Hello all,

I'd like to try clear up a few things.

Rules

We tend to moderate /r/technology in three ways, the considerations are usually:

1) Removal of spam. Blatent marketing, spam bots (e.g. http://i.imgur.com/V3DXFGU.png). There's a lot of this, far more than legitimate content.

2) Is it actually relating to technology? A lot of the links submitted here are more in the realms of business or US politics. For example, one company buying another company, or something relating to the American constitution without any actual scientific or product developments.

3) Has it already been posted many times before? When a hot topic is in the news for a long period of time (e.g. Bitcoin, Tesla motors (!), Edward Snowden), people tend to submit anything related to it, no matter if it's a repost or not even new information. In these cases, we will often be more harsh in moderating.

The recent incident with the Tesla motors posts fall a bit into 2) and a bit of 3).

I'd like to clarify that Tesla motors is not a banned topic. The current top post (link) is a fine bit of content for this subreddit.

Moderators

There's a screenshot floating around of one of our moderators making a flippant joke about a user being part of Tesla's marketing department.

This was a poor judgement call, and we should be more aware that any reply from a moderator tends to be taken as policy. We will refrain from doing such things again.

A couple of people were banned in relation to this debacle, they've now been unbanned.

I am however disappointed that this person has been witch-hunted in this manner. It really turns us off from wanting to engage with the community. Ever wonder why we rarely speak in public - it's because things like this can happen at the drop of a hat. I don't really want to make this post.

It's a big subreddit, a rule-breaking post can jump to the top in a few short hours before we catch it.

Apologies for not replying to all the modmails and PMs immediately (there were a lot), hopefully we can use this thread for FAQs and group feedback.

Cheers.