This comes up surprisingly often, but this comment chain in the recent AMA prompted me to start a general discussion to maybe put this discussion to rest.
The only other place I’m aware that this has been discussed in detail is this pull request from 2023, which the creator ultimately closed.
What I’m ultimately in favour of, and what actually gets requested (one, two, three), is letting mods edit the metadata around a post. Things like the NSFW toggle, or post tags in 1.0.
But I’m throwing this out to the floor. What, if anything, do you think mods should be able to change about a user’s content?
As per usual, the “free speech on someone else’s dime” folks think the people running the forums they feel entitled to shouldn’t have actual moderation tools. Shocking.
Once upon a time, people overseeing web forums used to have the ability to move posts, split topics, and even shunt comment chains into other, exising posts. But all Reddit allows is to delete, and so this space that apes some of the worst bits about Reddit thinks they shouldn’t do any better than the lowest of fucking low bars.
Don't overlook the perspective that many of us simply value seeing what the original author put out there.
It's not free speech on someone else's dime; it's not a claim of entitlement. Heck, a lot of people don't even care to speak, as they're looking for the experience of others' work, that substantial moderation interferes with.
This isn't point isn't about entitlement to speech. This is about the rules that shape the shared experience.
