It's hard to imagine "ideology" being relevant to the vast majority of reddit... Do you really think the moderators of ELI5 or PeopleFuckingDying or some obscure porn reddit or whatever are primarily concerned with "ideology"?
I used to help moderate a poker forum. I was a professional poker player, and an extremely active user of the forums. I don't recall pushing an ideology beyond "keep discussions constructive and topical."
The person you just replied to was a mod. Are you implying that their work was somehow about pushing an ideology?
This is egregiously incorrect.
is subjective
Nor does "subjective" entail "ideological" unless you're going to torture the term ideology being having a useful meaning.
What is your useful definition of "ideology"? Why isn't "subjective" included in your definition? Why would including "subjective" in your definition make it less useful?
Before hearing your response, I'm going to guess that you're thinking ideologies need to be "significant" for them to be an ideology. I'm guessing you don't think that subjective opinions are ideological because you don't think they're important enough to get that label.
Related, I got banned from entertainment for saying an exchange between jk Rowling and a trans person wasn't "mocking". I didn't defend her, I just called out a shitty title.
When I messaged the mods saying, in essence, "y'all are dumb and need to distinguish fact from opinion" they flagged me for harassment, which is one demerit away from a sitewide ban.
I know some mods are decent, and it's better in smaller subs with some actual purpose (city, hobby) that isn't memes, violence, porn or politics. Any of those categories, and with subs of any large size, and it gets really scummy really fast.
(Shout out to r/Texas mods for not sucking).
To me phrases like "abstaining from politics is taking the side of the oppressor" are just so damn American. You guys, more than any other nationality I've met, tend to dive head first into whatever ideology or sect or even hobby you happen to get into. There are, of course, people who are "extra" in every viewpoint or occupation. But more so for Americans.
Apparently politics definitely leaked into that community a few years back. I recall reading stories about it back then.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/25/18234950/knitting-ra...
I am not part of that community but if it behaves like almost any other online community, any accusations of racism seem to always create a backlash that lumps the conservatives leaning folks within the group to racism whether the conservative has outright committed any racism or not. There tends to be a guilt by association that seems to happen often—where if you have opinion “A” (some standard conservative opinion on some subject not directly tied to racism) you must also have opinion “B” (some fringe race-oriented opinion sometimes found in conservative circles).
So folks just stay silent and try and just knit (or focus on whatever interest of the group), afraid to disclose any political opinion in a non-political interest group for fear of the label. Then…they get called out because if there isn’t overt acknowledgement by concerned members of the “correct” political ideology. That results in the abstaining is oppression attitude. You then find these kind of communities creating rules that don’t just discourage political conversations but rules attempting to exclude people who may fall into a political viewpoint altogether.
I don’t know if it’s distinctly American, but it definitely seems to happen here a lot. To be honest, I find it all ridiculous.
To be fair, U.S. conservatives are only reaping what they sow. The overtly racist wing of conservatism received such a drubbing after civil rights went through that they had to scale back the racist rhetoric and talk about social and economic policies that disadvantaged certain races, but appealed to traditional ideas about federalism and small government. So now whenever anyone talks about federalism and small government, it is assumed that there is a racist agenda lurking behind those appeals because historically, there was.
That's an unfalsifiable ideological assertion that has been well-socialized, but that doesn't make it fact and lots of people disagree with it, because it's an opinion, and it's one that presupposes a Foucaultian worldview of human dynamics as being able to be distilled down to pure power struggles.
It's absurd to see that bandied about as truth just because it's "common knowledge." I bet in Communist China it was "common knowledge" right before the famine that killing the sparrows would bolster the harvest, too.
One example of many:
> Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
~ John Stuart Mill
People are pointing out that moderation is often biased and that the power of controlling the narrative and topics & viewpoints that are allowed is a motivator for many moderators. Your strawman argument that "all moderators" being "exclusively" motivated is just rhetoric to try to win against a claim no one is making.
The comment I was replying to - "all individuals of class X are motivated exclusively by vicious desire Y" - isn't a truth-seeking comment, and I think we can do better.
