Reddit

Unfortunately some mods do have an axe to grind, so they're using the new rules for which to lay down tempbans and permabans. Even for just criticizing a particular asshole Redditor without using violent language.

Fuck reddit. We need more niche communities on lemmy.

Today my dad got permabanned from Reddit because he read a post while at my house, they counted that as ban evasion and now he can’t ever make another account without also getting instabanned.

It started getting worse with trump running. Me things some right winged trolls took over just like the rest of Silicon Valley.

For automated bans I can tell you why - social media fingerprinting and anti-bot is really hard and it scales in favor of banning.

I working in anti fraud software development and the browser and apps give you incredible fingerprint that can identify anyone. However it has many false positives simple because the datasets are huge and peoppe use social media in weird but legit ways (cafe wifi etc). Generally big important systems like banks can alleviate that with support and KYC systems (know your customer) but social networks don't want/can't really do that in a scalable way.

Then, there's misalignment of incentives. The anti bot team does not care about false positives and these are almost never reported to the upper management so false bans become common and in the big picture not that big of a deal. Thats why you see so many websites use cloudflare anti bot when they are clearly losing sales when A|B tests are evaluated but the site admits never know that because cloudflare only tells them about successes not failures.

Finally, real bot developers are really fucking good. Wirh proper funding you just hire real people with real web browsers / real phones and thats why large scale bot operations like those of governments are almost impossible to defend against. Thats why Russia, China, India etc are investing so heavily in internet trolls - it's super effective and it's a hard problem to fight as it's easy to hide behind "xenophobia" and just deny everything. Any forensics would also implicate the social media hosts so the incentives all align for a perfect propaganda machine.

My theory is it’s because they’ve left the banning and appeals process up entirely to AI at this point, there are no humans involved at any stage, so you get kicked for using a trigger word or some other nonsense and then nobody actually looks at the appeal.

I was banned from r/pics for questioning the authenticity of a picture. I did not say anything hurtful and I was just pointing out that some of the things they were saying weren’t adding up. I was even backed by others who were also stating that it didn’t add up and adding other points. Banned from the sub with a vaguely worded message that basically stated “if you can tell us why you are sorry for why we banned you, we’ll unban you”, to which I responded that I have absolutely no idea why I was banned. After that, I received a message that I was permabanned. It’s so stupid.

Because one can not tell any truth in the face of US citizens. They like to believe they are always right. And that we care.

Because they're just a corporate profit machine now. The days of reddit being a good platform for discussion are over.

Reddit deserves to die! Leave it! It's become a tool for the government to control us.

"Ban Evasion" is such a bullshit concept anyway. Do something we don't like, and try and come back early? You can no longer come here, for life! And since I bet they IP ban, it bans your entire household! I wonder if there are some public places that are Reddit black holes, silently banning any Redditor who goes there because one person once called King Steven a greedy pigboy.

I left Reddit at the time of the great APIcalypse, and there were some businesses whose customer service was so abysmal that the only practical avenue for customer service was on Reddit. Getting a permanent ban for bullshit reasons can have an actual effect if you need support from one of these companies.

It surprises me that they haven't banned the wrong lawyer at the wrong time to prompt a class action lawsuit over how arbitrary it all is.

I was thinking about this today. They even have a thread over at reddit about it. The admins tried to tell people they only permaban after issueing several temp bans.

No they don't. I've only ever gotten permabans. I also don't think anything I did (some angry shitposts. No threats, harassment, or anything like that) deserved a permaban. Like they could have given me a temp ban or a subreddit ban, and I would have been fine with that. They for some reason went nuclear on me and went straight to site-wide permaban. I don't know why, I filed appeals, I sent messages. I tried to reason with them. Nothing. They go nuclear as standard practice and are completely inflexible about it.

The want people stuck in the Doom scroll wheel, not people thinking and arguing.

Easier to control.

Or a non conspiracy theory: it's cheaper to use "AI" to ban even if it is quite bad at it.