r/Calgary Deleted the Top Post of the Day Because I Wrote It Myself

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](https://reddit.com/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](https://www.storybench.org/reddit-a-guide-for-journalists/) *"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](https://dominionreview.ca/postmedia-and-the-american-hedge-fund-takeover-of-canadas-newspapers/)). CBC Calgary. Global News. Established outlets with advertising departments and corporate ownership structures. Those count as news. A personal public