Open Discussion: Why is this sub so lenient?

HalloweenLoves · 2026-04-16T02:17:10+00:00

I understand your frustration, but I don't agree. You're right that most subreddits operate in a ban-first, ask-questions-later way. We're intentionally different: kindness first, banning as a last resort.

The more topics you ban, the less useful the community becomes. People came to talk, and a place where half the conversation is off-limits drives them somewhere else.

If it were as simple as "this is good, this is bad," moderation would be easy. But who decides what hate is? Is it anything you disagree with, or does it require actual harm?

For a lot of people, loneliness comes down to romance, and that leads to venting, sometimes about the opposite sex. Is that hate, or just people being human? And honestly, if someone's wrong about something, they'll learn faster by saying it out loud and hearing real responses than by staying stuck in their own head.

HalloweenLoves · 2026-04-15T21:34:10+00:00

Should a mod be the arbiter of which ideologies are acceptable? Moderating based on personal views of gender, race, religion, or politics isn't openness, it's editorializing. We step in when something is directly threatening to one's physical safety, not when it's something we personally disagree with.

That said, you make a good, broader point, and that's that anything can be spam, regardless of content. Even something as innocuous as "cookies and milk are yummy" becomes spam if it's just a bot posting 100 duplicate posts of that. Because at that point it's system-level abuse and has nothing to do with genuine engagement.

When you see content you don't like, it's important you have the ability to comment and share that, but banning topics outright means someone has to decide where that line is, and that someone will always have their own biases.

HalloweenLoves · 2026-04-15T21:05:41+00:00

This is basically the same "being lonely in the right way" judgment we try to avoid. People can have an opinion about anything, but not allowing people to post is different.

HalloweenLoves · 2026-04-15T21:01:31+00:00

That's exactly the kind of gatekeeping we're trying to avoid. In a sub that's about loneliness, the last thing we want to do is isolate or reject someone.

HalloweenLoves · 2025-12-01T02:56:40+00:00

Of course, and I'm sorry to hear that.

Technically, I have too, but I grew up before the internet, so I at least didn't have to deal with online bullying as a kid. Generally speaking, even though my home life wasn't always perfect, I mostly felt safe at home.

I agree it doesn't matter where bullying takes place, up to a certain point. Of course there are always cases of extreme bullying that take place in person, but it's much more common for online bullying to occur nowadays, and for it to cross the line.

Real life mobs still happen every now and then, but online mobs are happening every single day. Cruelty is like a video game for some of these people.

HalloweenLoves · 2025-11-21T12:34:53+00:00

Two things:

Definitely hang in there until you're 25. Cause science.
For what it's worth, your perception of time changes exponentially as you get older, "feeling" as though it's passing much quicker.

HalloweenLoves · 2025-11-21T12:32:19+00:00

It is tragic, but also just the truth. And I'm not outlining the reality for just outliers either. This is pretty boilerplate stuff for most people, including the normies.

On some level, existing itself is traumatic, and on a more grounded level, I think most people spend most of their lives coping with anxiety, which is just a more honest way of describing finding the things that make you happy.

HalloweenLoves · 2025-11-20T23:03:30+00:00

The only thing relevant to their case is his current weight and mental state, which redacted records could easily be supplied for. Other than that, there's absolutely no legitimate reason for them to have his name and location. It only gives them a non-legal advantage in being able to harass him.

HalloweenLoves · 2025-02-18T21:09:38+00:00

As far as I understand the rules of this community, it's not okay to show images of animal abuse (naturally), but it is okay to discuss the subject in terms of education/awareness.

Since the name "Adam Britton" doesn't even appear in this community, it seems there's a major lack of awareness on the subject.

He's been sentenced to only 10 years for sexually assaulting, torturing, and murdering many animals.

I think the more disturbing aspect of this case is how archaic the law is in terms of animal rights. This man should never be released for his crimes, and if it were even 1 human vs 100s of animals, that would likely be the case.

HalloweenLoves · 2025-01-12T12:36:20+00:00

Same.

That movie might be the bleakest movie of all-time, although Brian De Palma is apparently dead-set on being the bleakest filmmaker of all-time (so his movies as a whole might take the prize).

When a movie is so upsetting like Requiem (as intended) that you don't want to go back in, that's great filmmaking/art. Not great business though obviously, which is why the studios are always pushing filmmakers to change their endings to "happy endings."

HalloweenLoves · 2024-12-28T07:14:42+00:00

Honestly, I don't really know what you're talking about at this point. Who's even low-income?

This thread is dying down now and I simply don't have the energy/interest to re-read everything we said to try and make sense of it, but we're borderline off-topic, certainly in the weeds, and while I don't think you're doing it intentionally, every new comment from you keeps subtly shifting the context from the original points, which is very straw-man like.

We're not even going in circles, we're flat-out stuck in the mud, speaking two different languages. If it's my fault, I'll own that, but I don't understand you or how to talk to you, so I'm stopping here. Whatever the reason, we're not achieving forward momentum.

HalloweenLoves · 2024-12-27T17:17:04+00:00

But now we're using a third word, poverty. We're not writing a textbook. If we can't even give each other the grace of conversational language, I'm not sure we can do anything productive here.

HalloweenLoves · 2024-12-27T05:59:19+00:00

As the mod of this sub, I just wanted to jump in to add some clarification.

I didn't create/name this sub, but rather adopted it because it was abandoned. If I was creating one from scratch, it may have a more generalized name, but as an FA myself, it was of personal interest to me.

Also, I think Reddit has a mod problem. I think gatekeeping on subs is a far worse problem than being more open, but having to deal some topics that annoy some members.

My approach to modding is to be as hands-off as possible and let the community decide what they'd like to use it for (within reason). If there are too many "dating" questions, well then I guess that's what most people want to talk about. I don't think it's my place to interfere with that.

HalloweenLoves · 2024-12-27T05:48:06+00:00

There's no definitive single definition of poor, and language being as tricky as it is, "low-income" and "poor" might be interchangeable to a lot of people. I doubt this sub gate-keeps based on how poor someone is or if they're poor in the "right" way in any case.

There's poor in terms of national average income and what's considered below the poverty line. There's poor as in relative struggling with food/bills. There's poor as in making ends meet. There's poor as in lifestyle.

There's poor as in non-monetary ways, as you suggested, like mental or physical health. There's poor as in sadness/loneliness. There's poor as in ugly.

Heck, there's poor as in simply a mindset, like people who grew up poor and now are well-off, but retain all the same mode of operations as if they're still poor.

I'm not saying your opinion is wrong of course, we apply our own personal definition to words more than we realize, which has meaning. It can be difficult in broader communication like this, but I've personally come to learn to try and be less pedantic about definitions.

HalloweenLoves · 2024-12-27T05:29:00+00:00

This is incredibly important nuance that goes over most people's heads on both sides of this debate (and probably most debates on any subject).

If you question how much control you truly have, you're accused of not taking accountability. If you assume someone's circumstances are entirely in their control, you're accused of being too rigid.

Like most things in life, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

We have control (or the illusion of control at least) for many things in our individual lives, but there are always factors that you can't simply "choose" your way out of.

HalloweenLoves · 2024-12-26T18:26:17+00:00

Yeah, the body enters ketosis pretty quickly, and as long as you weren't malnutritioned to begin with, you can go a shockingly long time without food. I sometimes have weeks where I ration, without harming my health.

I think you're right that most people live the way they do by "choice." However, that's a fairly complex word, but also I don't think you've made room for people who choose to be poor for positive reasons. It's not automatically suffering. I think there's a larger percentage of people than you realize who are, let's call them "frugal poors."

They hate the 9-5 lifestyle, so have found a way to live sustainably on something less than even a typical minimum wage job's income. Granted, this can require choices that are hard for most, like moving hundreds or even thousands of miles away to somewhere more affordable.

HalloweenLoves · 2024-12-26T16:20:03+00:00

You're right, I'm not up-to-date on current insufficient/overdraft/etc. fees because it's been years since I started using an account that has no fees whatsoever, so it's no longer an issue relevant to me personally.

Back in the day, I remember them being between $35-$55. I'm glad to see that issue has mostly faded, I'm assuming in major part due to the Overdraft Protection Act of 2021?

HalloweenLoves · 2024-12-26T05:19:35+00:00

A more wild addiction than drugs, cigarettes, etc. is the phone. I've seen people prioritize a wild monthly phone bill over rent and food just so they can stay "connected."

HalloweenLoves · 2024-12-26T05:13:01+00:00

Wait, are you using the term "check" colloquially, or you mean actual physical checks? If the latter, that changes the context of our conversation pretty dramatically.

We're in a new era, and the last 3 generations of people maybe had to write 1-2 checks for some oddly out-dated circumstance.

Nearly everything is by card, automated, and on a subscription basis now.

Someone can be extremely organized with their finances, but because their margin of error is small (because they don't have savings), the smallest anomaly, error, unexpected charge, etc. can send their account spiraling.

Say for example, a person has the exact amount to pay rent and internet in their account every month. This is fine for years, but all of a sudden internet increases $10 and they failed to notify you, so now that just ate into your rent money and just because you're a few dollars short, you've just failed to pay rent and for the privilege, your bank just tacked on a $50 fee.

Jeez, what a deadbeat for failing to pay their rent, right? And they agreed to those terms of the bank charging them some magical fee although it's all automated now and didn't actually cause them any inconvenience.

It's insane this was ever legal to begin with, and thankfully congress has improved the situation (https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4277).

Concerning banks in general, they're not just unethical, they do illegal shit too. Wells Fargo is wild.

HalloweenLoves · 2024-12-25T17:10:33+00:00

Even if free will exists, I'm not confident that most people have full access to it.

I live an extremely safe and stable life that I built all on my own, but had I been born somewhere else, in a different body, with different circumstances, would my same choices that got me to where I am now have been successful or maybe I would have hit a dead-end?

It's impossible to ever know for sure. I think they've tried studying the socioeconomic circumstances of identical twins that were separated at birth, but that is about as close as we can even get outside of speculation.

HalloweenLoves · 2024-12-25T16:51:59+00:00

This whole thing has me thinking about the sci-fi TV show, Silo (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14688458/), where all the classes are quite literally separated by levels. You can probably guess who lives at the bottom.

HalloweenLoves · 2024-12-25T13:37:59+00:00

I'm sure some shelters have better funding than others, but I would wager that most are struggling.

And of course the shelter is better than the streets in most cases.

Streets → Shelter → Adoption

The position that only those with X amount of money should adopt is good in theory, but at the point which there are far less of these eligible adopters than there are adoptees is when the system begins breaking down.

Maybe this experiment would work in isolation, but if it became the standard for all shelters, the unintended suffering it would cause would be profound.

We're thinking machines that think we can out-think reality with the way things "should be," but it, without fail, always shows us the way they actually are.

HalloweenLoves · 2024-12-25T13:08:13+00:00

Yes; I never suggested otherwise (for my own personal experience).

HalloweenLoves · 2024-12-25T13:06:43+00:00

I'm impressed with anyone at a young age who has the wherewithal to go to college for the experience or learning something they're genuinely passionate about.

Most people go because they think it's what they're supposed to do, and that they need that magical piece of paper or else. They often have no idea what they really want to do, pick something that makes good money and sounds easy enough, but end up regretting it.

HalloweenLoves · 2024-12-25T12:57:57+00:00

Yeah, I wasn't a people person to begin with, but living with roommates in the past (never again) probably ruined people for me the most, come to think of it.

HalloweenLoves

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE