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Reddit's tech community just got scolded, is no longer front page news
Thousands of self-managed forums make up Reddit's sizable corner of the internet, but only a few dozen bear the coveted "default" status that places them on every new user's list of subscribed communities. Now, there's one fewer. A dramatic saga of censorship, poor moderation and keyword-based deletion scripts have ousted the technology subreddit (/r/technology) from the default list. The change came shortly after users sleuthed out a number of keywords that, if present in a post's headline, would cause it to be automatically deleted. The community's moderators eventually confirmed that a bot called AutoModerator was used to cull content -- specifically targeting politicized or controversial terms. Unfortunately, the banned words included terms like anti-piracy, SOPA, NSA, Snowden, Bitcoin and even CEO, ensuring that dozens of hot-topic stories would never make it to Reddit's front page.
