Reddit was featured on PBSNews Hour this last Friday highlighting the rapid rise to 80M users replacing Digg, StumbledOn and Tumblr as the new place to go for Web cognoscenti. However, Reddit has to watch out because leadership in this category is like Fashion – rapidly changing on strange whims.
Meanwhile Censorship is alive and well at Reddit. This last week saw much more automated censorship at the top of the Moderation Log. And yet again, the why of the the censorship appeared spurious:
Once again the NYTimes got nipped by some zealous moderator for its story on the big plate the Supreme Court has set for itself this coming year. Apparently it does not meet the News subreddit guidelines.
Wouldn’t the moderators at Reddit being do a better job if they got agreement where to move the posting before out-right censoring? Should not the moderators, if they do an outright censorship, have to add a public comment on why the post was censored? Or is the Moderation Log a sort of Flak Catcher – taking the heat off the moderators for sometimes very dubious actions?