Suppose, a newbie has no idea how the internet works and he beliefs that the world is only positive. He decides to create a linkblog which is a collection of useful URLs about a certain topic. The supposed newbie comes with a background in Artificial Intelligence and his idea is to a create a meta blog which peer reviews the latest Arxiv papers from that domain.
He opens the website https://arxiv.org/list/cs.AI/recent so see the latest submissions, selects carefully the best one and writes a short description what can be found inside the paper. The newbie is doing so frequently one times a week and is posting the newsletter to an AI related online forum. What will happen?
According to most reddit tutorials, the moderators of the forum doesn't like the idea very much and will misinterpret his attempt as self-promotion or spam and the newbie gets banned quickly from the forum. That means, his contribution is not welcome. How likely is that interaction pattern? I would guess the probability is smaller then 1% that this will happen. If somebody is creating a carefully commented newsletter with the latest arxiv papers is welcome in any AI forum and the moderator will gave him the top position in the forum because this posting is useful for the entire group. The chance is high that the pageviews of a such a list will become higher than a normal posting.
Creating a list of the latest URLs from a certain topic and commenting them objective is some kind of meta-post which is welcome everywhere. The reason why not every forum can provide such a newsletter is because the number persons who like to create such content is very very small. Not evil moderators will hold the newbie down, but he will do so by himself. The reason why is simple: nobody likes to create a list of content written by other. What most authors are more motivated is to write a paper by it's own and asking for feedback from the group. Providing such a feedback for a large amount of papers is strongly desired by AI forums. What is the reason, that horror stories about banned reddit editors are so much posted into the internet? Is the reddit world different from the normal internet?
So the more interesting question is, what are the real reasons for getting banned or downvoted at reddit?