Arbitrary and capricious rules created on too many subreddits by volunteer moderators make it virtually impossible for independent journalists to use the supposedly open and democratic platform to help build our audiences in a period when we have few other options
Recently, as part of my ongoing series of columns covering how the American political, economic, and technological decks are being stacked against independent news publications, I wrote about some of the ways that social media algorithms and summaries by so-called “AI” search services are effectively blocking outlets like the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism from reaching our natural audiences.
Readers in the know may believe that an obvious shortcut to connecting with potential audience members is to post links to articles published by independent news outlets to relevant subreddits on Reddit.
And perhaps that is great thinking when it comes to subreddits run by decent mods (moderators in Reddit-speak). After all, the famously egalitarian platform is fully indexed by major search engines like Google. So (in an alternate universe where “AI summaries” hadn’t already ruined search engines) any links my colleagues and I post to various subreddits should not only benefit from traffic we generate when we first post them to Reddit, but should also help pull in more unique views to our websites over the long term as our posts pop up in search results over years. Therefore, all we should need to do is post our article links to the largest related subreddits and watch our audience grow.
But in my long experience with Reddit, decent mods are few and far between. And, more frequently than I can accept, when I try to post BINJ articles to any subreddit I don’t run myself, mods pull them down … while appeals to reason asking mods to put my posts back up are usually completely ignored.
How did we arrive at such a state of affairs? Well, as with Wikipedia, Reddit was founded by people with a healthy belief in democracy. As such, they allowed anyone with a Reddit account to post or comment on any public subreddit—which makes sense. But they also let Reddit users remain anonymous other than those who wish to post under their real names—which makes, to me at least, less sense.
These choices by Reddit founders immediately led to two problems: feral anonymous posters turning subreddit threads into permanent flame wars and mods fighting furious battles with them to keep their subreddits relatively troll free. These issues are often discussed and well understood.
Yet there are a couple more related problems with the basic way Reddit runs that are less often discussed: subreddits can be created by anyone on almost any topic imaginable and nearly all mods are volunteers (except a smaller number of people that happen to moderate as part of a paid job).
Herein lies the rub for me as someone who runs an independent news publication.
Consider BINJ. As our name implies, we were founded to serve Boston and environs with original reporting and opinion writing. Over the years, we expanded our coverage area to include all of Massachusetts.
Given that, it’s clear that we will want to post links to our articles in subreddits focusing on Boston and Massachusetts. Naturally, such subreddits were founded in 2008 (r/Boston on January 25 and r/Massachusetts on July 21 of that year), soon after the then-young company started allowing the instant creation of subreddits by any user.
And r/Boston and r/Massachusetts, like pretty much all subreddits, were not founded using some kind of democratic process involving voting by all residents of those locales, brave and true, to find the best possible people to moderate such important forums based on major geographic areas.
No, they were founded by random nerds of the type likely to be on early Reddit when its most popular discussions were still programming and porn.
Assuming they were not total human disasters—something I do not in fact assume, having been active on pre-Internet bulletin board services and then the Internet since the 1980s, but let’s pretend I do for the time being—these newly minted mods had to deal with untold numbers of posters and commenters to their subreddits that most assuredly were.
So, they swiftly had to come up with rules for their subreddits to make it clear what kind of behavior they would allow and what kind they wouldn’t.
And many such rules, and let’s be completely fair here, are utterly arbitrary and capricious.
Like, for example, r/Boston’s anti-journalist rules. Well, not actually rules, since they’re not found in their main list of rules on its home page. Nor can they be found on its “Complete Rules” page you can get to from its Wiki page (a.k.a. FAQ page). In fact I only found out about the specific proscriptions against journalists when I posted a piece I wrote for incoming Boston college students last year and r/Boston mods mentioned them in a note when they rejected that post.
Turns out the anti-journalist rules are a good bit further down on their Wiki page. Here they are:
Local Journalists and Content Creators
- journalists please read this before you post.
- Content creators are expected to actively contribute to discussion outside their own threads in addition to submitting links.
- For content creators specifically, please do NOT post links to places that sell your items.
- Excessive linking to your social media platforms or websites will result in a ban.
The whole experience of finding said rules reminded me a bit of that gag from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” where the plans to blow up the Earth to make way for a “hyperspatial bypass” were “on display to the public” on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system—a place that no human could possibly get to with the technology available to us in this era.
Regardless, these are ludicrous rules. Professional journalists like my many BINJ colleagues and I are extremely busy reporting on news of the day in the public interest. That’s our job in a democracy and we take it extremely seriously.
Our job is not hanging out constantly on some chat board like r/Boston to prove our worthiness to share the articles we write with whatever portion of its 654,000 weekly visitors (and 598,000 subscribers, according to subredditstats.com), as of this week, that might be interested to check them out and discuss them.
But I guess I shouldn’t expect better treatment since subreddit mods, as previously mentioned, are almost always volunteers and even when the original mods of larger older subreddits like r/Boston and r/Massachusetts happen to have been more fair-minded, it’s very difficult for them to replace themselves with people of similar disposition when they inevitably get burned out and try to find newbies to take on such a big job for free.
And I recognize that an obvious retort to these sentiments is that I should go start my own subreddit aimed at Bostonians (or whoever). I am, after all, allowed to do that. If I wanted to found, say, r/Boston2 and attempt to compete directly with r/Boston, Reddit admins (the corporate staff who run the massive social media platform) would probably allow it.
But what I can’t do is reverse time to just before the original nerds who founded r/Boston grabbed that subreddit name back in 2008 and grab it first. Nor can I fast forward through the years that followed when millions of people rushed onto Reddit as the hot new thing in social media and build my audience into the tens or hundreds of thousands at a good clip.
From 2008 on, anyone who wants to see what Bostonians are discussing on Reddit will go to r/Boston. They may be dimly aware that there might be other Boston-themed subreddits they could join. However, the possibility that they will find them and do that is quite low. And I should know, I founded the r/bostonjournalism subreddit nine years ago with the blessing of the r/Boston mod crew of that time and gave up on it when it barely attracted more than 100 followers after the better part of a year.
There’s very little possibility of a major Boston-related subreddit getting going ever again. So, like everyone else, I’m stuck with r/Boston for posting original news articles related to Boston to a largely Boston-based audience on Reddit. And if its mods want to take down my posts, they can do so at will.
This year, I founded r/MassNews with some other indy publishers after r/Massachusetts mods kept rejecting anything I posted from BINJ about Massachusetts that had anything to do with national politics (as state developments often do)—another example of a rule that makes zero sense to journalists, especially with the Trump administration constantly screwing with Massachusetts communities.
And I know that our new subreddit (and also our new r/NewEnglandNews subreddit) probably won’t even break 100 subscribers in a year or so and that the main reason to keep it going is having a subreddit makes it a bit easier to crosspost our work to some larger subreddits than it is to post directly to them (though much harder with subreddits whose mods don’t allow crossposting). But that is cold comfort to myself or any independent publisher trying to build a larger audience when nearly every avenue that used to allow that process to happen fairly cheaply and easily is now blocked to us. As the journalism industry collapses around us.
By way of remedy, I can only suggest that mods of major geographically-based subreddits and subject-based subreddits like r/politics (that has its own arduous and opaque process to register news outlets) rethink their rules affecting journalists—notably journalists from independent news outlets like BINJ that are trying to fulfill our function as “tribunes of the people” with little money or assistance of any kind these days—and try to make it easier for us to post our articles there.
Given the level of viciousness and snark evinced from my many interactions with many safely anonymous subreddit mods over the years—mostly people unable to separate hucksters trying to “build their own brand” (thus “taking not giving,” a major sin to Redditors) from journalists trying to put out news and views in the public interest—I have little hope of that happening. But it would be nice if it did.
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
