> I know the opacity is ultimately reddit's fault (and I've complained to them about it), but reddit these days seems almost completely unresponsive to small scale public feedback.

Then let's make it big! Can do #ShadowModeration on Twitter or ... ?? Once you figure out how to share this issue, it's an easy victory. Nobody wants their content to be shadow removed, so there's no justifiable reason for the practice. Platforms will say it helps with bot spam, but that's bologna because coders who make bots can code to detect shadow bans and removals. So it's clearly designed to manipulate real people, including moderators who use it and people who work at these social media companies. They think they're creating environments free from toxicity, but what they're really doing is creating toxicity by making it more and more difficult for people to reach across ideological spectrums.

> I guess part of the problem with the admin removals is that while the removal itself may not be secret (though it's often hidden, e.g. requiring a direct link to a removed thread), the rational and basis for it always is.

I completely agree. It's just something that's out of focus for me right now, and as I wrote, I don't want to compromise what I have so far. Undoubtedly I lose some traffic over it, and I just accept that.

> It increasingly appears to be automated based on user reports and if any human is reading the text at all in many cases they must not be native english speakers. (I've noticed that a lot of the more obviously bad admin removals seem to happen in deep in the night, pacific time).

That's interesting. I'm pretty sure the Philippines is a pretty big hub for moderation because they are low cost and know the language quite well. Plus that was reported in 2014 [1].

> To the extent that user-community moderation is often bad and admin moderation grows in frequency in response I think we can only expect admin moderation to become more incompetent and kafkaesque: As you note, it fundamentally can't scale but they can (and I think have) respond to the lack of scalability by just doing a worse job of it rather than not taking actions.

Yeah, that's effectively what is going on. They are building tools that remove mass amounts of comments in different ways [2] and now allow users to cut each other out of conversations too with the new user block described in the same link. Just today I came across a post from some 3rd party building a tool to identify hateful groups of users to be shared with subreddits [3]. And the website is all done-up too as if that's an idea that would be popular. It's crazy. I replied on that thread and the author of the tool just completely sidesteps the fact that any actions taken against users on his list will be occurring in secret. Like, that is not his concern because "that tool is just made for spam" which is just such a weak argument.

There is absolutely no concern for how much gets removed as long as users don't know about it. The good thing is the problem then becomes easier to point out. It's a race to do that before more harm is done.

> But regardless, I understand your focus better now. If you ever do come across a way to give posters access to their own admin removed comments without creating risk or distraction for your focus on shadow moderation, I know it would be appreciated by many.

Noted.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/reveddit/comments/sxpk15/fyi_my_tho...

[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/ymeqaz/hate...