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by pc86 1583 days ago
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.
2 comments
sokoloff 1583 days ago
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”
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samstave 1583 days ago
This is exactly what they are doing.
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pc86 1583 days ago
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.
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samstave 1583 days ago
The effort is more insidious - and I suspect its from China's investment into Reddit; here is my theory:

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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.

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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.

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