Reddit @lemmy.world reddit_sucks @lemmy.world 2y ago

I wasted so much time thanks to reddit shadowban

My first shadowban I think took me about 2 months to realise why I wasn't getting any replies... I had posted numerous help topics and just started to think that Reddit wasn't that useful anymore.

Then I realised I'd been shadowbanned. I didn't even know what it was.

I guess my IP or something got flagged because generally I was never able to make an account that lasted more than a few days without getting shadowbanned. At first it was okay even, some subreddits your account was working fine. Posting in the homelab subreddits or datahoarder etc. other subs like news, worldnews etc. my comments never got any replies.

I only ever used my acc mostly to ask questions. When I got my answer, I abandoned the thread. Didn't have time for drama and I generally didn't even reply to comments except to give more info on a request.

Month-on-month it got worse. Accounts which had no right to be flagged, got shadowbanned. One day I'd be posting fine, the next. Shadowbanned.

Then I'd make another account. Different device, different IP, even from a friend's computer in another country. I realised later they'd track you through everything. If you went to threads of a person who was shadowbanned, you also got it. Ultimately I spent ages trying to have even just one account with enough karma that I could post without captcha or 10 minute delay.

I wasted months and despite how much I read about it. I could never figure out how it worked. Reading about it also felt like a waste of my time.

When reddit finally shut down the public api and the apps I was using stopped working. I ditched it immediately. Gradually I also went back to stackoverflow. Even if it takes longer to get an answer, they are so much higher quality.

Looking back, I knew reddit sucked but boy was I mad when I thought of how much time I wasted. Just because I didn't spend 7 years of my life building a 75k karma account...

50 comments

Does anyone else just see a blank post?
- Lol that's so mean 😂
- This reminds me of my early Lemmy days when I asked if I had successfully commented and someone replied "No, I can't see your comment" and for a second my dumbass believed them
- I'm seeing some weird symbols, looks like a Lemmy bug.
  
  For a cat, everything on the screen looks like some weird symbols or bugs. That's normal.
- I don’t see anything
  
  hunter1
- Found John Cena.
- doesnt_look_like_anything_to_me.gif
- I'm on kbin and I can see the post
I mean… you sound like a kinda shitty user. You only ever ask for help, never contribute.

You don’t interact with people who have suggestions.

Did you even thank the people who eventually gave you the right answer?

Maybe you should stick to stack overflow.
- Genuine question: Does that deserve a shadow ban though?
  
  No, that’s a fair point, it doesn’t. But my usual view is that there’s always more to the story, and when they’re suggesting what they’re doing is totally fine but sounds kinda shitty, the things they aren’t telling us that they know are shitty are going to be really shitty.
- I don't think any of that constitutes a shitty user. Maybe just a note so active one. Maybe they're anxious about it, or still learning, or prioritize their own needs above others (which isn't something that should be inherently shamed)
  
  I don't thank every comment reply I get, am I a shitty user, or did I just make a decision where and when to spend my energy?
  
  It's not the sort of user I would actively engage in conversation with, sure, but it's far from a shitty one
  
  Prioritizing your own needs above all others should be shamed. To quote George Costanza, we live in a society. Being selfish isn’t a good thing.
  
  Literally only taking and never giving by his own admission isn’t something that should be supported.
  
  I didn’t say thank every comment - I said literally say thanks to the one that provided the correct answer, and maybe even an indication that it was the correct answer. Is every other user supposed to try every suggestion in a thread because OP was too lazy to say “thanks, that was it”?
  
  Posting a thread then not engaging in that thread is pretty weird behavior.
  
  Would I shadow ban him? No. But I could also see why someone might mistake that for a spam bot.
- Weird take. Maybe you should stick to Reddit with lame comments like that.
- Shame on you for not thanking to the person who answered..
- You sound like a shitty user
  
  Actually you do. It's not your business how some people use the internet mate. The threads I asked for help or advice, I left up so plenty of other people could find them and make use of them. I'd understand the flack if say, I deleted the threads immediately after I got my answer.
  
  Most of them were discussion about networking and hardware. Extremely high level stuff for work. Plenty of clients have benefited massively from the work I do. Don't under estimate the importance and positive impact of asking a good question. Finally, it's not like I forced anyone to answer me. If people want to spend their time helping others, for karma or just out of boredom or whatever. That's up to them. Trying to police other people's behaviour just makes you look like a prick. Not me.
  
  Honestly dude, you need to take that chip off your shoulder. It's your kind of instantaneously anti-social attitude that is one of the reasons why Reddit went totally down the drain mate. I came here to get away from attitude like yours. I think most of us did too.
  
  lol. Thanks for actually participating in this thread.
  
  But taking help from a community and presumably getting paid for it by your clients and never giving back does in fact make you look like a prick, mate.
reddit uses aggressive browser fingerprinting to track your alt accounts and ban. They also use some heuristics on top of that to determine similar individuals.
I'm still not familiar with what a shadowban is, but I had a ban I had gotten from r/entertainment at one point because I said I thought something that Lizzo had worn looked "trashy". That account was banned from r/entertainment. I was on another account scrolling through r/all and went to go comment on another random r/entertainment post and got a message about that account being tied to the banned account (I'm guess through IP or something). I've had other bans on different accounts with other subreddits, but never saw anything like that. Is that a shadowban?
- Shadow Bans are bans that are not announced or visible to the end user. None of the content they post is visible to other users on the site. So to the banned user, everything seems normal except they get not engagement with their posts.
Why do you need to ask for help so much? I was on reddit for 10 years, hundreds of thousands of karma, gilded etc, and only posted for help once.
- Such people obviously need help.
- Most of the questions I asked were pretty specific questions regarding network architecture, object orientated programming and so on. Most of the subreddits I posted in were also pretty obscure, so not the general /r/python or so on. There was about 50 or so of us mostly using the subreddit as a way to bounce ideas off each other. With not much time for idle/pointless chatter. Occasionally a few people would wander in and derail the topic but we'd usually ignore them.
  
  I also use public Slack and the occasional Discord but it was nice to use Reddit for the most longer architecture styled posts.
  
  I cannot fathom why anyone would use the site for 10 years and mass over 100k karma for literally any reason.
  
  I mean using the site was entertaining and I would leave comments? If you leave comments then people upvote it. It’s that simple. If you get a comment with 20k upvotes every year then that adds up to 200k. Due to the upvote algorithm I think there’s kinda an exponential curve past 10k but you get my point.

50 comments