On March 4, Trump's appointees from the Department of Veterans Affairs handed out notes to senior leaders. The agency said it would “movement aggressively” to improve efficiency, along with its “first objective” to reduce the workforce to 2019 levels.
The next morning, someone posted a copy of this “forced reduction” memo to a Reddit group called Veteransaffairs, an online community of 19,000 members. The copy was difficult to take a series of photos of the notes on screen, but the message was clear enough. Approximately 80,000 jobs will be cut.
Questions and comments are poured in, and to some degree confused and some desperate. The agency had 500,000 employees in hospitals, clinics, call line and local benefits offices. Who will be fired? Was this the end of VA's medical research? How does this affect waiting times for medical appointments?
No one had a solid answer, just speculation that gave information. The atmosphere was gloomy as the livelihood and veteran happiness was at stake. But there was still room for dark humor.
“For some reason, I have to pay Greenland,” one joked.
Reddit, a bare bone social media site that organizes over 100,000 niche communities known as Subreddits, has long been dealing with people with quirky interests, whether it's Bitcoin, fly fishing, or pictures of Keanu Reeves.
Unlike other social media platforms. Instagram and Tiktok offer videos and influencers. Reddit is actively inappropriate for building star power because of its high text. Your real name is required for Facebook and LinkedIn. Anonymous is dominated by Reddit, minimizing ego and outcomes.
The Atlantic may have been recently considered Reddit. “The best platform on Junky Web.” As other social media sites fell prey to AI Slops and fell prey to constant pleas for “subscribe as you like,” Reddit has become one of the last places on the internet with genuine human information, communities and advice.
For government workers, it has been a lifeline in recent months. The rapid downsizing of the federal bureaucracy by the Trump administration has made Subreddit, where government workers previously posted stories about Zoom meeting accidents and health planning questions, a crowded forum due to fears, anxiety and sips of observation within the ministry. On one Subreddit on Fednews, government officials are sending updates on layoffs, a new $1 limit on government credit cards, and an email saying, “What did you achieve last week?” It has drawn millions of visitors since January, according to internal statistics shared by the creators of Subreddit.
“These individual subreddits allow people to find a niche that works very well for them,” said Sarah Gilbert, a Cornell University researcher focusing on online communities. “It's happening at FedNews, where people use the space to gather and talk to other people who are experiencing similar trauma.”
FedNews participants recently wrote a post saying that the supervisor told employees to stop Reddit's “leak” information. “Don't stop, people deserve to know,” the author added.
(The Veterans Affairs Bureau did not respond to requests for comment.)
Without using a real name, it becomes easier to share information and release frustration without further liberating your career prospects. However, anonymity can also lead to misinformation, malfunctions, and breeding vitriols.
That's where people like David Carson come. Carson, a veteran Army and former VA employee who lives in Mount Pleasant, Tennessee, is one of Reddit's more than 60,000 moderators. These volunteers have done an incredible amount of content moderation work that other social media giants have contracted with. The work of unpaid moderators like Carson has allowed Reddit to shine in this moment of political uproar.
“Reddit is a community run by people like me who focus on people like me,” Carson said.
Internet front page
Reddit is 20 years old and is outdated with the Internet age. It started out as a place to share interesting information and has essentially left it since. Anyone can create SubredDit and become the first moderator. Anyone can visit or participate, as long as they are not private.
“Each Reddit community has its own topics, its own rules, its own moderators, and often its own jokes and culture,” said Galen Weld, a doctoral student at the University of Washington who conducted research on Reddit, and said he did consulting work for the company.
Sometimes things people want to share can be disgusting. Reddit has gained infamy in the past with a community dedicated to revenge porn, death videos and other toxic content. However, the site tamed the worst impulses (and the most illicit moderators) by disbanding subreddits that consistently violated rules established by companies for harassment and inappropriate behaviour in 2015.
Released last year, Reddit is currently one of the most visited sites on the internet, with over 100 million active users and revenue of $1.3 billion. This may seem confusing for first-time visitors submitted by search engines. Its homepage is a random collection of news articles, funny photos, and unfamiliar shorthand (“Do I overreact?”). However, individual subreddits can be intimate and welcome.
Each of these subreddits are unique, whether it's a home repair, romantic, dungeon, or dragon map, each has clear rules determined by the moderator. Want to chat with someone you've decided life is better without children? Join ChildFree. Parents are welcome, but only if they regret their choice. Are you enjoying Schadenfreude? Try Leopardsatemyface. The community has shared anecdotes about Trump voters who quickly suffered from his policy decisions, but bans stories about actual animal attacks.
New rules: no politics
There are two top rules for veterans on Subreddit. It's about maintaining the topic and being respectful. That means there is no personal attack or politics.
Politics was allowed when the creator of Subreddit tapped Carson to take over the channel 10 years ago. However, in the preliminary stages of the 2024 presidential election, Carson and his co-moderators began banning partisan political talk after commenters began to get too hot.
“People were pointing their fingers, calling their names, polishing them and insulting them,” Carson said. “We are trying to create a community that embraces people.”
After serving in the battle, Carson was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and receives disability benefits from a VA who teaches English literature part-time at a community college outside Nashville. He enjoys watching students react when he shows up on his first day wearing a motorcycle leather upholstery and a “goat beard that lies in my belly.”
His schedule is flexible and allows him to allow time to ease the veterans' subreddit. For years it was 1-2 hours a day. However, in recent months, his daily commitment has swelled to more than six hours.
“In every leisure time, Reddit was pulled up over the phone,” Carson said. “If I'm in the car with my wife, I'm sitting in the passenger seat and moderating the subreddit. I'm moderating the subreddit while my wife is sleeping, watching TV and watching TV.”
It's “irritating,” his wife, Stacey, said for a certain amount of time on his cell phone.
To help the activity surge, Carson and his co-moderators have recently recruited two new moderators, as their real name, Carson, doesn't know.
On a recent weekday morning, Carson logged in to Reddit and checked the moderator's queue. He began reading each and removed anything that was not directly related to the Veterans Affairs Division.
It will take time. Some people write “papers,” Carson said, and if a post contains a link, he clicks to make sure the information is appropriate. “Then you had to research the website, OK, can you trust this website?” he said. If the site has extreme partisan tendencies or unclear sources, he will delete the post.
“The job of a moderator is not just to prevent abuse or remove bad behavior,” said Eshwar Chandrasekharan, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who studied Reddit. “They can also easily find good ones.”
Carson always starts with content flagged for reviews by community users or by automated filtering tools. This tool, Automoderator, looks for inappropriate languages, problem users flagged by other moderators, and words that violate the subreddit's “nopolitious” rules, such as “Musk”, “Trump”, “Doge”, and “Orange”.
Carson himself has strong political sentiments. Expressing them has caused him to get into trouble in the past. He lost his job as a claims examiner in VA in 2017 due to a Facebook post written in the hashtag #AssassInAtetrump, according to the ruling of the Management Judge.
He was angry with the government at the time. The VA moved him from Tennessee to Colorado, exacerbating his PTSD by two years apart from his wife and children. It was cathartic to write about frustration with agencies on social media, he said. However, his colleagues discovered that the post was threatening. They included obscene and ominous hypotheses, and were post tenors he would immediately remove from his subreddit.
After he was fired, Mr. Carson returned to Tennessee and continued to moderate the subreddit. I am grateful to be able to share his expertise. He began to think of helping veterans in their own interests as more than a job. That was his purpose.
“We are trying to create a safe, kind and respectful community,” Carson said. He has always been focused on mentions of suicidal thoughts he has also experienced, prioritizing reaching out to those people to provide help.
This morning, car users had flagged comments. It allegedly installed on all computers tapped by the government efficiency group led by Elon Musk on all computers tapped by the group reducing federal bureaucracy. Carson deleted the comment.
“We allow fact-focused conversations and provide evidence,” he said. “But even so, it still needs to be related to the VA,” he said the spyware comment was “assumption.”
“You're not alone.”
Last week, when I received an email telling a federal worker to list five things they accomplished last week, someone posted a vote on Veterans' subreddit for a VA colleague. “Did you reply to the email?”
The majority of respondents said that was not the case.
This kind of information is “kind and enlightening.” Bruce, a VA employee at Salt Lake City, says he checks Subreddit every day.
Bruce, who asked not to use his full name to protect his employment, said there was little official communication from his local office, and Reddit helped fill the vacuum of information.
“It gives you the idea of what other people in Virginia are going through and that you're not alone,” Bruce said.
Cornell researcher Dr. Gilbert said people can post on Reddit. Differentiate sites by the internet between bots and AI-generated content.
But that could change. Last year, Reddit signed a license agreement with Google and Openai, allowing it to use the content of its site to train artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT. Real human writing from Reddit helps AI sound more human, Dr. Gilbert said it makes it difficult for Reddit and its moderators to eliminate bots in the future.
“You may not get high quality information with the same kind of person that people go to reddit to find,” Dr. Gilbert said.
Promoting human connection and networking is why Carson spends so much time pruning conversational hedges in his reddit domain.
“People find us when they need us,” Carson said. “Just right now, people need us more than ever.”
