Will just have to see how the new moderators being added handle it. Maybe new moderators are being added to control the amount of shit posts being posted. I'm not sure, I haven't read the pinned thread yet.

new mods been banning and (removed) like crazy, more than usual and more that how things used to be and I don't trust them yet

Ultimately, the site is run by the head of this website and very popular. 4th most visited site in the us as I recall, it can't really be helped. Those things can't be abolished without also censoring differing opinions and this sub becoming an echo chamber

I don't mind Putin, although he can be a little volatile and overly partisan.

Some of the mod noms I've thought, "holy shit, anyone but you. ANYONE."

I'm one of the most real you will ever meet here. Which is why I will never never be a mod. I truly don't want to. Lots of people want me to be, though. I'd be down. I'm actually fair and say fuck all. Many people do not like that. Call me Lucifer.

At some point we'll all have to come to terms with the fact that this sub--like all of Reddit--has a finite life cycle. As the subscriber base grows so too will the stupidity, shilling, number of those suck tards, etc.

The good news is, it'll usually come at a time where another alternative is there and waiting.

As it stands though, I commend the mods for doing a great job thus far. Let's hope any new mods won't expedite its demise, though.

They suppress any intelligent thought even if it doesn't break the rules. Plus they seemed to have fixed the algorithm for the comment count so it's not as obvious as it was a few months ago when someone got shadow banned.

Exactly. It seems like the election has left some persistent black clouds, but at least it's not irredeemable like /r/politics or even /r/worldnews. It also hasn't been overtly co-opted like /r/the_donald.

I've noticed shadowbanning posts which is creepy, but it could be way worse.

As for shadowbanning, could be new users, or spam bots.

I've noticed shadowbanning posts which is creepy

What do you mean by this? We don't shadowban on this sub, but we do have a 48 hour hold on new accounts being able to post/comment. We also have automod set to remove posts that specifically break rules (facebook posts, certain meme domains, maybe a few others), but all other removals are done by one of us.

This post wasn't in 'new,' 'rising,' 'top' or even 'controversial.' I could only find it maybe an hour later by going into my posts because I commented when I first saw it, and it disappeared thereafter:

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/68bvwn/iama_an_investigative_reporter_who_has_covered/

I'm not the author/OP of the post, to be clear... but I found it very odd that it seemed to disappear completely from the queue no matter the filter.

Hmm. At some point it was approved by one of us mods. At one point it could have been removed by a different mod, but honestly it's really hard to find out for a post that old. Reddit limits how many items you can fetch from their API (for understandable performance reasons), and you can't view mod actions on a per-post basis. So I can't even tell you why you weren't able to find the post.

If it happens in the future, just send us a modmail when you notice it. We'll either give you an explanation on why it was removed, or try to rectify it if it was removed in error.

Thanks so much. Really great of you to respond.

Np. We really do try as best as we can not to moderate content, but at the same time crack down on abusive language that contributes nothing to the conversation. Sometimes we make mistakes, but we try to fix them.

In another thread someone gave an intelligent response to one of my posts and then was shadow banned. There was nothing controversial only a well thought out response about higher education. This sub is heavily censored. If you think its not and that conversations on this sub are "organic" think again. It's time to go to a different website for real.

Comments cannot be "shadowbanned," only users can, and this sub doesn't do that. If you give me a link to the comment, I can look into it for you.

What sometimes happens is that reddit has a site-wide domain block list that will automatically remove comments with a certain domain (such as naturalnews.com, infowars.com, etc.) We have automod set up to approve some of these domains, but reddit doesn't publish their full block list.

What are we saying is the shill M.O. here? Most threads still have a pretty wide range of opinions. If their goal was to suppress all but one way of thinking they're not doing a good job of it.