[kkoncevicius]

You helped creating a bot that punishes users for posting certain words. You used those same words in your message and got a treatment not unlike the one you were helping to automate.

Maybe there is a lesson here somewhere.

[perihelions]

This is uncharitable; one merely filters isolated comments, the other temporarily* bans humans from an entire social media site.

If you click through to their offending thread, the AutoMod profile they built has a field value of "action: report". As I understand it, that means it does nothing but forward the flagged comment to a human moderator for review. As benign and judicious a use of automation as you can get.

*edit: s/permanently/temporarily/ (sorry!)

[soneil]

I'm assuming they were showing an example of a regex that will match a list of terms, and the sheer quantity of terms (rather than the initial presence of) weighted its score heavily.

It's a little unfortunate, but 3 days isn't terrible, and it's a good lesson in false positives.

[rossvor]

>This is uncharitable: one merely filters isolated comments, the other permanently bans humans from an entire social media site.

For three days, not permanently:

>"You’ve been banned from Reddit for three days"

[djbebs]

They are both censoring

[jasonhansel]

Looks like OP ran into a version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

[FaviFake]

That was a fun rabbit hole! Thank you!

[FaviFake]

> You helped creating a bot that punishes users for posting certain words

No, I did not. The bot would not punish the user in any way, it would simply hide the comment from other users without even informing the OP.

I'm not sure if you're understanding the situation, the bot would remove comments containing the n-word, r-word and other very insulting slurs

[1983054104]

It's either a side effect and you accept it peacefully, or you're in denial and don't want to accept that the automatic moderation on Reddit is awful. Which one do you choose?

[FaviFake]

This wasn't caused by the automatic moderation of Reddit, the official Reddit Help Center says that "site-wide suspensions can only be applied to accounts by employees of Reddit and are done so after review of the actions and the context in which it took place". Maybe a bot flagged my comment, but a human had to review it.

[ericfrazier]

Totally, because every company policy is true.

[nextweek2]

Shadowbanning is the word you are not using for some reason.

Punishment without awareness is not going to change behaviour. You've created a system that doesn't address the root cause, so you're creating a game of whack-a-mole for yourself.

[FaviFake]

Shadowbanning is the word I am not using because it's the wrong word. As I said, the bot would not punish the user in any way, it would simply hide the comment from other users.

Why do you think people should be free to call other users ni***r or re***d?

[TMWNN]

>No, I did not. The bot would not punish the user in any way, it would simply hide the comment from other users without even informing the OP.

This is shadowbanning, and is a very bad feature of Reddit. If someone's comment or post is removed, that person ought to a) be notified or, at least, b) get the chance to see for himself that it has been removed. Fooling the poster into thinking that all is well is terrible from both UI/UX and general human being perspectives.

>I'm not sure if you're understanding the situation, the bot would remove comments containing the n-word, r-word and other very insulting slurs

Thinking that shadowbanning is a good thing is really retarded.

[nousermane]

Keyword-based moderation has some pretty bad failure modes, yeah. False-positives from context, false-positives from different meaning of the same word...

But what alternatives are here? "Report" button, and human reviewing each and every instance of it? We've all heard horror stories about fb moderators burning out and getting PTSD from this kind of work.

[Levitz]

I'd say in a site like Reddit where every comment is voted on to change its visibility to begin with, there is no need whatsoever for such a tool.

The amount of overmoderation on the site is ridiculous. You have the site admins, then the subreddit mods, then the moderation by the users themselves, then the automatic stuff. You can still block users and filter subjects.

[freemint]

Maybe even exactly the treatment. It could be the reddit runs automoderator on DMs to flag people. It would be ironic if by fixing an automoderator config and chatting about that in Reddit DMs this code gets used on oneself.

[jareklupinski]

"Don't build systems you wouldn't want to be a victim of."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazen_bull

[Ekaros]

Sounds like system is working as designed.