[dablweb]

You might be able to go to reveddit.com and run your profile through it?

It shows banned and shadow-banned content.

Subreddits are banning people for simply participating in blacklisted topics / subreddits.

Reddit's censorship has gotten so bad I think it's a real societal risk considering how prevalent it is.

[pc86]

I think this is part of the issue. Subreddits ban people who have never participated in that sub, simply for having even a single old comment on some sub they decide is now "bad." This seems to me like something you'd want to prevent at the site level, but whatever. Where this gets tricky though is Reddit's on-the-surface-reasonable rule that if you use multiple accounts to evade a ban, even a temporary sub-level ban as opposed to a site ban, you can get banned from the site altogether. There absolutely exists a possibility that someone uses multiple accounts to access different types of content (one for tech, one for memes, one for porn), one of these accounts gets banned by a sub they've never visited, and now they trip some Reddit algorithm for evading that ban they may not even know about.

All that being said, implying that Reddit carries any sort of "societal risk" is a ridiculous statement.

[sokoloff]

Exactly. Verbally ask 1000 randomly picked English speakers to “spell Reddit” and I’ll wager that well over 900 of them answer something like “R-E-A-D I-T”

[samstave]

This is exactly what they are doing.

[pc86]

Yes, I know. I was describing what they are doing and how that can end up with someone being banned seemingly randomly and without warning.

[samstave]

The effort is more insidious - and I suspect its from China's investment into Reddit; here is my theory:

---

You can only havea working social credit system and survellience system online if you can collapse everyone down to a single UID of whatever (in this case usernmaes)

So if you have multiple accounts, and they can corerolate the multi-accounts to a single UID (person)

And you can use billions of bots and computational resources to track to whom a comment bleongs (the human) -- you have all that much more control and leverage over controlling that commentary coming from that human.

---

I think they are ensuring they have laser connection to the previously anon reddit accounts such that they have a sniper rifle on any human that steps out of bounds.

[sithadmin]

Subreddit-level censorship is a different issue than global bans. Subreddit bans don't have any bearing on global site bans, and subreddit moderators can't shadow ban content (only remove, lock, add flair, or mark as spam for the global spam filter). If OP is globally banned, they've either run afoul of the global spam filter (possible to trip if enough mods mark your submissions as spam, but as a mod that has collaborated with mods from other subs to deal with corporate astroturfers - the threshold to get a ban this was seems pretty high if there's a human generating posts rather than a bot) or some other global abuse detection system.

[josephcsible]

> Subreddit bans don't have any bearing on global site bans

Yes they do. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30322984 explains how.

[StellarTabi]

The abuse detection system that user is talking about does not kick in for 3 users on a shared IP who seeming accidentally participated in a subreddit another account was banned for. You would need much larger numbers or a moderator to formally acuse you of ban evasion to the admins.

[josephcsible]

The other comments in this thread make it sound like it absolutely does kick in in cases like that, and that no formal accusation of ban evasion is required for it to ban you.

[StellarTabi]

You just believe them with no evidence? Ban evasion suspensions say "ban evasion". They obviously triggered an unrelated system.

[StellarTabi]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30344379

[sdoering]

> Reddit's censorship has gotten so bad I think it's a real societal risk considering how prevalent it is.

How is reddit anyhow relevant to society. And how would a corporation cleaning/sterilizing an online forum be a societal risk. Is society that fragile?

And how can it be censorship? At least in my jurisdiction protection against censorship and free speech laws regulate the state's behavior, not private people or corporations. Not sure how this is in the US, though.

I just don't understand why people calling the behavior of private entities censorship.

But as said, I very likely are missing something fundamental.

[dablweb]

Sites like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter can very easily become a political tool for manufacturing artificial consensus.

A large portion of the population do not go to specific news sites directly but instead rely on a link aggregator, Reddit being the most popular in the world (I believe).

If a political entity were to gain significant control of the censorship mechanisms, you would have a massive societal risk IMO. I have been following the censorship problem on Reddit for a while now and I think this has now become the case.

I can't say which entities are operating here, but it seems resoundingly clear something very inorganic is happening in Reddit's systems.