If you ask investors, Reddit is doing great. Its current market cap sits at nearly $22 billion, three times what it debuted at during its March 2024 IPO. Once a little-known successor to Fark and Digg, and a great place to engage in down-to-earth communication and meet interesting people, it’s now one of the most well-known social (or anti-social) media platforms in the world.
From a user perspective, though, the site is less friendly than ever. The latest change — made with zero fanfare, as usual — now allows complete strangers to reduce your account’s functionality for any reason they see fit. Now, if someone blocks you, you’re no longer able to edit, delete, or even view your own comments, with exactly zero recourse for you, the person who originally posted them.
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Reddit’s block function has prevented users from further participating in comment chains for quite some time, which already opened up the potential for abusing control over certain discussions. The latest update to blocking not only stops a user’s ability to comment further, it makes it look like they never commented at all — but only to the blocked user. Others can still see and reply to the original comment, despite its invisibility to the apparent owner.
While Reddit never announced the change, it’s seemingly been in place for some users — but not all — for varying lengths of time. Mentions of the change can be found as far back as June 2024, but got little widespread attention. Now, according to Android Police’s and others’ experience, the update appears to be rolling out even more widely.
so reddit just added shadow-banning to its arsenal of tools that hurt users and do absolutely nothing for moderators.
just in case anyone was wondering why i’m here now…
I’m here because I was perma-banned for no reason 🤔 then the whole ban evasion policy. Forget that site
Did they actually tell you you were banned, or did they just give you cryptic error messages and wait for you to figure it out?
It looked like an auto mod message that I was permanently banned for no reason and to go to the help page to find out more. Of course that was useless. I tried to appeal. They said no. I said f#@k spez and left.
To be honest I’ve had more meaningful engagement in this thread then in 8 years with that site.
digg is gonna relaunch soon and kill it. it’ll become like facebook. pure poetic justice. i was on reddit back in 2008. it isn’t even fair now to say it’s just a shell of what it used to be. btw old.lemmy.world is a thing i like. and it (kinda) works with RES, too!
Are they seriously relaunching digg??? lol that’s funny. They relaunched my space and a bunch of zoomers showed up iirc. Maybe what’s old is new again. Next they should do geocities.
Neocities.org is basically geocities lol
I just signed up to the mailing list. Reddit has become a cesspool of idiots and power tripping mods.
i think they want to be 9gag. remember that site? me neither.
Nah they just want to get those sweet sweet clicks from Cheezberger… How does a site survive by just cutting and pasting another site???
Oh that’s just all of the internet now.
Funnyjunk still going? i used to be a funnyjunker and 9gag hater
i live in a small developing country and if i comment or post anything at all my account will be banned instantly.
appealing does nothing. it’s just an empty hole you can send messages into.
Wow that’s crazy. So is your entire country region IP blocked?
we basically have one state-owned service provider which leases out infrastructure to the smaller service providers. I think if you started to blacklist problematic traffic by ASN you would include huge swaths of residential IPs, cellphones, everything. I don’t know what the pattern is that they are using to blacklist.
I had the same thing. I received a temp ban then I got several emails saying multiple accounts were permabanned
Yeah it’s a ridiculous auto ban system. I had a couple of accounts that were ~8 years old? All banned. Made a new account with burner email and VPN. Banned.
I’m glad I’ve been using ReVanced and patched Reddit app for free premium. Otherwise it’s absolutely garbage the app and the site.
It did pop me back on to Lemmy.
There seems to be no consistency with perm bans. Burner email and VPN banned - maybe the browser you used had a reddit kill cookie in it.
I’m going to mainly use lemmy now, but a reddit account is still useful. I like my local city subreddit.
My plan is to go to a public library to make an account and then slowly use it every time I go to the library.
Then use a browser that blocks fingerprinting and use a VPN. If that fails I’ll give up.
They have been shadow banning since unidan days, it’s just last month alone their shadow banning went out of control. Someone posted a statiscal data graph of the week in a different forum I was banned the shadowbanning was up like 500%, also include permabans. It seems reddit has been relying shadow banning so people will find it harder to evade them. Also their using AI to do most of not all of their banning. They were able to measure it because they had hundred or thousands of acc
I made a throwaway a few weeks ago and posted a comment promoting lemmy-- shadowbanned immediately