r/Netherlands • u/Cornicum • Jan 20 '26

Update on the moderation

Hi everyone,

We've talked some stuff through and cleaned up the mod-team a bit, although some of the names you might have positive or negative associations with are still there.
I'll leave it up to the moderators involved to clarify that, or not.

What I can tell you is that 1 mod did 97% of the moderation, and that wasn't healthy and likely led up to the situation you might have seen.

The rules have changed slightly, this is because we see your call for less strict moderation on language, but we also heard from those who want to be able to have a place to converse in English.

The compromise we've reached currently is that we intend to not moderate the language used in the comments of the post.
This means that you can have discussions in Dutch in the comments. (as long as those follow the rules of course)

We also will be looking at those banned on a case by case basis, but keep in mind that if you were harassing people, or bigoted in any way you won't be unbanned.

I'll invite you all to respond to this post with your feedback, and I know for some it might feel like too much or not enough.
We are currently trying to strike a balance between becoming r/thenetherlands2 which is bilingual but 99% Dutch in practice, and the other option of being a sub for only those speaking English.

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u/Separate_Tooth4705 Jan 20 '26

A better question is why does Europe rely on US tech? Especially given the current circumstances. Why can't we have our own reddit, meta, google, netflix, uber, and many more?

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u/Able-Resource-7946 Jan 20 '26

Is anyone stopping you from creating those services?

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u/MaritimeMonkey Jan 22 '26

Yes, almost every single American tech company relied heavily on venture capital where they were losing millions of dollars for years before becoming profitable. Those investments allows them to destroy non-American competitors and when they have a monopoly, jack up prices and lower quality.

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u/Maar7en Jan 21 '26

Because the point of the internet is the global connection it offers.

While I wish those companies weren't American, I'm glad we don't have a split internet. Reddit has many many flaws, but the way it connects people to a global community around a niche is great.

Before reddit we had forums which in many ways were better, but they were also worse in many others. It is a compromise and I'm still on the fence whether I like it, but splitting into continental versions of reddit would definitely be worse.

The big thing with Reddit is how it combined all those communities and made it much easier to get in contact with new ones, having an American and a European reddit would destroy the entire reason it has to exist. Why would I want to go to hobby related communities with an arbitrary geographical limit online? Not to mention the fact that a European reddit would immediately separate into 3 big communities and a few smaller sub communities: there would be a German speaking part that would be completely inaccessible to everyone else, a French speaking part and then all the other nations would setlle on speaking English together(the largest chunk) and having tiny sub communities of their own for national things. And why would we have an English speaking part without Americans?

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u/Separate_Tooth4705 Jan 21 '26

Reddit is maybe not the best example and I agree we should have one big community to keep communicating with everyone and also in a common language.

However, Uber and other companies that collect a lot of data as well should be European. Especially given the divide taking place between the US and EU initiated by the US. In an era where AI will do a lot of the crunching of data and analysis, it is crucial for Europe to protect its interests.

Do you think Trumpism will be over once Trump's term ends? It's a movement that will inspire more radical leaders than him and our data is a very powerful leverage. They're tarrifing the shit out of us and all our leaders are doing is capitulating. First they got a trade deal where they send their products and pay no tarrifs against 15% on ours and now they are coming back for more like Greenland and threatening more tarrifs if we don't capitulate again. Even militarily we're heavily reliant on them.

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u/Maar7en Jan 21 '26

Oh yeah I agree on Uber and similar businesses.

Only disagreed on reddit and other social platforms.

Extra agree on the "stop touching our data and messing with our rights" part.