18h ago

What the fuck is happening at Reddit?

So, I have a main account, where I'm the asshole editor with lots of opinions, and then two others for things a bit more spicy.

Both of those have been suspended for "suspicious activity" roughly 30 hours apart. For, you know, posting what I usually do.

The thing is, one of these -- I'm in the eight-year club there -- is associated with an email address that was terminated for lack of use, so I can't reset my password as prescribed.

The other was suspended yesterday every single time I posted anything, resulting in multiple password resets. I've not posted anything there today, but ... hey, look, it's suspended again.

Is Reddit just making a hard turn toward banning adult content? r/help seems to have a few other people in my boat wondering what the fuck is going on, but I can't find any sources suggesting a shift in policy. And I can't post in r/help on my main ... the submit button does nothing.

57 comments

It's a sign to layoff Reddit and be active on Lemmy.
- I started !gnucash@lemmy.ml a couple of days ago mainly to give me a little motivation to log on here daily and post something. Feels like I'm posting into the void at this point, but I did get three subscribers and a handful of upvotes 🤣. I'm still spending 90% of my time over at Reddit, but if we want alternatives we definitely need to participate more.
  
  3 subscribers in 3 days is fair. If you keep up posting regularly. You should continue to get more subs. Subscribed in case I find an interesting post
  
  Love gnucash and I use it all the time .... liked, subscribed to the community and I'll do my best to check in
  
  You know, I was considering reporting this for self-advertising, but I decided not to. It's a sad state of affairs that in addition to our core competencies, everyone's supposed to be good at the deception we call "marketing."
- I'm, uh, somewhat active on here, if you'd like to check out my profile.
  
  I know. It's obvious from your post. I made that comment in jest.

I asked for a recommendation for raw denim repair in my city subreddit. Removed and suspended. 15 year old account. ¯(ツ)_/¯
- Maybe "raw" is now a flagged word? Seriously, the fact that all manner of people are suddenly getting cut off is supremely suspicious.
  
  Lmao, if ‘raw’ is a naughty ban worth word at Reddit…. Why even use that garbage.
- In my country, we call jeans "rifle" (pronounced /rɪ'flɛ/). No, really. People get suspended from Facebook Marketplace all the time.
  
  Ah, the classic Chevy Nova problem with translation.

My guess: bot mods. Reddit employed some LLM-based bot "moderation" across the site, and those bans are false positives.

Reddits been turning to shit for years. Surprised people here still use it.
- So, if I have a question about my 24V off-grid PV system, you're suggesting I reach out to Beehaw instead of the millions of people on Reddit who can answer such questions? Or that any local community on Lemmy scales like my local subreddit?
  I spend most of my time here but rely on Reddit for other needs.
  
  It's just time
  I started out on reddit years ago and I even became a mod in a small niche community I grew from a dozen people to about 500 ..... it took about six years of regular engagement and contact with people. It was actual work in my free time but I enjoyed it.
  Same is happening here but lemmy has competition .... reddit was great years ago and no one needed alternatives so they stayed with it and no one could compete because there was no need for anyone to do anything.
  But now everything is in transition and it's going to take years to see where things go.
  I don't care, I'm staying here, I get my fill here, people are nice and it feels a bit like reddit ten years ago. Can't wait to see what this place looks like in ten years.
  
  millions of people
  Doubt. Most are probably bots now, let alone able to answer a question like that.

Reddit is corporate-controlled and moderators/administrators can run amok so easily. I was banned from /r/news years ago with no explanation...I appealed several times with no responses.
I founded /r/AskBibleScholars and have no issues there.
I believe that you already know the answers to your own questions.
- The speed at which these suspensions are being done suggests zero human input. And I know the difference between mod removal and a sitewide blanket suspension.
- I also had an account that made it to the frontpage once with a gif that I illustrated and animated myself. Shortly after, the account got shadow banned an I never learned why. Didn’t post anything illegal or even weird with it. Reddit moderation is such a shit show.

There was recently a project I was looking into. The only way to contact them was Reddit and Discord. Made a post on Reddit with a several years old account. It was instantly removed by Reddit admin with no explanation. It was not spicy in any way. Literally just asking a question about the project. Fuck me, I guess. Moved on to another project.
- No, no ... fuck u/spez.

It's probably time to leave reddit; even if you do manage to get your accounts back.
As a former mod of /r/Genderqueer I can say they've been terminally enshittifying for a while now; and have gone full AI rampage to eliminate human mods because they get accused of bias constantly. It doesn't help that some mods are legitimately bad too; some of the stories I could tell you from when I was in private mod-only meta-reddit communities would curl your toes. Even I wasn't without my biases; but I had the interest of my community at heart...which, as you know, nonbinary and genderqueer people are very vulnerable to abuse and harrassment.
It's time to step off the reddit mothership, and don't bother looking back unless you must. Tools like redlib can at least help you view reddit posts still, anonymously even if you can't comment.
I've been running my own personal Redlib instance locally using WSL2, Docker and Podman. It's been invaluable in ensuring I can still read things I need to read.

They ban you for all kinds of nonsense. I had a couple turned over on appeal. My latest ban was for 7 days for threatening violence because I said I hoped those guys who got caught fomenting unrest in Greenland were charged with something serious made an example. The comment was on topic, within the confines of the justice system and made no threat against anyone. Reddit has some really weird moderation. I just deleted the account. Fediverse is better for actual engagement anyway.
- This isn't a ban; it's a suspension that I can't recover from because my email address associated with that account no longer works.
  
  So effectively a ban.

Yeah, forget it, it is a bots place anyway... my account is maybe 15 or 16 years old, I emptied everything with a tool, I still have the account and lurk from time to time for some sub, but never upvote/post/comment since the API fiasco

Reddit's moderation bots have been extremely trigger happy for many years.
I got my main account, 10+ years club, suspended... appealed it, and got banned. Then every account I had ever logged into with the same IP, app, or browser as the banned one, at any moment in the past, got banned in cascade.
Once you get on Reddit's bad side, there's no going back. Suspensions add flags to Reddit's internal "shadow profile" of every account ever linked in any way. They all become more likely to get flagged and suspended, which gets them flagged even more in turn, until Reddit's ban-evasion system kicks in. Then, they're all toast.
To add insult to injury... once triggered, the bots go back checking your history, applying the most recent moderation guidelines retroactively. Over the following months, the account kept getting notifications about old comments being removed, followed by subreddit bans.
- I could write a lot here, but "that just sucks" carries enough weight that I don't need to go 40".

It's a broken shithole of a website, didn't you get the memo?

57 comments