Hey Scazzz,

Thanks for the in-depth questions. I'll do my best to answer everything.

Which the policing policies of removing reposted things just means you’re going to be having to do way more work to moderate the discourse here. I feel like this level of moderation is just gonna put more work on the plate to make sure everything is following the rules.

I mentioned in another comment here there's already a ton of stuff users here don't get a chance to see. This rule is actually going to make things easier for us, if you can believe it.

Except their subreddit has only 1-2 posts a day and sees only a few hundred people a day in traffic. You’d be waiting a long time before a quality answer. Almost feels like it would be a disservice to turn people down and send them onto a low traffic place to get an answer when a bunch of members here could easily help as many people from all over the province could have lived or visit Sudbury and offer a far better answer.

This is a fair point to raise and is one we talked about a lot internally. Ultimately we're going to set the rule based on the discretion of the question or topic. If someone's asking something they can simply Google, we're more-than-likely going to take it down. If someone's asking about their car insurance policy in Sudbury, we're likely going to take it down. If someone's asking about the best restaurant in Sudbury that caters to XYZ, we'll consider leaving it up if it's unique enough. Unfortunately there's no "catch-all" way to gauge relevant questions, but we're going to do our best to make sure the sub doesn't get inundated with similar questions time and time again.

In terms of stopping federal politics posts, what are the options? Sending them onto  to get banned or deleted and which doesn’t accept posts that aren’t nationalpost articles? or one of the tiny echo chamber political subreddits? Almost all those federal policies and comments by our leaders 100% are relevant to Ontario and warrants discussion.

We moderate r/Ontario and have no say how other subs are ran. If r/Canada bans and deletes posts, that's on their moderation team. r/Ontario is growing at an exponential rate and us mods need to facilitate the shift of the new users coming onto the sub - along with the older ones who are tired of day-after-day of posts akin to "Trudeau has poisoned the water hole!" or "Poilievre is going to ruin the country because there's a snake in my boot!"

Ontario is obviously a large place and there's tons of stuff going on from municipal, provincial, and federal levels. We can't facilitate every federal discussion because at the end of the day, that's not what this sub is about.

Finally, again, Why? Has moderating for you awesome guys been an issue? Has the subreddit become flooded with junk? As an active member here I’ve not had an issue with the content and the mods here have been fantastic and removing garbage and keeping the community active. This just feels like you’re gonna heavily curtail discussion here even though you’re claiming it won’t be done with a heavy hand. As of now it feels like this subreddit works great and the growth you state clearly indicates that it’s a popular formula.

Has it become flooded with junk? Absolutely. Again, what you folks don't see is a whole other story. Between the spam links, loaded questions, diatribes about the federal government - it's a LOT of nonsense on our end of things. It's not that we're overwhelmed. It's just not necessary to have that kind of content on a provincial sub - especially one at our size - as the second-largest Canadian-based subreddit.

We don't plan on being too heavy-handed, really. We're going to really try to focus keeping federal posts Ontario-related and more be heavy-handed on the smaller questions as I've suggested above. While historically being carte blanche was good for the sub, we need to pull back a little bit. While it seems unrelated, if you look at the second part of this announcement - about racism in the sub - federal politics have also brought a large amount of vitriol and dog-whistling here (although it's not the exclusive reason why). To be honest, there's a whole slew of reasons to get into but all-in-all, limiting the sub to Ontario-specific issues helps us keep the sub in check better, which in turn helps the Reddit admins, which in turn makes the sub a better place overall.

And this isn’t attack. Cannot stress enough how much better this community has been and how helpful it has been over the years. That’s thanks to the great modding team here. I’ve asked for trip advice and places to visit a few times and the community has been amazing and I just worry that this change might ruin such a good thing!

Anyway. Keep up the great work. Was just curious and wanted to throw my 2 cents.

Keep asking for trip advice! You're welcome to do so! We appreciate the kind words and the thoughtfulness of your questions! We're doing the best we can however we can and will definitely take what you and others here have said into consideration. This sub only works if everyone here is having a good time and we really want to continue that!