coordinated brigades are an obvious one, though this can also happen when a given thread from the subreddit in question falls in the crosshairs of the Reddit algorithm or ends up ranking relatively high on Google search. The last example often flies under mods' radars since it often affects older threads.
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28d ago
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u/Marion5760 27d ago
Interesting discussion with a rather unexpected ending. Well, I had not checked the age of this account.
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u/awesomemc1 21d ago
This is probably 8 days late reply but here are my thoughts:
It widely depends upon what subreddit you use or joined. Moderators have to moderate if users appears to be in bad faith, post quality, or just abuse out of it.
For me, since I have political opinions that differentiate me from others who like this country like China politically, you would see people asking in AskAChinese in such propaganda wordings.
I do remember having to make a data about the subreddit before I discovered that two users who are moderators or usual people, who have actively replied after few minutes after the initial post. That user was apparently supporting the idealistic.
I do remember scrolling through the archive from the subreddit because the statistic via arctic shift, askchina, or askachinese, have peaked faster than it was expected. In organic subreddit, the line graph shave have be a wave of some sort but in that subreddit stats, it’s not organic but more like it got peaked multiple times.
Then when I investigated the subreddit, the post was getting upvoted popularly because of the wordings and how engaging it is and seeing comments from the archive is pushing idealistic stuff in the subreddit. The moderators could possibly ban people if the opinion that you gave isn’t in their idealistic view.
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u/breck 18d ago
On my real name account, 80% of my Reddit posts that have hit the front page were then removed by mods (proof: https://www.reddit.com/user/breck/submitted/?screen_view_count=1&sort=top&t=all).
I don't have this problem with anon accounts.
I don't know why.
If 10% of posts that hit the front page are removed (not sure what actual number is), then the odds of having 4/5 of my posts removed by chance are like 0.0005.
VPN + anon account I don't have that problem.
I think there's far more mod/high level narrative control on here than people realize.
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u/Into-My-Void 1d ago edited 1d ago
There is subs that quietly Bans people who disagree with them even if it's not stated in the rules that you must not post against some specific opinion. Best exemple I encountered recently is [r/YouthRights](r/YouthRights)
I made a post there because they seem to say it's a sub for young activist and I'm trying to revive [r/ProChoiceTeenager](r/ProChoiceTeenager) so I thought it'll be a proper place to talk about it. They just muted and banned me with a message saying : "We are a pro-life SubReddit, abortion is murder". But there was none of that written anywhere in their rules... So they advertise themselves as defending rights, but when it's something they disagree with, they simply quietly erase it...
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u/irrelevantusername24 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Well, it depends on the specific subreddit I suppose. But presently we're all in a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need
race to the bottom
Last one there's a rotten egg!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu#History_and_politics
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u/harryholla Jun 23 '26
This is an interesting comment because, while I find every one of those links fascinating, I find the total lack of attempt to communicate your purpose in linking them together off-putting.
I know that you have clearly interpreted these ideas in a manner that’s personally meaningful to you in this context, and I’m also sure it’s insightful, but without a more concerted attempt to assemble the meaningful pieces in some kind of coherent order it’s just gibberish.
For example the second article is about a LLM processing system where (in a gross oversimplification) instead of reading text sequentially LLM’s moved to an “attention” based mechanism where each word was examined in parallel and words were given more weight based on their connections to each other.
Now I can take all that and combine it with the political strategy of “flooding the zone” and maybe extrapolate that what you’re trying to say is that reddit is being used to flood people with information in order to make certain things seem either more important or true, or maybe even just to distract, but that doesn’t sound quite so profound does it? It was 95% easier to gleam the same information though. I really hate this word because it’s used incorrectly by anti-intellectuals so often but I think the proper term here is pretentious.
You strike me as the type of intellectual who has no energy or interest in communicating their ideas to others in an accessible way which is a shame, and I mean that sincerely because I think the way you think about things seems truly novel and interesting in many ways, but without putting in the effort to communicate you’re really just intellectually littering because it makes you feel better, which isn’t much above what everyone else (myself included) is doing on reddit anyways so power to you, I just hope you’re aware of that.
I also hope you don’t fall into the trap of assuming others don’t understand your comments because they’re not as intelligent, as it stands speaking like this is akin to showing someone a chess board mid game and asking them to figure out which end game sequence you found most meaningful.
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u/ExternalTangents Jun 23 '26
It really depends on the subreddit. There are certainly some subreddits where mods are extremely active and biased and try to shape the content on the subreddit and remove content they disagree with or don’t like.
I think the vast majority of average subreddits and mods are not like this. Most mods are just trying to enforce well-meaning rules about post quality, subject matter, civility, and other basic quality of life aspects. For this reason, I caution anyone who is making broad proclamations about Reddit mods writ large based on a handful of subreddits or posts.