>the mods of a subreddit will reply to it in the same way, in almost all cases: with an instant, permanent banning. Wow. What a great example of a complete lack of accountability coupled with unlimited power. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Every subreddit turns into an echo chamber punishing the most heterodox positions. As those positions, and who promulgates them, are defenestrated, the bar continues to migrate further upward towards greater and more vehement compliance and leader praise. The party members eat eachother in a series of ever increasingly severe purity tests to prove they aren't disloyal to the party narrative. With each subsequent purge, the crimes that are deemed purge worthy must become more trivial due to economies of scale in the marketplace of outrage. You can't even safely remain consistent with your own position, because no matter how safe and reasonably moderate your position seems in the moment, as the flames of heresy burn upwards, they force everyone away from them to the higher ground of ever more extreme positions. If you remain stationary in your position, yesterday's moderate becomes todays's heterodoxy, and tomorrow's heresy, and you'll burn along with them. This cycle must be broken, culturally wide, or 2021 will be even worse than 2020. It's going to be a rough ride. >In the case of r / WritingPrompts, I was told > >"No prompts referencing real world drama (including politics, recent tragedies)." > >so I guess the Black Death must have been recent. Who knew? 🙄 Did you point that out in a reply? That this could be *any* kind of plague, even a zombie plague, or like *The Stand?* This is really something that should be argued a lot further. Reddit also needs a kind of "Supreme Court" and a proper appeals process to deal with these situations of power abuse.

What was the reason given for the deletion?

You didn't address any of his points. This is a bad faith reply. Also I think you might be confused about the stated purpose of *this* subreddit. Censorship is bad. That's the message here. That's the First Principle, and the expected common priors.

Good mod.

But humor is subjective, so isn't he *really* saying "not funny *to me*"? Hrrm.

Can you please respond to this publicly, /u/O-shi ? I feel like "be faster" is a bad faith reply. It discourages good faith, reasoned, balanced, and researched grass roots journalism, and encourages a "fire from the hip, be first" practice, that sacrifices accuracy to advanced narrative. Where is the place for long-form, traditional journalism?

I actually [messaged the mod in question about this](https://i.imgur.com/zlDUf10.png), and then when I refreshed my front page, I saw this thread. Wasn't planning on sharing the PM, but O-shi has stated that he perfers mod actions to be transparent.

"Sides" seems like an incoherent concept if the project is good faith rational argument with the goal of elucidating objective reality. It seems like a bullet proof defense would be "I'm not on any side but that of the truth." If you make true statements, they're *no less true* regardless of "side." What am I missing?

"If you actually want to understand somebody's position, then you will always be interested in their efforts to clarify it. But what we're noticing in our discourse, is people don't really want to understand your position. They want to catch you saying something that can be construed in the worst possible way and then hold you to it, and then they claim to understand what you think better than you do." — Sam Harris

Banning as a *punitive* act is a form of abuse.