My 1st impressions of astronomy & physics forums on Reddit

[Michael Mozina]

I did a little poking round on Reddit this week on various astronomy and physics related forums and I was actually pleasantly surprised. With the exception of /astronomy forum I thought that the overall moderation of the various forums were pretty reasonable all things considered.

I think my favorite 'mainstream" forum on Reddit was the /space forum. It's got a huge number of followers and a lot of active readers compared to any other forum. The moderating seems to pretty kick back. They appear to prefer to simply let the public vote topics up and down and allow the public input tools to decide which content gets priority and which content ge's buried. I guess that's only logical considering their size, but I was pleased to see that my posts weren't simply deleted by moderators based on their content even if they got buried by voters at times. All things considered I think it's probably my favorite mainstream forum.

The /astronomy forum on the other hand is *heavily* moderated and down right draconian. I got banned instantly from that forum awhile back simply for posting a link to a published paper by Peratt without the slightest warning either. Evidently the mods there are rather heavy handed and have a huge chip on their shoulder towards anything even remotely related to EU/PC models. Apparently even published papers are not welcome there if they support anything other than the LCDM model. It reminded me Cosmoquest. I suspect that they share a lot of the same moderators.

The /astrophysics forum is a much smaller community which seems to be moderated by younger mods with an odd sense of humor and little if any respect for conventional thinking. They seemed to have no problem with my posting of EU/PC oriented material or asking tough questions. I get the feeling they're just having fun at the expense of professional astronomers and they don't take anything too seriously. I actually enjoyed that forum.

/universe is even a smaller community than any of the rest ,and the moderators seem to have a chip on their shoulder for ideas that fall outside of the mainstream. I had a good conversation with one of the mods, but eventually he removed the entire thread because things didn't go his way and it deviated from their 'preferred' content. A least they didn't ban me outright however, so it's "better than' /astronomy in that sense. I wasn't personally attacked there either, but the moderator that I talked with used a lot of loaded language like "pseudoscience" when describing EU/PC content and he didn't seem to have much tolerance for open debate.

In terms of a preference for public voter moderation, the /physics forum is pretty kick back. Like the /space forum, and unlike the /universe forum, the moderators at /physics didn't seem interested in controlling the content themselves, rather they let the public voting tools control the priority of the content for the most part. None of my posts there were removed based on content.

Our EU/PC oriented forums are the best of course in my subjective opinion, but I was pleasantly surprised by the kick back moderation style of most of the mainstream physics and space oriented forums, with the exception of the /astronomy forum.

Anyway, those were my impressions of Reddit.

[Michael Mozina]

Apparently just asking some uncomfrotable questions about the LCDM model is grounds for a good heretic burning at the r/physics forum. Here's my dialog from yesterday with the moderator at the /physics forum who evidently took great exception to me asking two questions about dark matter and the assumption of "space expansion". Keep in mind that I specifically and intentionally refrained from discussing anything at all that was even remotely related to the EU/PC theory on the Physics forum. I simply asked a couple of difficult questions about the LCDM model. I put the moderator's messages to me in quotes:

r/PhysicsYou've been banned from participating in r/Physics

[–]subreddit message via /r/Physics[M] sent 22 hours ago

You have been banned from participating in r/Physics. You can still view and subscribe to r/Physics, but you won't be able to post or comment.

If you have a question regarding your ban, you can contact the moderator team for r/Physics by replying to this message.

Reminder from the Reddit staff: If you use another account to circumvent this subreddit ban, that will be considered a violation of the Content Policy and can result in your account being suspended from the site as a whole.

Could you explain to me why I was banned?

[–]from RobusEtCeleritas[M] via /r/Physics sent 21 hours ago

Hello,

Your ban was for unscientific content.

Cheers.

Could you be a little more specific? I don’t recall posting anything on the forum that wasn’t related to science.

[–]from RobusEtCeleritas[M] via /r/Physics sent 20 hours ago

Many, if not all, of you recent posts are nonsense about dark matter and Lambda-CDM. If your goal is just to stir up conflicts with dubious posts, then there is no place for you here.

Cheers.

As I recall I simply asked a few questions about the model. So questioning the model is cause for a ban without so much as a single warning?

[–]from RobusEtCeleritas[M] via /r/Physics sent 17 hours ago

From your comment history, it's clear that you've a priori decided that you think mainstream cosmology is incorrect. You've demonstrated an unwillingness to have your viewpoints changed, so when you "just ask a few questions", you are not asking in good faith, and are simply attempting to incite arguments.

This kind of behavior does not contribute positively to /r/Physics, and it's not something that we're going to allow.

Cheers.

Kind of like burning Bruno at the stake for daring to disagree with Ptolomy?

[–]from RobusEtCeleritas[M] via /r/Physics sent 14 hours ago

No, more like banning a pseudoscientific agitator who doesn't seem willing or able to contribute meaningfully to our sub.

What pseudoscience? I simply asked some basic questions about the LCDM model. Care to site the specific posts that you're talking about?

[–]from RobusEtCeleritas[M] via /r/Physics sent 14 hours ago

We've been over this, your "basic questions" are asked in bad faith. You are a believer of some kind of pseudoscientific nonsense, and you reject mainstream cosmology despite apparently not understanding it at all. Literally everything in your recent post history is an example. And your little Galileo complex doesn't help either.

I'm not going to repeat myself about this again. If you're hoping to get your ban overturned, you're going to have to be much, much more convincing than this.

Wow. You haven't even bothered to cite a single post for me, or a single quote from one of my posts where I presumably discussed what you are calling "pseudoscience" on your forum. How can I possibly defend myself, or respond convincingly or meaningfully when you won't even cite a post or a statement that presumably contained what you're calling "pseudoscience"? I don't profess to read your mind, even if you presume to read mine. When did I ever post any "pseudoscience" to your forum?

[–]from RobusEtCeleritas[M] via /r/Physics sent 14 hours ago

No need to read my mind, simply my words:

Literally everything in your recent post history is an example.

Don't worry, you can continue to spam /r/Astronomy and /r/Space with your disingenuous questions, assuming they haven't also banned you.

But you can't spam /r/Physics anymore.

Since you continue to refuse to even cite a specific post or specific sentence where you falsely accused me of posting "pseudoscience" to your forum, and you irrationally pretend to read my mind, I can only assume that you're having a very bad emotional reaction to me asking even simple, basic and honest questions about your belief systems.

You're just as bad as the Ptolemy proponents/experts insisting on burning all heretics at the stake. You don't even have the intellectual integrity to cite a single post I made to your forum that supposedly contained any pseudoscience at all. You evidently just can't handle my honest "lack of belief" in your personal belief system. You're acting like an intolerant leader of a cult rather than an ethical and open minded moderator of a science forum.

[–]subreddit message via /r/Physics[M] sent 13 hours ago

You have been temporarily muted from r/Physics. You will not be able to message the moderators of r/Physics for 72 hours.

[Michael Mozina]

It's rather amusing from my perspective that the moderator's basic premise was that I'm not allowed to even question the LCDM model or show any sort of doubt about the LCDM model, or lack belief in the model because I don't understand it properly according to him. Yet all I did was ask some questions to see if they could explain their model to me.

Admittedly I am sure that my reputation precedes me, but the fact that he had to flat out lie about me posting unscientific content and 'pseudoscience' to the /Physics forum when all I did was ask questions about their own model says volumes IMO. The only thing i even discussed (actually asked about) at the /Physics forum was dark matter and space expansion, so apparently he believes that these two topics are "unscientific content", and 'pseudoscience'.

Hmmmm. Maybe he was right after all.

[BeAChooser]

WOW! Thanks for posting that, Michael. Not that it surprises me. I especially loved the last statement... "You will not be able to message the moderators of r/Physics for 72 hours." They have to do that to keep their heads from exploding. And welcome to what the left has been doing to conservatives all over the internet the last few years. Censoring them. It's what they've done to the opponents of AGWalarmism for years. They can't defend what they believe so they simply hide. But unfortunately, they already control the majority of media so their indefensible beliefs continue to hold sway over public opinion and funding. It's the only reason the Russian Collusion meme continues. And no one will ever hear of your experience except the few who read your post. I'm afraid that if things continue, a time will come when they shut down forums like thunderbolt entirely. A new dark age is ahead.

[Michael Mozina]

WOW! Thanks for posting that, Michael. Not that it surprises me. I especially loved the last statement... "You will not be able to message the moderators of r/Physics for 72 hours." They have to do that to keep their heads from exploding. And welcome to what the left has been doing to conservatives all over the internet the last few years. Censoring them. It's what they've done to the opponents of AGWalarmism for years. They can't defend what they believe so they simply hide. But unfortunately, they already control the majority of media so their indefensible beliefs continue to hold sway over public opinion and funding. It's the only reason the Russian Collusion meme continues. And no one will ever hear of your experience except the few who read your post. I'm afraid that if things continue, a time will come when they shut down forums like thunderbolt entirely. A new dark age is ahead.

I think it's rather telling that the so called "scientific" community cannot handle any criticisms of their model, or even a few tough questions about their model without totally freaking out. Essentially all I did was ask a couple of specific questions about space expansion and dark matter. I didn't even post any content which could even remotely be considered "unscientific" or "pseudo-scientific" as he falsely asserted.

I think that the tension between the SN1A data and he Planck data, along with that most recent quasar study has them feeling very defensive at the moment. There really is no good way for them to deal with that problem. Either they must radically deviate/depart from General Relativity by trying to stuff a variable into a formula which should only contain a simple constant, or they have to introduce yet another ad-hoc form of energy that turns on and off at exactly the right times to make their theory work right. If they invent yet another ad-hoc form of energy, they'll have to do so without being able to explain anything about it, not where it comes from, or why it turned on or turned off when it did. Either way, it's an ugly and inelegant solution to a serious problem in their model and it's bound to open them up to criticism. It's even likely to cause some internal squabbling.

The last thing that they need is for skeptics to start informing the public about the seriousness of the problem and making a big fuss about it before they come to a 'consensus" on what to do about it. I had to be silenced by force because I asked too many questions.

They really don't know how to handle public criticism and tough questions about their model because they're not used to it.

Their whole model is predicated upon to basic assumptions that are highly dubious assumptions. First they 'assumed' that redshift is related to expansion even though Edwin Hubble himself did not prefer an expansion interpretation of the redshift phenomenon. This assumption has come into conflict with almost every distant redshift observation. The originally "predicted" that the universe should be slowing down, but that didn't fit the redshift pattern associated with SN1A data, so they introduced/invented dark energy as an ad-hoc gap filler. That claim then came into conflict with the Planck data set, and it also comes into conflict with the quasar data as well. That's a big problem for them. The expansion interpretation of redshift also predicted an evolutionary process that has also come into serious conflict with observations of "mature" and "massive" galaxies at higher redshifts. That whole interpretation has been a disaster in terms of the predictions not matching observation.

The second dubious assumption that they've been making is that their luminosity based baryonic mass estimation techniques were correct, but there have been 8 or so published papers over the past decade that show all sorts of serious problems with that particular mass estimation technique. They don't want to discuss that problem either.

They're in a very precarious position now. Not only is 95 percent of their model nothing more than placeholder terms for human ignorance, not of it works right in the lab, and it's inconsistent with observations too. Not good. The last thing they need now is for skeptics like us to point out their problems to the public before they even have a 'plan' on how to deal with any of it.

[Michael Mozina]

I see that /space has removed my more controversial post related to dark matter, as did the /astrophysics forum. I also managed to earn myself a two week vacation/ban from /universe for discussing tired light proposals there.

LCMD proponents sure are a touchy bunch.

FYI, I posted a copy of my controversial dark matter thread on /plasmacosmology:

https://www.reddit.com/r/plasmacosmolog ... _the_dark/

is that really that threatening or offensive of a post, are are they simply overreacting again?

[Cargo]

an unwillingness to have your viewpoints changed

Now that' some rich irony right there.

[Michael Mozina]

an unwillingness to have your viewpoints changed

Now that' some rich irony right there.

Ya, I thought so too.