Yesterday, I published an article asking why Calgary Public Library is spending $8,000 to fund an AI artist residency while actual Calgary artists can barely eat. I decided to post it to r/Calgary since I thought it was an important local issue, and there weren't any other posts on the topic. It hit 50,000 views and became the most upvoted post of the day, with dozens of comments from Calgarians who were also interested in the topic.

Then it was deleted a few hours ago. And I was permanently banned. The mod team's reasoning, in full: "All your recent posts are designed to promote your personal internet publication. That's spam."

I want to be precise about what happened here. This is really a story about what local public discourse looks like when we've outsourced it to anonymous volunteers, on a platform which was designed for something else entirely.

What is Allowed to be a Publication?

Reddit's canonical self-promotion guideline has been floating around since the early days of the site. Storybench explains "it's perfectly fine to be a redditor with a website, it's not okay to be a website with a reddit account." And honestly, that is a sensible distinction in principle. Nobody wants a subreddit colonized by astroturfing brand accounts and SEO spam.

But the mod team of r/Calgary told me that I was promoting a "personal internet publication." Not a business. Not a brand. A personal blog. My personal blog, specifically the one I write under my own name, that I pay for out of pocket, that has no advertisers, that runs on open-source software, and that I have been publishing on for nearly four months at a pace of close to a post a day because I believe in writing for the public good.

My offense was being the author of the piece I linked. As I tried to explain to the mod team, I could not link to any other news story that was critical and reporting on this because none existed. This is why I wrote my piece and why I am an independent journalist in the first place.

Under their logic, a Calgary journalist who self-published a piece about a local issue and posted it to r/Calgary would be banned. A local blogger breaking a story with no corporate media coverage would be banned. Any independent voice without the institutional backing to make their work "legitimate" in the eyes of a volunteer mod would be banned. What's not banned? Posting links to the Calgary Herald (which is owned by an American company). CBC Calgary. Global News. Established outlets with advertising departments and corporate ownership structures. Those count as news. A personal publication, even one covering a genuine local story that the community demonstrably cared about, with 50,000 views and a top post of the day, does not.

Poynter documented the same double standard in 2014, when The Atlantic, Businessweek, and Discovery News were briefly banned for self-promotion. The difference is those outlets had PR teams to manage the fallout and negotiate their way back in. I have a laptop and a ban notice.

Who's Running This Public Square?

r/Calgary has over 400,000 members. In a city where the local newspaper is a skeleton of its former self and local TV news is increasingly automated, the subreddit has become something that looks very much like a community bulletin board. It's where Calgarians share city news, debate municipal issues, organize around local concerns. It functions, whether Reddit intended this or not, as a piece of public infrastructure.

And it is run by anonymous, unaccountable volunteers who cannot be removed by the community they moderate. This is not a conspiracy theory about r/Calgary specifically. This is how Reddit works. Reddit's structure means that moderators can only be removed by other moderators who have been in the role for longer than them. The senior mod is, effectively, immovable. A University of Michigan analysis of over 600 million Reddit comments found that moderators routinely suppress content that conflicts with their own views, consciously or not. "The bias in content moderation creates echo chambers."

Nobody elected these people. Nobody can vote them out. The community has no formal recourse when a moderator removes the top post of the day because they personally disapprove of the source.

When I pushed back, I was muted for 28 days. The conversation, as far as r/Calgary is concerned, is over.

What Local Media Failure Actually Looks Like

A person writes something true and relevant about their city, their community responds, and someone with a mod badge and no accountability deletes it and locks the door.

The absence of robust local journalism has created a succession crisis. The question of who gets to shape local public discourse gets answered by whoever happens to be running the subreddit, the Facebook group, the neighbourhood app. The Washington Post can navigate Reddit's anti-self-promotion rules because they have a dedicated staff person whose entire job is to build relationships with subreddit moderators.

Independent publishers like myself don't have that. We have our work, and we have whatever community goodwill we can build one post at a time. Until someone with a mod badge decides that's spam.

The institution I was writing about, the Calgary Public Library, is in the business of providing public access to information and protecting the commons.

The irony of getting silenced while criticizing an institution for failing to protect the commons is not lost on me. But Calgary Public Library didn't silence me. An anonymous Reddit moderator did, on a platform that has appointed itself the de facto local public square without accepting any of the responsibilities that implies.

The Article Still Exists

I'm an advocate of the IndieWeb because of issues like this. My work permanently exists on my own platform, regardless of what happens elsewhere.

The original article in question is still available to read on brennan.day. It was never behind a paywall. It never cost anything to read. It contains contact information for Calgary Public Library if you want to weigh in on the AI residency. It will be there tomorrow and the day after, because I own it and nobody can delete it.