I found this article yesterday and posted it on reddit android, here : https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1jmwg4w/everyone_k...
0 upvote, comment filled with what is either depressed sad people or just bots.
Here it's top 2... With mostly interesting comment.
Some subreddit are more dead than other but r/android got to be one of the worst.
Yeah, I'm not sure what exactly is going on with reddit but if dead-internet theory would hold anywhere, it seems to be there.
Besides, all the topic/subject subreddits seems moderated by people who hold a vested interest in the topic/subject, to the detriment of their community. I made a submission which went into details about the proprietary license that Meta's Llama is under, and what exactly that license means, and it was removed manually by the moderators of r/LocalLlama without any reasoning + they refuse to answer why it was removed even after trying to understand the rules of the subreddit better.
I'm guessing when the last "reddit purge" happened where they replaced a bunch of community moderators with employees from reddit, most of the platform was sold to companies to moderate their own spaces, unfortunately.
Find a more niche subreddit like /r/<city_name>running (although location subreddits fall into a similar trap) or /r/longdistancerunning and you'd probably find them to be more interesting simply because moderators are beholden to a smaller community and their job is more about making things interesting for their niche and cultivating a community rather than just dealing with slurs, bots, and spam.
Namely, once a subreddit becomes popular or has basically "the default" subreddit name, it's extremely difficult to just start a new subreddit if you don't like the moderation on the old subreddit, because it's so hard to get people to know about or move to the new subreddit. There was some drama years ago where some r/lgbt mods went on a major power trip, which caused other folks to start the r/ainbow sub, but still most folks go to the lgbt reddit as it's what comes up first if you just search for "gay subreddit" or similar.
You say "because moderators are beholden to a smaller community", but that's the point - mods aren't really beholden to anyone at all, as it's not like electing mods is a democratic process. Note nor do I think it should be, as being a mod is a ton of grief and labor that people donate for free. But I do think Reddit could make it a lot easier and "fairer" if people wanted to "fork" a subreddit if people wanted to discuss the same topics with the same community, just with different moderation rules.
the only feasible way (short of like, scraping every comment made on a subreddit and dm'ing each of those users) to reach the audience you're trying to convince to switch to your alternate subreddit is by... posting on the original subreddit. the original subreddit has no incentive to allow your post, and public moderation logs aren't a thing on reddit, so...