Regretting the shot not taken…
October 14, 2021, 10:04 PM
Some of you may remember that a month or so ago, there was a large protest on Reddit about COVID misinformation, targeting a subreddit called /r/NoNewNormal. The idea of the protest was that a number of subreddits “went private”, i.e. stopped accepting submissions, and vowed to stay that way until Reddit management did something about this subreddit, after Reddit management had previously stated that they were not going to intervene. Ultimately, /r/NoNewNormal was banned, and as such, the subreddit and all of its contents were removed from the Internet, as if they had never existed. I have mixed feelings about the whole affair, and I feel like I have a unique perspective on it, because I used to moderate the subreddit, and probably did the most in building it, and then once it caught on, it slowly morphed into something that it should never have been.
First of all, my own stance on the whole pandemic is no secret. I wrote a very long Journal entry about it back in May. In short, I said that vaccination is the only way out of this, and that we should have never fooled around with much of the fabric of society like we did. We should have never mandated masks, lockdowns, closures, plastic shields, social distancing, or any other weird new rules and restrictions. And then when the vaccine became available, get it without delay. That has been my stance more or less from the outset. The entirety of “your part” in this is getting vaccinated. Aside from that, nothing else matters, so leave me alone. I took an exceptionally dim view of people who tried to justify all of these changes as a “new normal” like they expected this to remain a thing for the foreseeable future, as well as playing the “wE’rE iN a PaNdEmIc!1!1!” card as an excuse to be exceptionally rude and/or judgmental with other people who disagree with them.
At the same time, it initially felt like those of us who opposed all of these new rules, ostensibly to curb the spread of COVID-19, were fairly alone in our opinions. The sense that I got was that most people were all in agreement on these measures, and that I was the odd man out. Then I discovered the /r/LockdownSkepticism and /r/EndtheLockdowns subreddits. These were people who thought more like me on these matters, i.e. that the lockdowns and related measures were security theater. I later found /r/NoNewNormal, which was started a little bit after the other two, and I tended to participate in that subreddit most, as it had the post quality of /r/LockdownSkepticism, but unlike /r/LockdownSkepticism, it did not have a “gatekeeper” for posts. I tend not to post in communities that have gatekeepers, because I don’t want to waste my time posting somewhere when there’s a chance that no one will ever see my post based on the whims of some anonymous approver. If I go to the trouble of posting something, I want a guarantee that it gets seen. In any case, /r/NoNewNormal fit that bill, with decent, open discussion and no gatekeeper. It was described in its sidebar as, “The phrase ‘new normal’ is pretty creepy. Let’s talk about concerns with it, and what can be done to resist it.” It was sort of a way to criticize the measures being taken, and also a place to get emotional support for what we were all going through from a sympathetic group of people. In other words, it was built with good intentions.
Eventually, the sole moderator put out a request for additional moderators. I moderate a number of subreddits covering various topics already, and because of that, I know my way around the Reddit moderator tools pretty well. So I volunteered to help. I quickly got the nod to help moderate, and ended up in the #2 moderator spot for /r/NoNewNormal.
At this point, it seems worthwhile to explain how Reddit handles subreddit moderators. On Reddit, all moderators of a given subreddit are not equals. Notwithstanding differences in permissions (there is an option to designate which tools a given moderator has access to), there is a pecking order based on seniority. A moderator with full access can remove any other moderator that joined after them, or change the access levels of the same, but they cannot touch any moderator who joined before them. Therefore, the moderator in the #1 spot of a subreddit (often the person who started the subreddit, but not always) essentially has god status, because no other moderator can touch them. The only way that the top moderator leaves their role is if they step down voluntarily, or they are removed by Reddit management for any number of reasons, typically when they go inactive on the site as a whole, and another user requests to moderate the subreddit. I’ve seen both things happen in my experience on the site, some more than others. In any case, it creates a bit of an uneven power dynamic, because in an argument, if push comes to shove, the higher-ranking moderator can always just remove the lower-ranking moderator, or strip them of much of their access, even if they retain the title. I’ve seen some moderators threaten that before, and that’s usually a sign that there are major problems within a subreddit, and that such a subreddit is nowhere that I want to be. I was in the second spot on /r/NoNewNormal and had full access, so unless I really pissed off the top moderator, I was safe, and had the run of the place. The other problem with the seniority-based system as it exists is that if a higher moderator is doing things contrary to what everyone has agreed on as far as running the subreddit goes or otherwise is causing harm, there is no way to rein them in because they outrank you. All you can do in that case is ask nicely. From an official standpoint, your choice is either to deal with it, or wash your hands of the situation by removing yourself as a moderator.
So with my being in a moderator spot on /r/NoNewNormal, I went to work setting up the subreddit in the way that I typically do for subreddits that I moderate. I set all of the various options, and then I put some basic rules down. In the case of /r/NoNewNormal, those were:
1) Scope of this subreddit: This subreddit discusses concerns regarding changes in society related to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, described by some as a “new normal”, and resistance to same.
2) Treat all participants with respect: Please be civil in comments and posts, and treat all participants with respect.
3) Please flair your posts accordingly: Please flair your posts accordingly, if possible (not all posts will have a suitable flair).
The first two rules are pretty standard for subreddits that I moderate. The first rule always defines the scope of the subreddit, i.e. what the subject matter is, with the intention of keeping the subreddit on topic, and having a rule to point to when off-topic posts are removed. The second one is behavioral, i.e. don’t be a jerk. This is typically the unspoken rule in all social spaces, but it nonetheless merits saying, if nothing else but to have a rule to point at when removing things for incivility. That third rule, meanwhile, was specific to /r/NoNewNormal, because we used flair to categorize posts, and this was a reminder to place flair on one’s post. I later added one more rule, concerning violence, after that became something of an issue:
3) No threats of violence: There is zero tolerance for threats of violence, or insinuation thereof.
That rule bumped the original #3 to #4, and it reiterates a Reddit sitewide rule, i.e. no violence on the site. That codified what had been our practice for a while, of banning anyone on sight who had threatened or insinuated violence. We were not going to have that at all. We also extended that to wishing ill on people as situations warranted, such as when then-president Donald Trump got COVID-19, and it was all over the news, and that spilled into our subreddit. For that, I got out in front of it, pinning a comment to the top of that post stating that anyone who wished death or other ill upon the president and/or his family was getting banned on sight. I only ended up having to ban one person for that, which was fewer than I had expected.
When I moderate an online community, I tend to take a “light touch” stance when it comes to moderating. I don’t like throwing my weight around as a moderator. I am there as a participant first, and only put on the moderator hat when I need to. And when I do have to put on the moderator hat, I tend to do it as quietly as possible. I don’t like online social spaces where moderators will see anything potentially controversial and say something like, “Our admin team will be monitoring this post to make sure that it doesn’t get out of hand,” because that has a chilling effect on the running of the space. I don’t like feeling like I’m being micromanaged. I would bet that no one likes being micromanaged, especially in something being done for leisure, like social media. I want people to feel like they are free to express themselves, even if it’s controversial, and that nobody is constantly looking over their shoulder and ready to swoop in and dirty delete their post should they say the “wrong” thing. We’re all adults here, after all, and if you’re not mature enough to handle differing opinions, why are you in a social space with other people on the Internet in the first place?
In moderating /r/NoNewNormal, I was initially more or less running it alone. The top moderator was there, but they really didn’t have the time or the skills to properly run a subreddit. Like so many subreddit founders, they had an idea and started a subreddit about it, but then had no idea what it took to actually run a subreddit, and get overwhelmed when it starts to get actual participation. I quickly came to realize that I couldn’t rely on them, so I was on my own, but since I had full permissions, I could do everything that I needed to do without having to go to them for assistance. At first, I was moderating the subreddit like I do my others: check on it as part of my usual perusal of Reddit, approve posts, look at posts or comments that have been reported to moderators (i.e. someone’s feelings got hurt, and they’re reporting it to get even), and so on. For the most part, that worked, but it started to take up more of my time as the subreddit grew, and it grew pretty rapidly. The subreddit also got a fair amount of troll posts and other things that needed to be cleared out, as well as nasty messages through moderator mail, both unprovoked and in response to bans that had been handed out for trolling and other abuse (people just can’t help but to take a parting shot at the moderators once they’ve been banned). I suppose that such is what happens when your subreddit is based around criticism of a current event that is impacting all of our lives, where it seems like everyone has a strong opinion about it, and it’s all very polarized.
Growth on /r/NoNewNormal occurred pretty quickly. Clearly, lockdown opposition was a bigger thing than initially thought, and soon, like within the first month that I was moderator, it had become pretty clear that I couldn’t handle it all by myself. Other users started to message me to that effect, that it looked like I was in over my head. Considering all of that, I eventually realized that it was too much for one person to handle, and put out a call for new moderators. If I recall, I asked for people who were relatively sane/reasonable based on their participation in the subreddit, preferably with previous moderation experience on other subreddits, and vetted people based on that. In the end, I brought five new moderators on board. With seven total moderators, we had things mostly under control. I later had to remove one of them because they eventually went rogue and started posting things on behalf of all of the moderators that were not vetted by anyone, after we had specifically asked them to wait so that we could all have input on what was to have been a group statement. If it tells you how far they had gone when they went rogue, we later had to ban this former moderator for a period of time because they were breaking subreddit rules. We later added a few more moderators, which rounded out our team fairly well.
The content was a bit of a mixed bag. We had a lot of good content in the early days, mostly about developments related to the pandemic response, and emotional support for the participants. One of the biggest things on the emotional support side was a weekly chat thread. I find those things to be of limited utility (I would prefer to make my own post rather than add a comment to a megathread), but people wanted it, and so I made it happen. I put it on its own account, /u/NoNewNormalBot, so that way, if anything bad happened with the chat thread, it would not affect my main account. Politically, the subreddit tended to lean a bit more right-wing than I was comfortable with (I am by no means a right-winger), but I could tolerate that because it was an open discussion, and opposition to lockdowns and other rules was supposed to transcend political lines, even though in practice, support for lockdowns and such tended to be stronger in more leftist circles, while the more right-leaning circles tended to oppose them. I was in that weird, uncomfortable spot of being a leftist who opposed pandemic restrictions, and so I really felt like a man without a party. However, I had much less patience for two specific kinds of posts: conspiracy theories, and talk about the subreddit’s potentially being banned. As far as conspiracy theories and such went, the biggest thing that I had to deal with was posts regarding the so-called “Great Reset“, the name of which comes from the name of the 2020 meeting of the World Economic Forum. However, the name was where the similarities ended, as people on /r/NoNewNormal took that to mean that some anonymous “they” had engineered the entire pandemic in order to achieve certain societal ends. I dismissed it out of hand as downright nutty. After all, the simplest explanation is usually the right one, and conspiracy theories are almost by definition not the simplest explanation. I used to low-key remove those posts when I saw them because they made the group look crazy as a whole, since the entire idea that the whole thing was engineered was absurd on its face (why would anyone seriously want to do that?). At one point, I put in a filter for the automoderator to remove anything containing the term “Great Reset” immediately upon detection, but another moderator removed that, and I didn’t press the point. On the latter point, there was always discussion about alternative platforms for where to take the discussion after Reddit eventually banned the subreddit. I took issue with that, finding it quite insulting. After all, there I was, putting in a lot of effort to keep the subreddit well-maintained, for no thanks and no pay, and people were saying, without directly saying it, that all of my efforts at running a happy subreddit were in vain, and working to pull people away from the subreddit that we were running and onto a different platform. I addressed it at one point, saying that if /r/NoNewNormal was banned, I wasn’t following whoever to some new platform. Rather, I was just going to walk away from it, because I wasn’t about to join another platform when I just wanted to discuss things and get some emotional support of my own. It wasn’t such a huge cause to me that I would be willing to move to another platform for something that might be considered “too hot for Reddit”. There are times when that is worthwhile, but 99% of the time, deplatforming should be taken as a sign that it’s time to move on when your host will no longer have you. To that end, I configured the automoderator to remove anything posted that contained the names of certain alternative platforms in order to combat these sorts of things, and unlike the conspiracy junk, other moderators did not low-key remove that. If people wanted to start an equivalent board on a different platform, more power to them, but don’t junk up my subreddit by advertising for it.
I also was amazed at how many people genuinely hated /r/NoNewNormal. The way I saw it, it was okay to disagree, and it was okay to engage the community to discuss the subject when you disagree in a polite and professional manner, but it was not okay to troll, send hate mail, or otherwise sabotage the community. I appreciated when people would come and politely ask questions of the community when they were of a differing opinion. It allowed for an exchange of ideas, and even though no one really expected anyone’s view to change based on an Internet discussion, it was still good discussion. But we got a lot of bad actors in there as well, and that was no good. People would deliberately troll the subreddit. People would make deliberately provocative posts in an attempt to paint us all as a bunch of nutters. They would also send hate mail to the moderators. I never had death from disease wished upon me more often than when I moderated /r/NoNewNormal. When we would remove the troll posts and ban the trolls, they would then take a parting shot at us through the moderator mail. There were also lots of post and comment reports from people who solely disagreed with what was posted that we had to go through. And the trolls would give a Reddit award called “Wearing is Caring“, which promoted wearing masks ostensibly to stop the spread of COVID-19, to posts and comments on the subreddit. The subreddit was generally anti-mask, and so it was pretty clear that the giving of the “Wearing is Caring” award was intended as a way to troll. We were removing that award all over the place. Unfortunately, there was no way to ban a certain award from the subreddit, and so that was a continuous battle. I suspect that removing the award was feeding the trolls, since it notified them when an award was removed, but what else could you do, I suppose.
Eventually, I started to tire of the subreddit. The content had started to become less about emotional support and took a more extreme turn, which turned off a lot of our earlier participants. There was a lot of anti-vaccination content being posted, which I strongly disagreed with. The userbase had become more and more polarized in one particular direction, in a way that made me uncomfortable. Additionally, dealing with the trolls, brigaders, and other bad actors was becoming a constant thing. Spending time on /r/NoNewNormal was no longer fun for me. It felt too much like thankless work and a lot of abuse that I wasn’t getting paid for. It was clear that the community that I had helped build had gotten away from us and had become something that resembled the worst of Reddit more than the support community that it had started out as. I found myself participating less and less, and more just sticking to moderation tasks on there without engaging much. In short, /r/NoNewNormal was no longer fun for me.
By this time, I had also found another anti-lockdown subreddit called /r/LockdownCriticalLeft, which was more along the lines of what /r/NoNewNormal used to be, and seemed to attract a smarter crowd overall. That subreddit was a breath of fresh air for me, because it met my own emotional support needs the way that /r/NoNewNormal formerly did, without being the cesspool of anti-intellectualism that /r/NoNewNormal later became.
The tipping point for me came on February 15, 2021. That was the day that I went out to Dulles Town Center and got my first dose of the Pfizer (tozinameran/Comirnaty) vaccine. The way I saw it, vaccines were always the only way out of this thing. Get vaccinated against COVID-19, just like you would against any number of other diseases, in order to return to your old life. There was no going back to your old life without getting vaccinated. In other words, you could not have your cake and eat it, too. For me, it was a no-brainer: get the vaccine. You don’t want a “new normal”? Then get vaccinated. I’ve been vaccinated against plenty of things to no ill effect, and COVID was no exception as far as I was concerned. As I see it, if I’m faced with the choice of being vaccinated against a disease or getting the disease itself, it was much easier and less messy to get the vaccine than to get the actual disease. After I got home from the vaccine appointment, I made a post on /r/NoNewNormal announcing that I had gotten my first shot of the Pfizer vaccine, and I strongly encouraged everyone else to get vaccinated as soon as they were eligible in order to help bring the weird “new normal” that we had long opposed to an end. I have zero sympathy for people who develop serious complications from diseases that are preventable by vaccination if they never got vaccinated against it, where the only reason that they eschewed the vaccine was because they didn’t want to do it, i.e. no legitimate medical reason not to. In other words, you died because you were dumb. In any case, I distinguished my post with the moderator flag, and I pinned it to the top of the subreddit, because I was absolutely serious about this. Why did I do it that way? To make sure that it got seen. I knew what the subreddit had turned into. I knew that it had morphed from a group mostly seeking emotional support through reasoned discussion into a bunch of degenerates who just wanted to sit around doing nothing with their fingers in their ears, but they absolutely needed to hear this, and without the special placement, it would quickly be downvoted to oblivion and not seen by many people because of the way that Reddit’s algorithms interact with post voting. The backlash was forceful and immediate. My post got the flaming to end all flamings, as I got called all sorts of lovely things, from a troll to a shill to a sellout to a fake. Even my fellow moderators turned on me, making their own comments opposing my views and distancing themselves from me. The top mod supported me to a limited extent, and asked me questions that would help me make my point. I held my own under that scrutiny and gave some very good answers, but, of course, the degenerates would hear nothing of it, giving me downvotes in the triple digits on all of my statements. But that was always my stance, that the nonpharmaceutical interventions that we were asked to do were pointless theater, but that the vaccine was the real deal, and I was unswayed by their namecalling and flaming.
As far as I was concerned, with that incident, the people over at /r/NoNewNormal had shown their true colors, and there was a fundamental disconnect between our philosophies. Even more so, their fervent anti-vaccination stance was quite irresponsible, if not downright dangerous. So, in short, the hell with them. Also, by virtue of my moderator position on the subreddit, I was in a unique position to do something about this community – a community that I was, by this point, convinced was doing more harm than good by continuing to exist. The /r/NoNewNormal community had served a purpose for a while, but ultimately, everything has its time. What is beneficial one day may not be so beneficial in the future, and its continued existence may actually become a harmful force. I did a good bit of thinking about my options for it while I was at work (operating trains gives you a lot of time alone with your thoughts, which can be both a blessing and a curse at times), and I came up with a plan for how to dispose of /r/NoNewNormal. My idea was to remove all of the approved submitters from the subreddit, remove all of the moderators beneath me, clear out the automoderator configuration, place the subreddit into a private status with a note explaining what happened and why, and then finally remove myself as a moderator and walk away from it, leaving the top moderator, whom I could not remove because of the aforementioned seniority-based system that Reddit uses for ranking moderators, all by themselves with an empty subreddit.
After I came up with the plan, I sat for a few days on the idea of whether I wanted to execute my plan. Because I was only second-in-command, and not the top moderator, I could not completely kill off /r/NoNewNormal all by myself. The top moderator could have revived the subreddit easily enough, even if I might have been able to make it rather cumbersome to restore. That gave me pause about whether I wanted to go through with it, because if I did it, my goal would be to eliminate it, and anything short of that would have meant that the job was not complete. Ultimately, I just took my ball and left, taking all of the things that I controlled away from the subreddit and washing my hands of the whole thing. So I removed the access from /u/NoNewNormalBot that allowed it to make the weekly chat threads, and deleted all of its past posts, which eliminated the weekly chat thread in its entirety. I also removed a bot-removal service from the subreddit, because that was also my doing. And finally, I took the irreversible step of removing myself as moderator. I was clearly done with them, and was separating myself from them for my own sanity. When the top moderator saw that I had left, they sent me a very nice message thanking me for all of my contributions to /r/NoNewNormal, and that I was welcome back any time. Meanwhile, when the degenerates that by then populated the place saw that I was gone, they practically cheered that I was “removed as a moderator” because of what I had posted. I made sure that the record was set straight on what had happened: I resigned voluntarily, and the top mod confirmed that I departed on my own, and defended all of the work that I had put in to help build the subreddit in its early months.
In any case, I was gone from there, and happier for it. In the months that followed, I occasionally felt some regret that I didn’t take that shot at them when I had the opportunity. Whenever I had those thoughts, I had to remind myself that I did the right thing, removing myself from a toxic situation, and leaving everything else in that den of ignorance intact because I could not eliminate them fully on my own. But it was still a lingering feeling of regret over the shot not taken.
After I left, I would occasionally check up on /r/NoNewNormal quietly, without posting, and it was clear that I was right in separating myself from them. One look at their sidebar in their later months told me, as their four rules ballooned out to ten, that they were having major problems on their subreddit. Check these out:
3) This is an inclusive community: Everyone is welcome to participate in this subreddit. Racism and other discriminatory conduct is not permitted.
6) No soliciting, offering, or selling fake vaccination cards: This includes (but is not limited to) anyone asking how to get a fake card, how to make a fake card, anyone offering files/instructions to create a fake card, anyone offering to create a fake card (either for free or for a fee), or anyone attempting to solicit/facilitate fake vaccine cards.
7) Follow Site-Wide Rules: Since this is reddit, we have to follow reddit’s content policy.
8) Avoid Duplicates / Reposts: This includes “i just got banned from” posts. They will be removed. We know it’s happening. We’ve had many of those for weeks now and they don’t contribute anything at this point.
9) Moderators have discretion to remove all content and users as seen fit: By participating in this sub you agree to the terms that moderators can remove any and all content and users from the forum at their own discretion. This community is based on the principal [sic] of rejecting the new normal and caters to the users who support this principle. The forum is also sometimes open to those who come to ask questions in good faith and discuss matters respectfully, ask questions or provide factual corrections. There is a zero tolerance policy towards those who abuse this.
10) No Misinformation: We strive to identify and remove misinformation as quickly as possible. Unfortunately Reddit’s reporting system is crippled by rampant abuse which compromises our ability to identify and remove problematic content in general. Sending a message to the moderators is the fastest way for us to be able to identify and remove problematic content. Given that what determines misinformation is not always easy to define however it is NOT SIMPLY SOMETHING YOU DISAGREE WITH.
As I saw it, there were red flags all around that there were major problems going on, and that things had only gotten worse since I left. Additionally, all of the instruction creep served as a way to broadcast exactly what was wrong with the subreddit to the world. They had problems with racism, forgery, breaking sitewide rules (big no-no there), and misinformation, plus they clearly had no real presence on the subreddit, considering that they had to explicitly state that the moderators are the moderators and what moderators do and listing it as some sort of terms of service. The exasperated tone that was conveyed through the writing, as well as the use of boldface and all-caps to add emphasis to parts of the statements, indicated to me that whoever wrote those new rules was at their wit’s end at the time that they added them, and that the inmates were now running the asylum, i.e. things had clearly gotten out of control. I also noticed that the moderator list had changed. Gone were the names of most of the moderators that I was familiar with, and a lot of new names that I didn’t recognize were in their places. I wonder how many of my old moderators realized that the place was not worth saving and just left it, like I did.
By mid-August, /r/NoNewNormal had been “quarantined“, which is something that Reddit management does with problematic subreddits. It is not a ban in and of itself, but it does place a warning screen on the subreddit, and requires an additional click in order to access the subreddit’s content. It is often used as a prelude to banning, and in the case of /r/NoNewNormal, they were banned a little more than two weeks later, and the content contained therein was scrubbed from Reddit entirely. Good riddance to them, as far as I was concerned, and it gave me the sense of closure that I didn’t get before when I declined to take it out myself. The problematic /r/NoNewNormal was gone, and unlike the shot that I might have taken, when Reddit management fired at it, they had the power to ensure that it was gone for good.
However, while I do agree with the end result, I don’t like the way that they got there. Reddit had originally declined to ban the subreddit, but then reversed course after 135 subreddits “went dark” as a method of protest. I don’t like that Reddit acted based on that, because it demonstrates a couple of things to the masses that I found concerning. First, it says that at Reddit, the management doesn’t stand behind its own decisions, i.e. that their users have a significant amount of sway when it comes to decisions about how the site is run. Additionally, by acting only after a massive protest, it sends a clear message that this tactic works as a matter of getting rid of subreddits that some people may disagree with or may otherwise be unpopular. It’s that way of saying, “My subreddit is so important to your site that we can make you do anything that we want just by withdrawing access to it on our own, and you just proved it by caving to our demands.” It seems to go down a slippery slope in the “First they came…” vein, and the way that typically ends is, “Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.” I really wish that if the /r/NoNewNormal subreddit was to be banned (and it was probably time for that), that it was done through Reddit management’s coming to its own conclusion about it and acting based on their own decision, rather than after being bullied into it by the userbase. That just leaves a bad taste about it overall, and has a chilling effect on the entire website, as if bad moderators on certain subreddits didn’t have enough of a chilling effect on things already.
So there you go, I suppose. While /r/NoNewNormal was started with the best of intentions, and I feel like no one involved in moderating it was acting in bad faith, at least when I was involved with it, the subreddit ultimately spiraled out of control and became something that it never should have become, and Reddit is a better place overall now that /r/NoNewNormal is no longer part of it.