Summary
Reddit’s r/medicine moderators deleted a thread where doctors and users harshly criticized murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Comments, including satirical rejections of insurance claims for gunshot wounds, targeted UHC’s reputation for denying care to boost profits.
Despite the removal, similar discussions continue, with medical professionals condemning UHC’s business practices under Thompson’s leadership, which a Senate report recently criticized for denying post-acute care.
Thompson, shot in what appears to be a targeted attack, led a company notorious for its high claim denial rates, fueling ongoing debates about corporate ethics in healthcare.
Because then the admins will remove them as mods and install their approved puppets that will follow everything the admins tell them
If the mods are already behaving in the way reddit desires for fear of removal, would installing proper puppets make much difference?
Yes.
Wishing violence on someone, no matter how deserved, is against reddit TOS.
Doing anything at all that an advertiser might not like isn’t officially banned, but the second admins take over it’ll be all but the official policy. A doctor wants to complain about an insurance company that might advertise on Reddit? [Removed]. Want to ask about your symptoms of a drug that advertises on Reddit? [Removed].
Admins are just reddit employees and have to do whatever is best for reddit, which under spez means being as advertiser and AI friendly as possible.
Beyond that, admins can’t be fucked to respond quickly when users are doxxed, harassed, or threatened with death. And this is in a discord/slack designed to let moderators communicate with the admins. Why would they respond to anything users say on a single subreddit if they can’t even respond to dozens of mods being threatened without a board meeting first? Heaven forbid some major issues come up that need seeing to, cause the admins will not do anything.
I passed along dozens of instances of harassment, doxxing, death threats, and straight up CSAM, many of which were directed at me, inclusing having been DMed CSAM images. It would always take the admins days or even weeks to respond. When someone attempted to doxx me (with incorrect info), it took the admins nearly 2 weeks to ban the user.
I know to a lot of people this reads like the moderators just giving in to the admins, and it is, but until more and more people move here or somewhere else, reddits the main place for these groups, and therefore they have to play by reddits rules, because breaking those rules hard enough is the only time admins give a fuck, and that does not end well for users or mods.
I’m not sure I fully agree with the idea of continuing to limp Reddit along until enough people switch, and only then torching it. That didn’t work for twitter, as Mastodon was available for years, but people only properly migrated away from twitter when it became unbearable to use. AFAIK, Digg died a similar death.
I suspect we would get a more steady stream of migrants here if Reddit became so blatantly pro corporate that they censored posts in the way you describe. Then people would actually be motivated to switch.