[RhodesianHunter]

Reddit has seemed rudderless for a long time.

Their ads platform is damned near useless compared to their competitors. It's a wonder they have any revenue at all.

Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.

[flutas]

> Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.

I reported someone in the news sub. Paraphrasing but apparently reporting someone for saying "they should all burn to death" (talking about govt officials) 1: isn't ban worthy, and 2: is "abuse of the report button" and led to me getting a 3 day ban.

I'm out.

[nifoc]

I used to have a (long) list of posts/comments that they refused to remove after I reported them. Most of these were (at least to me) _very_ obvious cases of being against the TOS (and the law).

I messaged this list to the admins. I emailed it to their support team. Never got a reply. Not even support answered my email.

I truly believe they just don't care.

[pierat]

Whereas I had 3 accounts permanently suspended for calling someone an idiot on /r/idiotsincars for "harassing speech". I have other accounts, but they took out 1 old account and a squatted account. Like, really? For using the term "idiot" on a subreddit with that very word?

I have here, Masto, and a few other places that at least have mostly sane policies. All I know is that reddit is definitely on the decline. And this whole API debacle is going to be their own Digg V4 moment.

[waboremo]

There is no sane middle ground on most of reddit. There are subs where you'll get reprimanded far quicker for "annoying mods" by bothering to report anything, and then there are the other subs that are so uptight and intense that your comments can only be fluff anything else gets slapped down for one of the vague rules it has. Good luck debating subreddit mods for their vague rules, you'll just annoy them and admins do not care in the slightest to resolve these petty things.

They've created systems that makes it obnoxious for everyone involved.

Tiny subs excluded, but at that point the form of reddit just doesn't suit smaller communities well. The way reddit sorts best, new, top, plus a bunch of obnoxious automod filters keeps smaller communities (even if "small" in this sense is 50000 followers) feeling absolutely dead.

[tayo42]

Lol I had the sane thing happen, then when I asked the mods what happened in got reported to the admins for harrasment. There's no way tho discuss, just a brick wall. Wild been on that site an embarrassingly long time without issue

[delfinom]

I got permabanned for having an alt account with auto generated name...that contained 88 in it because "hate group symbolsim".

Literally a name reddit generated for me and I paid no mind to it.

Fun fact, reddit uses browser fingerprinting to ban all your accounts afterwards. Also fun fact, there is a way to get innocent users banned as a result too.

[RobotToaster]

I feel sorry for anyone born in 88

[bongobingo1]

I reported a bot for spreading links to malware.

I got banned for false reporting.

Clicking the link through to the reported comment showed ... a deleted comment from a deleted account.

Lesson learned!

[fooey]

Yeah, reporting abuse on reddit is a minefield

The lesson I learned is not to report anything because trying to be helpful is not worth the risk of blowback

[sorenjan]

You can't report to the moderators, they're just anonymous users that for some reason wants to work for free for Reddit. Often times they have their own agendas, I've used third party sites to show deleted comments that makes it clear some mods support calls for violence against certain groups, depending on which subreddit it is.

I've reported threats of violence similar to what you describes over at https://www.reddit.com/report and they removed it after a day or two, even comments that were highly upvoted.

[i_am_a_peasant]

I've gotten permabanned for calling mods idiots. shrugs

[hirvi74]

I got banned from a sports related subreddit for spreading misinformation by saying, "Helmets do not and cannot prevent concussions." The mod's justification was, "That is the entire point of helmets."

Perhaps the mod has taken too many to the ol'noggin.

[tick_tock_tick]

I mean for Reddit that is "abuse of the report button". It's a very tame comment compared to a lot of what's posted and considered acceptable. What did you expect or think should have been the outcome of reporting that?

[granshaw]

Far from it. They have great recent user growth and everybody is appending “Reddit” to the end of their google searches in the quest for non-gamed search results

[asdff]

It's not a sustainable position though. Advertisers aren't idiots, the market will adjust as it makes sense to adjust. You already have bot accounts flooding certain keywords on reddit with product placement. If everyone ends up on reddit, that's where the SEO spam crap you see today will follow them. If everyones on twitter, it goes there. If everyone goes to mastodon, so be it, there be the bots. It almost doesn't matter what the service is exactly, once it hits a critical mass it gets enshittified just because of the business opportunity it presents.

[RhodesianHunter]

I didn't say anything about user growth. I said their ads platform is trash, which is evident to anyone who has attempted to use it.

[granshaw]

Fair enough. I did notice the distinction when rereading your comment

[vGPU]

Primarily because google has become completely useless. I get more accurate search results with Yandex, Brave, and bing, in that order. That’s how bad it is. And I hate Yandex. They’re always making me do captcha challenges.

[martin8412]

A lot of subreddits blanket ban you if you've posted in other subreddits that the mods don't like.

[RhodesianHunter]

Reddit Admin itself will blanket ban accounts in entire sub-threads with no recourse or explanation.

Participate in a well informed debate on monetary policy, but some idiot downthread went on an anti-semitic rant?

Your account will be banned. Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. You will receive a link in a message to the message you wrote for which you were banned, but since it was deleted it will be a worthless link. You will receive a link to a form to appeal your ban, which goes straight to dev/null.

[delfinom]

>Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts.

Worse, they use browser fingerprinting AND IP.

[waboremo]

Yeah they track quite a lot of bits of data for users. It's the very reason why most new users are found bemoaning how annoying it is to start posting on reddit.

It's your email, social account, ip/location, browser fingerprint info, search terms, information from their partners (ad networks, apps) and cookies, subs you visit, what you upvote/downvote/save/report, which page on reddit you're coming from/going to, etc. They use these to then determine blocks/shadowbans/counteract your votes and so on.

Has this resulted in a substantial quality increase on reddit? Oh absolutely not, you'll get chatgpt bots, people harassing you, completely unrelated comments, report abuse, etc. but they'll never give up that much data.

[bri3d]

This is has always been an interesting aspect of Reddit.

On the one hand, this is fine: Reddit is supposed to be a collection of independently moderated sub-communities with their own rules and administration. On the other hand, you have a unified identity and content history across those communities, so it's a lot easier for one community to take action based on your history in another, which is a strange dynamic.

I actually think Facebook Groups are onto something with the way post history and profiles work: each Facebook Group a user posts in creates a separate sub-profile for that user which is specific to the Group. Users in that Group can see a user's post history in that Group, and that user's "main" profile depending on their privacy settings, but a user can't walk "across" to see a user's post history in other Groups unless they search from that other Group.

I feel like per-subreddit post histories along with a global user profile would help move Reddit more towards the "sub-community" vision if that's the direction they want to go.

The issues Reddit have are:

* Cross-stalking, as discussed above.

* Content discovery. This is the same problem every user-generated content platform has. What sub-communities get surfaced on the logged-out front page? Cross-pollinated to existing users? Every type of content will be objectionable to someone, so deciding what to show is always going to be a lightning-rod issue with advertiser dollars at stake.

* Global moderation. What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of Reddit? What happens when that user is completely banned (do all of their old posts disappear?) Should large-scale content moderation like spam be handled at a platform or a community level?

[barking_biscuit]

> What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of Reddit?

explicit deepfakes

[SlimyHog]

I got banned from some subreddit that I've never visited for making fun of someone in /r/conservative, just because I posted there.

[delecti]

Not to victim-blame, but which subreddits? I pop into new subreddits from time to time, and I don't know that I've ever been banned from a subreddit in my accounts 14+ year history. I'm also less sympathetic if the bans were because you posted somewhere like the_donald (I can't think of a more timely controversial sub) vs somewhere innocuous like r/gaming or r/technology.

[JPws_Prntr_Fngr]

Ikr. I feel like there's lots of problematic folks? doing a lot of heckin wrongthink out there in the current climate? and its making me feel like so unsafe?

[delecti]

A moderator's job is to keep their subreddit a functioning community. It seems entirely reasonable to me that they might notice a pattern and cast a wide net to save themselves a lot of hassle.

[numpad0]

None of those social media are rudderless, just that, money’s circulating in hyperspace and the lower dimension slice of those just has to be mostly consistent on time axis. We are looking at a cross section at ballast deck of a ship.