I haven’t really posted a lot to r/selfhosted (or Reddit in general), but whenever I did, there was always someone who voted my post down in less than 30 minutes after it was posted. Maybe because of this (or maybe because they were actually perceived as low quality posts), these posts never received a lot of engagement with their 0 scores.

Today I’ve made a little experiment and posted the same article both here and to r/selfhosted. On Lemmy, it received a few comments and some upvotes, but over at Reddit, it was promptly downvoted to oblivion.

I’ve never really used “New” on Reddit, but I’ve decided to take a look at it, and to my surprise it looked like r/selfhosted’s New page was full of genuinely helpful posts, but I’ve never got to see them as their scores were all zeroes.

What gives?

  • Rainhall@feddit.online
    31·
    1 year ago

    There are self-appointed moderators over there who browse new and downvote anything that doesn’t fit their vision. I was one of them, looking for certain “offenses.” For instance if someone posted run-of-the-mill war news in an “interesting” sub, with nothing at all novel or intriguing about it, I would downvote it. So I guess I’ve got my gates to keep too.

    But yeah, I had the same thing happen to me in a couple subs. I posted what I thought was perfectly relevant content, and it would attract a few downvotes right away, and then, usually, climb back up as less-zealous people read it.