Was recently granted the privilege of a permanent ban on reddit for a username I had for over four years and it led me down the rabbit hole of seeing more and more claims from other people who went through similar experiences. Hell, there’s a lot of them. Frivolous reports resulting in punishment, appeals being automatically denied, the works, etc.
It might just be a presumption, seeing how many bots slide under the radar each day on that site through posts and comments, but I have a strong feeling that most (seemingly random) admin bans are designed to flush out active and semi-active human users rather than weed out bot code posing as people online. The end goal? Whether it’s to create an automated, cyclical platform designed to extract marketing and ad revenue from a steady stream of new users or anything else for that matter, I know not. All I know for certain is that the ban tendencies have ramped up in the recent year and the people actually being punished for it are those who have been using it for long periods of time and manage to conveniently fall on the edge of a subjective TOS offense.
I had my suspicions that it was gradually turning into an AI-fueled cesspit, but now I’ve had my chance to really believe that it has. Good riddance in that case
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No, I don’t think there’s an ulterior motive. Reddit kicked out all the active mods and mods who knew what they were doing, and then brought in people with zero mod experience. Of course you’re going to get more issues with mod abuse now. Not everyone has the temperament to be a responsible mod, and I think Reddit is simply reaping the consequences of its choices
Mods can’t issue permanent site-wide bans.
This post has nothing to do with mods.
So if it degenerates to the point where every user is a bot, who are the advertisers going to sell their crap to? Are they going to shift to advertising antivirus software and machine oil?
I have a few subscribed subs there for self hosting and a few other subs related to Linux and the sort. (I know the fediverse has those too! :) ) only because the majority of new updates or announcements for selfhosted apps and tools are made there only.
I used to be a mod and stopped posting during their protest and haven’t posted since. I also ran a userscript to delete all of my posts and it seemed to have scrubbed my history correctly there. I’m a lurker there and their new design really has gone to heck. I have uBlock origin and AdguardHome running on my network and their pages don’t play well sometimes with errors displaying what I assume to be ads.
Yeah, those ramped up in early 2023. I was guessing that it was related to an impending IPO, and guess what was announced shortly thereafter. The enshittifiation had already begun.
Let them weed the humans out. Then the bots can talk to each other over there and all the humans can move here!
They’ve gone down the shitter any way you cut it, unless you’re actively profiting from the stock somehow.
Listen friend…
ERROR CHATGPT TOKENS EXPIRED
The only thing I still use reddit for is to browse Fortnite sub sometimes (once every few days), on a desktop (Firefox with ublock) and if I post anything it’s useless shit.
I got a reddit (not sub) warning for personal attacks.
In a message that said “Fuck you, EPIC”.
If i remember correctly, warning even implied that it was an automated warning.
Works great. Can’t wait to post even more nonsensical shit there.
I think they just have no idea what they’re doing. There’s no master plan. It is devolving into botshit, but not on purpose; it’s just because all the people with anything remotely resembling qualifications to run one of the world’s biggest social media sites have left the building at this point.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity.
My head canon is, that they’re analyzing posts and comments and used that to weed out bots in the past. “Oh, this looks like 90% of our content - it’s a human” - “Oh, this doesn’t look like 90% of our content, probably a bot”. Now the baseline shifted and everyone who is not a bot triggers it and gets banned.
Don’t worry. It’s going to get worse because they’ve went deeper with their partnership with Google. Google has access to reddit’s API and user data while reddit gets access to a back-end AI. What you are suspecting is only the start of things to come.
I got a 1-2 week Reddit site wide ban earlier this year for stating to the mod of a sub that I was going to circumvent the sub ban by using an alt account. The mod banned me because I hold a different opinion and the person obviously didn’t like it.
I used an alt account to circumvent the site wide ban using the exact same IP addresses and devices, and Reddit didn’t do anything; not even a warning.
It’s not in the interest of Reddit to permanently ban you from their website. They lose advert money and they lose actively monthly users numbers which affect their stock prices.
As @[email protected] and @[email protected] said Hanlon’s Razor explains it: they simply don’t know what they’re doing.
This can be explained for example by paid site-wide moderation being forced to review more reports per hour than it’s able to. Eventually accuracy goes down the drain.
Our capitalist overlords are currently in a bind where they’d prefer all of social media is AI shrimp Jesus, and that is currently profitable this quarter. So I guess not actually a bind. Carry on.
