One of the most popular sections on the user-driven news site Reddit was downgraded Monday after users discovered that moderators were removing stories that included popular terms such as "Bitcoin," "Tesla," "Anonymous," "Obama," "Congress," "National Security Agency" and "Snowden."

When users of the section in question, r/technology, tried to submit stories with those words in their headlines, their posts were mysteriously removed without comment. It turned out that the moderators of the section, who are all unpaid volunteers, had simply placed a filter on the section that automatically censored headlines with more than 20 popular words in them — simply because the moderators didn't want to deal with the large number of stories submitted on controversial topics.

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Now, r/technology, followed by some five million Reddit users, will no longer be a default subreddit. That means starting Monday, new users will not be pointed to it from Reddit's homepage. It's a significant step intended to shame the moderators of the subreddit into cleaning house.

"The moderation team lost focus of what they were there to do: moderate effectively," Reddit communications director Victoria Taylor told the BBC. "We might consider adding them back in the future if they can show us and the community that they can overcome these issues."

The censorship was first discovered last week by Reddit user creq, who discovered the banned words by trial and error and believes the word filters kicked in around eight months ago.

One former moderator of r/technology, agentlame, then posted his own account of the problems within the subreddit. What it boiled down to in his version: Not enough moderators imposing a too-broad list of troublesome topics that engendered too many headline submissions, then refusing to fix the problem. "The top mods were MIA," he wrote.

Two other subreddits, r/politics and r/atheism, were removed from the list of default subreddits last year after long battles over their content.