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Tell HN: Reddit accounts cancellation/suspension caused by VPN usage
332 points by netfortius on Feb 15, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 245 comments
Posted earlier about an account of mine having been suspended with no apparent reason (at least of posting rules breaking), then other two which I had in the past, for testing. As I was/am traveling at present, I used VPN in a few places, and I tested the theory of this being the source: created a new account yesterday, used it fine with no posting or submissions, then used it again today with two different VPN exit points, and sure enough: "Your account has been permanently suspended from Reddit."

If the Redit bozos do not comprehend the need for VPN, if *content* provided is of not harmful in any way, then I sure wish them good luck in keeping this service going ...

Edit: PIA as VPN, with three major exit points, used interchangeably: France (local when there, public place), UK (local when there, public place) and US (employer specific requirement). Original account was 10K+ submissions and almost same for comments, with never close to questionable content - got suspended during my travel, with no apparent (at time) cause. Two older/test accounts I dug up in the immediate aftermath of first closed, with no submissions, got also suspended within the span of a few days of use (reading/access only). One "control" test account got banned today, after having been opened yesterday - this purposely used while "flipping" between VPN exit points. HTH



It's how the Reddit spam filter works. Once your account is flagged as spam by the system, it would be global shadowbanned automacially. At this stage, your account is essentially finished, it's basically impossible to talk to someone and get your account unblocked. Eventually the account would be deleted, all the post you've ever made would also be gone in the worst-case scenario, just like my previous account.

My Reddit account was banned because I was posting from Tor. I've registered successfully via Tor and was able to use it without any problems for 6 months or so. One day, I was suddenly shadowbanned. I guess it was because the exit node I happened to be using that day was on a "kill on sight" spam blocklist.

I always posted in good faith and never got into any flamewar, a few links I shared were well-received by the subs.

Recently it almost happened again with my current account, but this time I was not global shadowbanned and it seemed to be just a local spam filter (many subreddits have their own anti-spam policies and auto-moderation queues). I sent a message to the Subreddit admin and I was able to post again. But after this incident I've completely stopped accessing my Reddit account via Tor.


> At this stage, your account is essentially finished, it's basically impossible to talk to someone and get your account unblocked.

Seems like they're following Google's strategy. Presumably, ad profit from each individual user is low enough that it's cheaper to accept false positives in their anti-abuse mechanism than it is to provide a functioning appeal process. Maybe if the user manages to go viral on Twitter or HN with their story they could get it reversed. Going viral with stories of false-positive bans is the primary way to restore a Google account, it probably works for Reddit too. Normal people have to suck eggs.

At least losing a Reddit account is less life-disrupting for most people than losing their Google account.


It's the strategy of all the major social players.

Several months ago I followed a new cardistry (look it up) personality on Instagram. I scrolled through and "liked" one or two dozen of their performance clips, out of the hundreds that they've posted. My Instagram account was blocked, for "manipulation" or some verbiage like that. Basically, the algorithm thought that I was a bot hired to inflate that person's numbers.

The Instagram appeals process is to email them a selfie, holding a piece of paper with the current date and something else written on it. I did this, but never got any kind of response. My Instagram account that I had for 5-10 years is just gone.

Turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I created a new account attached to the same phone and email address (somehow THIS isn't detected as abuse?). But I just lost interest in the app, and life seems to be better now for having done so. If Reddit ever nukes me, then it would be the kick in the ass that I need to stop wasting time on that toxic site as well.


>The Instagram appeals process is to email them a selfie, holding a piece of paper with the current date and something else written on it.

Do they also ask you to put a shoe on your head?


No … Instagram is a .com domain so you don’t need to head-shoe (at least, not in the US …)


wait... does any domain registrar ask that user's prove themselves with the shoe on head method?


I believe it's just a reference to 4chan, where asking someone to post a shoe-on-head for verification was a meme, being a .org domain.


Delete your email address from your profile. That got my ten year account banned.


Sounds like something someone who's going to sell their account would do.


"Using encryption, sounds like something a criminal would do." Yes, that is what this sounds like.

iI have another idea why Reddit does not like VPN. They cannot monetize your data as easily.


I was answering the unasked question of why Reddit would care if someone removed the email address associated with their account.


Using a proxy or VPN also sounds like things a spammer would do, and this is also why Reddit would care and autoban these accounts. But the point of this thread is that, these anti-spam mechanisms always cause collateral damages (like some of us in this thread) and the experience can get really frustrating when that happens.


I deleted it after verification because I wanted to remain anon. Thirteen years ago.


I recently learned about the kik strategy for handling child porn via Darknet Diaries[1]. If you can't actually tell anyone at kik about child porn, kik can't know about it and if nobody at kik knows about it then they're apparently not required to do anything about it.

[1] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/


This is astonishingly illegal.

What needs to happen is for someone who has a report to make to contact the state attorney general and say "because this company is profiting from child pornography with no reporting mechanism, they have lost their safe harbor protection, and are complicit."

Companies like this need to be taught at the metaphorical end of a rifle.


Yeah, I think that's basically what the FBI agent they interviewed said. There's nothing for him to do and it would be entirely up to prosecutors to do anything. Part of the wrench is that kik can show that they do some sort of things that possibly qualify as "moderation" under the law. Things like auto-banning bots. So in court has apparently successfully kik has made the claim that they do moderate based on things like this so that checks the safe harbor requirement apparently.

But... all the people they claim to have on their "Safety Board" haven't worked for kik for years and all efforts to contact anyone on twitter or anywhere fail. Even DMCA takedowns of revenge porn were being ignored now. It seems to be a dead platform that nevertheless gets app updates uploaded so something is still going on somewhere by someone.

Basically the only option they were discussing was getting the app removed from Google and Apple stores and they compared the situation to Parler where the app was pulled for failing to moderate. And yet kik seems to get a pass somehow. It's a very disturbing and frustrating episode.


This would be easy to prosecute, assuming the allegations are true. They don’t have a working DMCA contact, so they lose safe harbor. They could have the lawyer testify that her client’s underage nudes and related dmca takedowns were never removed, despite court order to take them down. That’s obviously not a special case, so they could spot check a few dozen prior cases, and show non-compliance for those too.

Of course, doing that would cut off a stream of easy pedophile convictions. The prosecutor’s office might like the status quo. It certainly helps increase their metrics.


one mild problem is that kik is from canada

the fbi's real world response would be "let us introduce you to some canadian officers, and we're going to help, but it's actually up to them"

still, as the former owner of an ISP, i've had to do this, and they're actually quite professional and reasonable about it


Makes you wonder if it's deliberately kept up to allow easy transmission of that kind of material... giving CSAM traffickers ample rope to hang themselves, as it were.


Is Google banning accounts just for vpn usage?


I don't know about VPNs specifically, but stories of Google handing out automated, unappealable permabans are rampant. There's one on the front page of HN right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30345201

Entirely possible that user will get their account back since they won the social media lottery, but for every viral story there are god knows how many people out there who lost all their email/photos/etc. because of some inscrutable machine's mistake.


why wouldn't they? modern browsers constantly snitch on all sorts of things, including IP addresses (I say 'snitch' because so few people outside the industry are aware of even this basic fact/practice), so it's not unlikely they would have some automated banning tool. and the banned google accounts we hear about when some knowledge worker on here goes viral have fallen victim to those tools/systems.


Shadow banning is such a disgusting practice. It's basically sweeping the "problem" under the rug, whilst leaving the "problem" completely in the dark with regards to what it was they did wrong.

It's lazy, it's abusive, and it should be illegal.

Edit: to clarify, I'm totally fine with this tool being employed to combat spam(bots). Just not against normal posters/contributors.


> It's lazy, it's abusive, and it should be illegal.

I really dislike "it should be illegal" for things like this. It's itself a lazy solution against a hard problem. It seems to often be used as shorthand for "I don't like this and I want it to stop". But making things illegal isn't a magic "make it stop" button. (Hello, War On Drugs, War On Terror, War On Poverty, etc).

If you want to involve the Government in solving your problem, you now must also account for:

* What is the exact text of a law against this that could actually make it through any particular Congressional body?

* How will possible violations of this law be reported and investigated?

* How will that law be misused by malicious prosecutors and investigators to hassle and punish anybody they don't like?

* How will all of the actors involved actually change their behavior in ways that you didn't expect in order to avoid being targeted for either well-intentioned or malicious prosecution for possible violation of these new laws?

Example: Say I run a pseudonymous social media site resembling Reddit, and shadowbanning is the only thing keeping it from being a hopeless pit of spam right now. If I can't shadowban anymore, maybe my only solution is to require hard proof of identity for all users at least as strict as the KYC your banks use. Now everything you ever post is hard-linked to your identity. Even if not publicly shown normally, it's vulnerable to hacks, malicious employees, or Government requests. That would obviously benefit the Government, so there's a little incentive for them to implement and enforce any such law in such a way that sites are effectively forced to do this. Whoops, we just made the problem worse.


I don't disagree with you, let's play devils advocate: To be fair to the companies, the amount of work to fight off bots and bad accounts is quite complicated, costly (both financially, quality of site, reputation wise) and similar to all kinds of frauds gets increasingly more challenging as the fraudsters improve their game. Add in managing the people who are purposely incendiary and not bots.

The amount of people getting caught up in the filter is likely quite small. Should they have a better system to get accounts re-activated? Probably - would make sense that they cast a wide net and then have a relatively easy way out for real individuals who can prove identify. Is that perfect? Heck no.


    > The amount of people getting caught up in the filter is likely quite small.
I don't believe that this is the case, though. Subreddit mods often seem to use it against counter-narrative type of posts - a single post could get you shaddow-banned for life on 50 subreddits that all happen to be under that mod's control. Happens often enough.

As I mentioned I'm fine with this tool being used against spam.


Off the top of my head, it seems self-evident that we can't assess the effectiveness of the filters without actual data. You may hear hundreds of complaints of 'false positives', but bots rarely complain, so those hundreds of false positives may be the collateral damage from blocking either a single bot or hundreds of millions of bots.

Although I'm not normally massively against using anecdotal data for hypothesis building, in this case, it seems as though without actual data, it'd be silly to comment further.


isn't shadow-banning only something reddit admins can do, not subreddit moderators?


Subreddit mods can do it also, with a little help from the automoderator bot I believe.


ah, now I found the right thing, they set automoderator to hide every post automatically, thus getting the same result.


It should not be illegal to ban someone from a website under any circumstances.


I think he means the practice of shadow banning. Not that I agree there either, but I agree that it is abusive.


What if they just started shadow banning African Americans? Would that be illegal? This is a serious qeustion. If we have no idea on who they are shadow banning how can we tell if they are not being discriminatory?


The practice of excluding by race is not actually illegal.

Think about fraternities. Think about ethnic centers.

People have an expectation that because it's immoral in the obvious case, it's illegal.

It's actually not. Nothing stops anyone from making a group for, say, Chinese American newspaper reporters, or Lebanese car mechanics.

What's actually illegal is turning people down for jobs or housing over race.

The law would only be interested if the website was the only way to get to protected topics like a job board


It's also illegal in the U.S. to turn away customers because of their race. That's more relevant than private club membership.


I'm not talking about regular bans, I'm talking about shadow banning.

In case you're not familiar with the concept: it entails "muting" an account without ever notifying said account of that fact. They can still post, comment, vote, and everything else, but no one will see this content.


Sorry, I should have worded that a little more clearly, but my statement applies to shadow banning as well. In my view, it is totally unreasonable to make arbitrary software behavior like shadow banning illegal.


I think dang might disagree with you there.

Also "illegal" is a little over the top. Are we talking misdemeanor or felony, here?


I totally get it when it's used solely to combat spam(bots), but, at least on Reddit, this tool's use has become too widespread and hits too many normal community contributors.

Edit: I'd just like it to be not allowed by law to hopefully curtail its use. I don't really care about what the repercussions of doing it anyway might look like.


Who cares what dang thinks. He’s petty like the Reddit mods are.


Its a great tool to combat nefarious personae (both bots and humans). Its like a tarpit for smtpd/sshd (spamd on OpenBSD). Reddit is a free service to use, so it stands within reason their support dept. (which you'd contact concerning (shadow)bans) is sub-par. For paid subscribers, I would want my money (and time) back.


    > which you'd contact concerning (shadow)bans
Reddit support does not intervene in disputes involving moderation or moderators - unless it's the subject of some virtual riot.

Shadowbanning seems mostly used to silence slightly different opinions, and that's what I have a problem with.


>whilst leaving the "problem" completely in the dark with regards to what it was they did wrong.

This is the original intent. As far as I understood shadowbanning was for nefarious actors such as spambots, manual spammers, etc so they'd keep going without automatically creating new accounts.


HN does the same. I messaged Dang about it and he apologized and un-shadowbanned me.

Apparently it was because I had two accounts made from the same IP. On on my laptop and one from my mobile phone.


Looks like you were recently banned, was that what you were referring to, or something different?

I noticed because your comment showed dead.


Shadowbans are different from permanent bans or suspensions the OP has gotten. You at least you know you are banned when you're permabanned/suspended. Reddit claimed at one large incident of outrage over shadowbans that shadowbans were only intended for bots and that no actual humans should ever be shadowbanned and that they would rectify it after messaging admin. My account randomly got shadowbanned a few months ago and I got crickets via support/admin. They really don't give a shit and it shows in the quality of the content and comments.


If your account gets shadow banned and you don't notice does it really matter? You are still getting something out or you wouldn't keep posting. Sometimes just posting to yourself is enough.

Say you do notice, you just start a new account for free. Bonus points for moving identities and breaking existing tracking history.

Getting banned can be a win/win


>basically impossible to talk to someone and get your account unblocked

Not sure it would even matter. I once submitted a breaking news story to /r/news and it was autodeleted by their bot. I messaged a mod asking why it was deleted since it was in fact news and was not a duplicate and their response was to tell me I'm stupid and to permaban me from the sub.


These are completely different issues. I was talking about a network-wide ban performed automatically by Reddit server-side anti-spam mechanisms, it's not about the internal policies or moderations (whether auto or manual) of a specific subreddit.


I've had this happen. The top post on /r/worldnews was an Israeli "attack on Gaza", with no mention of the rocket attack on Israel an hour prior. I posted a link to a site - an English-language Arabic news site, mind you - that stated that the Israeli "attack on Gaza" was a precision strike against the military target that fired rockets at Israel earlier in the day.

My submission was deleted, my account was banned from the sub.


>Once your account is flagged as spam by the system, it would be global shadowbanned automacially. At this stage, your account is essentially finished, it's basically impossible to talk to someone and get your account unblocked.

FWIW I had that happen to me a year or two ago and was able to get the ban overturned.


Interesting. How did you do that? Does the "Contact US" form really work?


https://www.reddit.com/appeals


Doesn’t reflect my experience. Created new reddit account once and noticed its content was getting 0 engagement anywhere, ever. Contacted support, and in two weeks or so, they replied apologising because the account “mistakenly tripped their spam filters”. Account is now unshadowbanned


> Recently it almost happened again with my current account

(Reddit allows the creation of multiple usernames using the same email address,) were your two different accounts that were (1) permanently banned and (2) temporarily banned using the same email address?


> Reddit allows the creation of multiple usernames using the same email address

Interesting, didn't know that. But the E-mail addresses are different.

My previous account was initially shadowbanned without notice (all posts auto-filtered, and if I remember it correctly, it was a global shadowban on all subreddits) so I had stopping using that account. Weeks later I checked again and it became permanently banned explicitly. The system said,

> Your account has been permanently suspended for breaking the rules. This account has been permanently closed. To continue using Reddit, please log out and create a new account (the username [REDACTED] cannot be reused). This is an automated message; responses will not be received by Reddit admins.

My current account in question was temporarily shadowbanned. I was able to post in a subreddit without problems, and one day I was suddenly shadowbanned. But it was not a global one because I was able to post in another subreddit, so I suspect it was just an Auto-Moderation filter. After I sent a message to the mod of that subreddit (not Reddit admins) and stopped logging in via Tor, the account went back to normal again. But I never actually received a reply from the mod, I'm not sure how exactly I got unbanned - automatically due to a "good" IP, or manually by a mod.


Just a PSA: Email is entirely optional. You can create multiple accounts without email.


I had a ten year old account that was banned for not having an email address. There were various warnings asking me to supply the email address. I refused and the account was deleted. No issues other than this.


Take your E-mail address seriously. After a security incident, Reddit sysadmins may force an E-mail verification and password reset. I lost my first Reddit account (Yes, I lost two Reddit accounts) because of that - the E-mail address was gone since a long time ago but I didn't bother to change that, so I couldn't complete the verification.


> impossible to talk to someone and get your account unblocked

Hence why Reddit will only and ever remain a tool for consumer to consumer communication, and why a business would be stupid to use it as a primary marketing channel.


Why were you using Tor?


Mainly because I hate trackers. These days I'm using Tor for at least half of my web browsing. My desktop also runs QubesOS, the web browsers (both Tor Browser and the regular browser) are in their own disposable VMs. Once the window is closed, the system is reset and whatever cookies or exploits would all be gone permanently.


Why aren't you using Tor?


Logging in websites while using tor is completely useless.


It's slow af and various site traffic blocking tools get triggered by it.


A few years back I started completely separating my Windows/gaming system from anything I care about, which includes any credentials. While I never really considered Reddit an "important" credential for my main account, I decided to avoid starting a slippery slope and created a separate account for my gaming system since I am usually reading subreddits related to the games I play and want to post comments.

For the most part this worked great. Except one day I happened to post from my main account before a gaming session to a popular gaming subreddit while there was a controversial debate happening. The debate exceeded the mods ability to manage the discussions and so a large sweeping keyword temporary ban was put into effect and anyone who violated it received a 24 hour ban from the subreddit. Fine, whatever.

However, before I even knew I was temporarily banned on my main account I was logged into the gaming system and posting unrelated normal comments about the game. After a few hours I noticed that I wasn't getting the replies I normally would and I thought it was strange. Eventually I logged I went to check my email and stuff on my real computer and noticed the temporary ban message. Then I started looking at my gaming account in private browsing and noticed none of my comments appeared: it was shadowbanned. Not just in that subreddit but entirely. You actually couldn't even load my profile page content. The account would "exist" but none of my content such as pinned posts, avatar or bio/description etc. would be present.

I thought it was strange so I contacted Reddit. It was entirely automated I highly doubt a human was involved in responding to the message through their support channel. I got a canned message about how my account was circumventing a subreddit ban.

My guess is that anyone using a VPN or Tor is also having this same problem - probably just with a lot more subreddits and a lot more accounts though =/


I’d guess it’s not the usage of a VPN that has triggered this, but rather a new account immediately presenting multiple IP addresses. I’d guess that would trigger abuse flags at most places (especially from known VPN IP addresses which tend to have a lot of malicious activity originating from them).

This isn’t to defend them - it seems very odd to immediately permanently suspend accounts like that!


Yes. Most likely it is just a correlation, not the real cause. We have been using https://focsec.com/ for detecting trial abuse in our products. People using VPNs (+ new free email accounts) to "restart" trial periods is something that is quite common, we found.


How resource intensive / business focused is your product?

Lots of people use vpns for work or privacy, I think that method would have a lot of false positives. In cases where trial account usage costs you very little or nothing I'd err on the side of not blocking users.


People don’t use public VPNs for work. The tunnel terminates in the same network that the physical office is on. And using a public VPN from a work machine for privacy is a very bad idea. That’s grounds for termination if they catch you and possibly an even worse issue if the company ends up under investigation for any reason. They’re going to take a very close look at anything of yours they can get access to since it won’t have ended up in normal audit logs.


What do you mean by public VPN? Do you mean free proxies? I'm talking about paid private vpns like expressvpn. The p in vpn stands for private so that's a bit redundant. Your traffic is still encrypted, these vpns can't run a MITM attack on you.


> I think that method would have a lot of false positives

What makes you think that? This is you saying that that detection service is not very good, FWIW.


> (especially from known VPN IP addresses which tend to have a lot of malicious activity originating from them).

While certainly true, in my experience unknown VPN IP addresses can be even more problematic since for them, even providers willing to support the interests of VPN users just see lot's of suspicious usage from you IP address without any real explanation.

> This isn’t to defend them - it seems very odd to immediately permanently suspend accounts like that!

Normally I would agree, but since the account is not only just a few days old but also didn't post or create comments, I think that immediately banning it makes sense.

For a new account which didn't create any content yet the user isn't loosing anything important if the account is deleted and since the user is unlikely to have any real attachment to the account yet, they are more likely to just create a new account than to deal with any warning/suspension/whatever procedures.

IMHO you shouldn't expect your account to stick around until you have at least some non trivial content in the account.

Of course the main account is a different story.


I've been using a VPN continuously since the UK introduced the "Snooper's Charter". VPN usage has risen hugely around the world and it's not uncommon to see (mis)advertising on TV from more disreputable companies like Sophos and NordVPN.

Over time, these positions will become increasingly untenable. If everyone uses a VPN or lives behind CGNAT then these kack-handed approaches to "security" won't be seen as being plausible – the more real users they block or inconvenience the greater the harm to their product and I am sure this is going to go up over time. It's not like a real attacker can vary their ipv4 addresses willy-nilly at any rate...


Could you please elaborate on NordVPN being disreputable? This is the first I'm hearing of this.


Tragedy of the commons, since PIA is popular, its naturally popular with people with actual sockpuppeting and webscraping to do. Switching VPNs to a less popular provider may provide temporary relief, if they are routing through IPs that are not infested with bots.

To get around this and the other Captcha-related annoyances, PIA now offers dedicated IP as a $40-per-year add on:

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/vpn-features/dedicated...


I've gotten a 7 day ban just for being a member of a group. Never posted, never up or down voted. Just a member. Banned for 7 days. I'm Reddit user 2,200 or so, never had even a warning about anything. I'm lucky they didn't permanently ban my account


That’s not a thing for the entire site, so you must be confusing a ban from a subreddit with a sitewide ban, and subreddit mods are (for some reason) allowed to do whatever toxic, evil thing they want, including banning people for subscribing to another subreddit.


How would that even work? Moderators don't have access to any lists of users that have subscribed to their subreddits.


Don't forget that this is a company where the CEO can apparently go in and edit other user's posts for revenge and he was put in place and tolerated because he was somehow better than the person in charge before him.

Just posting in the "wrong" sub can get you banned all across the platform (no matter what you actually said).

Of course, this violates several of the Reddit mod TOS/guidelines, but Reddit doesn't care.

Yesterday, one of the top stories in the default /r/news is the attempted assassination of a Mayoral candidate.

Today, it turns out that the guy was a far-left BLM supporter and all mentions and threads have been retroactively scrubbed from the sub.

It's just a large echo-chamber supported from the top down. Would it be exceptional to think that this information could "leak" into the hands of the echo-chamber mods?


Worse than an echo chamber, it's an intentionally curated propaganda site. At least in an echo chamber you could scroll down to see the unpopular posts.


Small tip for people reading comments: if you want to read Reddit anonymously you can replace the domain of any reddit URL with teddit.net.

It's an open source, lightweight, web UI for Reddit focused on privacy: https://teddit.net/.

Git repo available here: https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit.


Also: https://libreddit.kavin.rocks/


What a stupid domain choice. WARNING: It is not sufficient to replace first char in domain. You must also TLD.


So? I have Privacy Redirect for that…


I suspect I was banned from Instagram in the same way. No explanation was given.

I use ProtonVPN. It wasn't until Spotify stopped working sometime later (403 Forbidden for all HTTP requests) that I narrowed it down to using VPN.

Seems to be a growing thing. Thankfully, Spotify didn't do anything to my account, and it continued to work from regular IPs.


At work we got a login attack via VPN IPs and we blocked VPNs from login in via AWS WAF and 2 days later a major user was complaining that he cant login. We had to remove the rule. (developers were working on captcha in the meantime)

I also used a tunnel when Spotify was not available globally. It did not create any issues.

Using a Public VPN is double edged sword. If you really need it its better to setup a wireguard tunnel to a own server as the the Public VPN IPs as monitored by the security companies and also get abused all the time.


The reason OP flipped between VPN exit locations in the first places has been because they wanted a VPN against the local ISP (public wifi, apparently) manipulating/sniffing traffic, without the latency penalty of going from France to the UK or vice-versa. That said, a vps in Amsterdam is quite practical from both locations, especially if mildly-congested wifi is already involved.


Can't you do a captcha with the WAF? I'm pretty sure that's an option on AWS


> Can't you do a captcha with the WAF? I'm pretty sure that's an option on AWS

You can.

I know because our information security office did it to all of our web endpoints. Which are mostly API endpoints. Without telling anyone involved with individual apps, before or even, until specific complaints got to them, after doing it.


*Large rueful sigh*

I feel your pain. It's stuff like that that just makes you know, they not only have no idea what they're doing, the level of agency and access they have mean it's just a question of when they finally accidentally something big on fire one day - and whether you'll be able to make it out unscathed with eg just some lost sleep.

Would probably make a good story for http://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport, as you're probably already aware. If you feel like (and can stand) writing it (heh).


the attack was to an api endpoint. which is queried via xhr on the main app. adding captcha to it would break the app to all users.

the developers are now working on adding captcha at the application level and also signing the api endpoints.


Admins and mods are banning untold users every day for any and no reason at all. It is a really terrible place for discussion now, even if you somehow manage to find a small subreddit which permits nuanced discussion. It will inevitably be banned or the mods replaced with Reddit-approved mods and all nuanced discussion banned. I hope to see a Digg-like exodus soon.


> I hope to see a Digg-like exodus soon.

Small problem with this. What enabled the Digg-to-reddit exodus was a strong competitor lying in the shadows. Nobody lying in the shadows behind reddit could handle an exodus. Most lemmy instances regularly go down anytime reddit so much as sneezes. I remember an exodus attempt to Voat took Voat down for at least a week, and in fact Voat never got back online until the entire exodus quit.


To be honest, I think there are strong alternatives now, but obviously none of them have the infrastructure necessary to sustain the entire Reddit community migrating overnight. Reddit's servers were flaky for years after the exodus, but we just lived with it because Digg sucked more. These days we have Kubernetes and commoditised hosting, so the infrastructure piece is largely solved. The question mark is around funding. Thankfully I'm seeing a lot more interest in funding for social platforms these days. VCs smell blood since Facebook signalled they're in decline. Twitter has decided any right leaning political views will be banned, so they're actively purging double digits from their user base. Alternative news and discussion channels like Substack are flourishing. This is the first real opportunity social has had for competition in at least a decade.


I periodically delete reddit accounts and start new ones, mainly to preserve anonymity and prevent harassment. 1 in 3 accounts I start are shadowbanned from the start for no apparent reason at all. I’ve never used a VPN. Same IPs and devices each time with no attempts at obfuscation or any activity that would reasonably seem suspicious.


I also rotate periodically, partially to evade bans from moderators, and I’ve only run into trouble with IP bans on account creation.

If you create the account from a clean IP you’re usually good, even if you use the banned IP later on.

Reddit is ripe to be picked off by a more agile competitor, if someone could innovate in moderation. Monetization would also be a lot easier for a smaller startup, as Reddit more or less paved the way for a few different paths there that users now find acceptable.

They abandoned the idea of making reddit gold a cryptocurrency, but it’s perfectly memey and would blow up a valuation if someone else could get it right.


I create one with suffix "_month", post one comment, and wait for it to languish for a few weeks before using it 'regularly'. Otherwise it gets shadow ban.


Doesn't surprise me the slightest, Reddit is not like it used to be. It used to be the underdog where free speech flourished and today it's a chineese-owned propaganda machine. A few users controls the biggest subreddits and most deviating views get themselves either banned or restricted.


the day reddit will end up like digg is always a day too late

now they have in sight the IPO so they are doing great cleaning, even of the past, they are rewriting it to be more attractive to sponsors and investors; a monstrous number of posts and subs are deleted every hour every day with the excuse that they apply [new] rules not specified anywhere and even often contrary to the well-established customs

they have gone from total administrative absenteeism to be a Kafkaesque nightmare, primarily for moderators (volunteers)

as a European I did not understand the concept of the word "cancel culture" but now that I'm seeing it with my own eyes I hope reddit fail very soon because now has become a spite to everything that Aaron wanted

so no, they have not become chinese/russian/"destiny manifest" propaganda machines, they are just a horrible horrible horrible place (with 10mb of javascript per connection as cherry on top)


> the day reddit will end up like digg is always a day too late

Many people ITT are saying that they're even worse than that right now. At least the Digg big redesign was halfway usable.

On the flip side, there's now a decent chance that the next "big" discussion platform might be a properly federated system, allowing for some longer-term resilience against this sort of deterioration. Much like E-mail/Usenet vs. centralized Compuserve or AOL.


Chinese? I'd say Russian.


I'm pretty sure a certain chinese company invested ~300M$ couple of years ago[0] if i recall correctly.However the platform became totally unusable and a sh*tfest way before that,think ~2014+, mainly because it was the turning point where no transparency was maintained or provided anymore, especially when it comes to moderation of users & their posts and management of subreddits.By early 2016 this was almost 'proved', but at that point this tactic resulted in creating echo-chambers, which drove up users and made it the "successful" platform it is today.Turns out nobody really cares about transparency and doing the proper job when the users and numbers are constantly exploding due to the forementioned created echo-chambers. By the way my guess why reddit was never russian-oriented or 'aligned' is because most russophile subreddits were actively targeted and shut down(for good reasons many times), whilst chinese subreddits, the 'official' north-korean (propaganda) subreddit, and many others, were kept up and almost treated as separate platforms from the mainstream website.

[0] ( https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/reddit-300-million/ ) Indeed it was,once again, Tencent, the company famous for destroying MMOs, infiltrate the western gaming markets and pollute it with micro-transactions, cosmetics, etc.We're on the edge of touching politics and geostrategy here and I don't want certain people to jump telling me i'm a conspiracy nutjob.At this point the record is there, go look at it.


If propaganda was the purpose of that investment then it would have been a terrible one. Major subreddits are very often plastered with anti china stuff. It doesn't even have to be factual. Meanwhile back when i modded a major subreddit with somewhat of a politics focus around the time when the whole situation in Ukraine kicked of russian propaganda accounts were very obvious and common. (relatively new accounts with certain formats of usernames posting short stuff that was found verbatim on similar accounts, etc)

It reminds me of an American study someone once commented here on HN where they looked into this and whilst they found Russian "shilling" substantial they there were surprised to find actually more anti china bots (mainly posting in simple chinese) across platforms like twitter than pro china ones. Pro-china propaganda efforts were found and measured but were largely amateurish, quickly banned and ineffective.


>the 'official' north-korean (propaganda) subreddit,

I'd honestly always assumed /r/pyonyang was very clever anti-NK propaganda. The role it occupies as Reddit in-joke aligns with western agendas.

/r/nknews skews closer to actual North Korean propaganda, but I think (or maybe just hope) the general vibe there is the readership understands that ANYTHING you read online about North Korea is potentially propagandized in one way or the other.


> Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.


Can you disclose which VPN you are using? I sometimes use ExpressVPN + a different browser to protect my identity, but it would be annoying if I lost my account.

The charitable interpretation is that Reddit got a lot of abuse from individual IPs, the IP didn't seem to be shared to them, and they just blacklisted it. I assume they don't generally blacklist IPs from abusive users, since otherwise university campusses would quickly have problems :-).


> The charitable interpretation is that Reddit got a lot of abuse from individual IPs, the IP didn't seem to be shared to them, and they just blacklisted it.

They likely buy databases of IP addresses which have likelihood of fraud attached to them from third parties like Neustar or Geocomply or Digital Envoy.

Being a VPN address is a great way to get a giant red flag on those databases (correctly).


PIA


Found this BS, in dire contradiction with my test: https://reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/search?filter_by=knowledge_b...


this article talks about being locked for security reasons, not banned (suspended).


Which the more so infers VPN not suspension driving...


Upvote bots use VPN all the time, so there might just be a chance that you managed to get IP from VPN that was perma banned by reddit (yes, its a thing).


I wonder if it's feasible to make a VPN network where you peer with only _one_ other individual but that individual is selected somewhat randomly. As in, you offer your residential IP to one other person and one other person offers their residential IP to you.

The only services I've seen involve a few people offering their servers as n-ary client exit nodes which obviously ends up with saturation problems like the tor network. Obviously the legal concerns are a big deal but if companies like Mullvad aren't liable for illegal web traffic, one might be able to get similar protections for people that install this VPN.


That seems like a bad idea. When illegal activity is done on the internet the first thing law enforcement will do is go after you (by subpoena'ing your ISP for your information based on IP). You also have places like Germany where copyright representatives are very aggressive and will fine/settle you large amounts when downloading pirated content.


Likely because bots and troll farms are totally out of control, and they don't have a more accurate way of fighting it. IMHO, this is also the reason behind some of the heavy-handed moderation on some subreddits. AFAICT, as bad as it is already, this is only going to get worse as (1) NLP AI gets better and (2) there remains no positive defense against sybil attacks.

Just curious... I'm assuming people have already thought of doing a pseudonymous web of trust--or is that somehow inherently impossible even ignoring the old spam-solution form checkbox for universal adoption?


> AFAICT, as bad as it is already, this is only going to get worse as (1) NLP AI gets better and (2) there remains no positive defense against sybil attacks.

I strongly agree. The future of public discourse online looks dim. At that point, on one hand, platforms will certainly require more Personal Identifiable Information, which harms the privacy of regular users. Meanwhile, trolls and bots from various malicious actors will be able to dominate and control many conversations on an unprecedented scale. One would have neither privacy nor security, the web envisioned by digital utopianists as a free, open platform will be completely dead.

100 years ago, the pioneers of aviation believed the invention of airplanes would be a force to end all wars, because it breaks the power asymmetry in battlefields. But we get massive aerial bombardments on civilians instead.

> It was an idea shared by many after the inception of flight. War would become practically impossible, the brothers thought, because the scouting done by aircraft would equalize opposing nations with information on each other's movements, preventing surprise attacks.

> "We thought governments would recognize the impossibility of winning by surprise attacks," Orville said in 1917, "and that no country would enter into war with another of equal size when it knew that it would have to win by simply wearing out its enemy."

> Two years before, he had declared: "The aeroplane will prevent war by making it too expensive, too slow, too difficult, too long drawn out."

> "Yes, we thought it might have military use - but in reverse," said the 76-year-old inventor, whose brother had died at age 45 in 1912. "Because the men who start wars aren't the ones who do the fighting, we hoped that the possibility of dropping bombs on capital cities would deter them."

100 years later, the pioneers of the web believed the invention of the Web would be the force to a free society because it breaks the power asymmetry on information between individuals and the state. But we are now getting massive manipulations from all types of malicious actors.

> "Information," Gage [John Gage from Sun Microsystems] answers, matter-of-factly. "What stopped the Vietnam War was that we told the truth about what was happening. Today, the truth-telling mechanisms that we can put in people's hands are a million times more powerful," he says, wending through the ghetto fringe of East Palo Alto. "And when every person on the planet has access to that power - which is what I'm trying to do - then watch what happens."

Yes, many people now has access to that power, but some, like state actors (or just plain old advertisers), now have order-of-magnitude more power.


Both Reddit's admins and their future-employee mods are completely out of control, in a way that makes Facebook's intentional topic manipulation seem tame by comparison. These people go out of their way to ban people for no reason -- constantly, every single day -- in a way that can only be described as intentionally abusive. They appear to get some kind of sadistic pleasure in reading ban appeals and denying them, knowing full well that the bans are improper and the appeals are justified.

In fact, they make a point of not properly responding to reports of harassment (including the sexual proposition of minors), but they will permanently ban well-known and popular accounts that never broke a single rule. They'll even ban people directly out of spite, or because they disagree with you. There is nothing too petty for them.

They're even swindling advertisers in the most brazenly shameful way, and they've been banning live streamers to protect the lie[1].

Ultimately, Reddit's strategy is to simultaneously file their IPO and switch the design to be a TikTok clone with a web3 component attached to the awards system. They're going to tank rapidly, but it doesn't matter to them because they already got paid.

The bans were a way to prevent rocking the investor boat until the IPO, but they got caught up in it, and now it's going too far.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29574786


This is very true and it is already having an effect. The amount of posts in the development sub reddit has declined so much it is borderline dead. For example the front page of r/javascript is mostly days old posts which means I can visit it once a week and not really miss anything and it has 1,873,376 subscribers! It seems people have recognized that the post quality was garbage and moved on to greener pastures. It truly is the end of an era. I got banned from r/webdev because some said "using PHP is stupid" and I replied "that is ignorant and that the comment itself was stupid" and I got banned for that and I never looked back.

Good riddance reddit.


I’ve been using Reddit since the beginning, and I still use and like it, but your ban for saying “using php is stupid” comment resonates. One of my biggest Reddit pet peeves is downvoting or punitive mod action in response to subjective opinions.

It’s not a new problem, and it’s one that can happen in any forum with downvoting, but it drives me nuts. The downvote is not a disagree button!


The downvote button is Reddit's second biggest problem. It was meant to signal that a piece of content was either off-topic or broke a rule, as a way to alleviate the pressure of moderation. That's a fine theory, but it's simply not possible in an anonymous and unaccountable environment. It increases the trolling and makes it easy for bad actors to both control competitor content and promote their own.


> The downvote button is Reddit's second biggest problem. It was meant to signal that a piece of content was either off-topic or broke a rule, as a way to alleviate the pressure of moderation.

That seems inaccurate. The up/down arrows feed the "hotness" algorithm, and it was never a means of moderation, but does have a side effect similar. You're probably confusing "curation" with "moderation". I can tell you with high confidence, being a mod of several big sub-reddit's, that I give zero-fucks about the up or down votes given to any item in the moderation queue.

Further more, the actual numbers for up/down votes is fuzzed by reddit, intentionally misreported to sabotage those who try to game the system. They mess with the feedback loop, making it harder to vote brigade.


> The up/down arrows feed the "hotness" algorithm, and it was never a means of moderation, but does have a side effect similar. You're probably confusing "curation" with "moderation".

That's not true. Downvoting[1] is absolutely intended to be a way to alleviate moderation duties, so that off-topic or inappropriate posts are made less visible and the moderators don't need to micro-manage every single comment.

> Further more, the actual numbers for up/down votes is fuzzed by reddit, intentionally misreported to sabotage those who try to game the system. They mess with the feedback loop, making it harder to vote brigade.

The vote fuzzing doesn't actually stop brigading at all. If it did, there wouldn't be any, yet everyone acknowledges that the vote gaming is ubiquitous and constant. Bad actors don't care about the numbers Reddit is reporting to them -- they vote until the desired effect is achieved, not until some standardized number of votes is hit.

[1] https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddi...

"Vote. If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it does not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it."

"Think before you downvote and take a moment to ensure you're downvoting someone because they are not contributing to the community dialogue or discussion. If you simply take a moment to stop, think and examine your reasons for downvoting, rather than doing so out of an emotional reaction, you will ensure that your downvotes are given for good reasons."


Slashdot's mod points award system had pretty good noise rejection, but it too eventually succumbed to the dumbening.


"Mod points award" is interesting. It basically incents the awardee to put quite a bit of thought behind their moderation decisions, but the flip side is that you get far fewer datapoints per comment. Perhaps there might be a way to use both systems concurrently.


It's still baffling to me that so many subreddits have rules against downvotes and use CSS hacks to hide the downvote buttons (that alternate clients or using the preference to disable custom CSS easily circumvents) and that Reddit just hasn't added that as core functionality for moderators to enable on a subreddit.

The only thing I can think of is that if they make it an option all subreddits will ban the downvote and for whatever reason admin must be really invested in ensuring people are able to downvote.

One of the clever things I noticed about HN is that you cannot downvote replies to your own comments. It's an interesting tweak.

On top of that the very recent rollout of changes to how blocking works are really wrecking havoc on debate subreddits where jerks are now using blocks to "win" debates.


>>The downvote is not a disagree button!

Downvote is a disagree button as it is perceived as such and that is an issue. Same functionality is in NH - it just has a higher treshold when you can use it, but not really that different in essence.

Banning for arguing is normal - from the times, when early web forums existed. Banning can be for any reasons - disagreeing with mod, arguing with someone, who is friends with mod. Mod is a god in forum. The solution to that is - either be a friend of mod or do not argue with idiots for idiotic reasons unless you are an idiot or simply want to be banned. PHP might be stupid or might not be stupid - who really cares in the end, when you log off from forum.


GP was not banned for arguing, they were banned for placing a throwaway arguing/flamebait comment - "using php is stupid" - in the proper context, by providing some nuance. The fact that they were even banned for that, when at most they should have been warned had they been actually arguing, tells you everything there is to know about how well that 'subreddit' is being managed (hint: not very well).


I've reread what GP was posted and he was banned for reason: personal attack, because he did say, that comment is stupid. For exactly the same reason you can get banned, if you use nuanced sarcasm or actually if you are touching anything that is toxic.

Warnings can not be sustainable, when such high volume of warned is involved - you have to keep records of those warnings. Since it is easy to create account in reddit, outright ban is a warning - to not to do the same with new account.

If you are a dick in RL and do snarly comments in RL, you will be banned from communication quicker than in reddit - in some cases even beaten up. So, the only approach is to use reddit and NH comments with attitude, that it is not real conversation.


> get banned, if you use nuanced sarcasm or actually if you are touching anything that is toxic.

I agree that this is a thing, of course. But it makes for very low quality discussion, since non-toxic users will just let the toxicity fester instead of engaging to mitigate it.

> you have to keep records of those warnings.

'Reddit Enhancement Suite' has that as a feature, and it could be added as such on the official site. Or it could be done unofficially in the "modmail".

> Since it is easy to create account in reddit, outright ban is a warning

Returning with a new account after being permbanned from a 'sub' counts as ban evasion, and will trigger a global site-wide ban for both accounts. Reddit has gotten very aggressive about this as of late, quite possibly using AI bots that will try to detect when such "ban evasion" is happening, and trigger global bans.


>>I agree that this is a thing, of course. But it makes for very low quality discussion, since non-toxic users will just let the toxicity fester instead of engaging to mitigate it.

I do not make rules of reddit(I feel that the discussion somehow has took that direction, where... I am defending reddit?) - I just speak from my experience.

There is a reason, why humans can not have on their mind more than one enemy - their brains can not keep track of all the enemies as keeping track of all of them is a nightmare scenario, where brainpower is used just to keep track of all of them. As long as mods are humans, there are no good solutions to keep track of all warnings - maybe AI can do that, but keeping all that information in head is too much garbage - if I have to manage any such forums, banning is the best option for warning, as my brains are not unlimited. If a person convinces, that he has learned a lesson, then the ban can be lifted. Some bans can even expire, so it does not really matter.

When I think of warning, it also has additional information: how long it has to stay, until it is forgotten(because it is not a ban), what that warning was about, because you can't really make warning to kid not to touch hot surface and scald for the same reason, if he touches electric power cable - they are completelly different cases, so I am looking from that viewpoint, that there does not exist proper warning system and 'Reddit Enhancement Suite' is not it as well - from the description it still sounds, that it is meant for banning - not warnings, where warnings are meant to educate and protect people. Warning system means a lot of involvement and without AI, that is not viable, especially when no one is going to pay you for that kind of job.

>>Returning with a new account after being permbanned from a 'sub' counts as ban evasion

Not, if you return with different email, as reddit can ban email, but not a person, so this rule can not be implemented to a person and can be read as guideline. Unless you are a complete idiot and post your id data and after being banned from sub, come back and state that you have returned, then that rule can be applied in that case. And I perceive that rule exactly how it is technically done - that they might ban account and maybe email, that was attached to it - rest takes too much effort and is not really possible to do by reddit(at this stage).


> I do not make rules of reddit(I feel that the discussion somehow has took that direction, where... I am defending reddit?) - I just speak from my experience.

I don't think you're "defending reddit", FWIW. I just wanted to push back lightly on some things you said. And I've also seen a system based on escalating "warnings" work very well at multiple places, including arguably here at HN!

> Not, if you return with different email ...

That's not what multiple users have said in the current discussion. Their AI bot watchdogs are a lot more trigger-happy than that these days. (Which is quite fine and well per se, since plenty of bans of spammers, grossly offensive abusers etc. are quite legitimate.)


Well I disagree but I understand your golden rule so I'll downvote you since this is the behavior you are requesting. Please note that I don't want you to reciprocate. To me downvotes mean I posted something irrelevant or forgot to be polite.


>>Downvote is a disagree button as it is "perceived as such"

Not because people are stupid and have one-dimensional thinking, but for the reasons, that textual information does not provide enough additional information, I always add additional information, if post is a joke.


I'm banned from askscience because the mod doesn't believe that I can both do my day job and make comments on my old day job.

Apparently nobody on earth has two related specializations, and since he's a college kid in one of the two topics, he knows that the comment I made is wrong.

Nevermind that it's about a device that I created, or that I gave him the manual and showed it to be true, or that my comments were friendly and positive.

Nope, just saying "it's a lot smaller than most people seem to expect, around the size of a minivan" and I'm gone, despite a dozen 3000+ comments and no negative ones

Reddit pulling its staff from free labor has left it in a position where nobody can be fired no matter how toxic they are to reddit's user base


How incredibly frustrating! I empathize. You're not the only one who has experienced this sort of Kafkaesque behavior from mods on Reddit, where no matter what you explain, no matter what supporting evidence you provide, no matter what reality is, you will be willfully misread in order to justify a case against you.


My account was permanently suspended for "threatening violence" when I said that the reddit admins are enabling pedophiles. Aimee Challenor used to be an employee of reddit, hired without any background check or scrutiny. I wonder how many others like that are still in employ.


I was hit with a warning for threatening violence when I said something, in response to all teen moms should have their baby taken away, I said “like Indians have had done for decades in Canada? I don’t think they should be taken away but rather supported and checked in on by case workers to help with the stress of raising a kid.” I was literally showing support not to take a teen moms kid away and offer them more social support but got a warning. Wft.


Reddit like to claim some lofty, detached sense of free speech as if the sexualization of minors was something that happened without their influence.

One thing they don't want to talk about these days is how they minted a one-of-a-kind profile trophy called "Pimp Daddy" to commend u/violentacrez for his sustained and voluminous work on maintaining the "jailbait" subreddit, plastering Reddit with bawdy pictures of high school girls he scraped from social media.

It wasn't until Anderson Cooper did a piece on the practice that the whitewashing began, with sudden claims of disinterest in the matter for the sake of free speech.


I'd honestly throw a party if Reddit completely collapsed under its own weight and its owners/investors lost everything they had... but I still haven't seen anything else that will replace the niche that it fills. As long as there's no alternative, they'll continue to make the rules.


I'm utterly amazed at how ban-wild some communities can be. I occasionally see stories of people being banned from communities they've never posted to (reading/lurking only) simply because they also subscribe to another community that is "opposite" of the first.

Take /r/novavax_vaccine_talk for example. There was recently a member [1] there who was banned from /r/coronavirus simply for being a member. These people aren't anti-vax by any means, but because it doesn't "fit the picture" they get ousted.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Novavax_vaccine_talk/comments/sa78h...


This used to be a joke. "You have been banned from /r/Pyongyang."


I miss that joke. It's too bad the mod didn't create a bot to automatically actually ban people from the dead sub when called out, just for fun.

Edit: Ironically said in a comment about the overuse of banning people


Ha, it happened to me on Sunday, I posted a message like "We got our booster 1 month ago and didn't have any side-effects" in lockdownskepticism (which is not even an extreme or anti something sub) and started getting messages from pics/netflix/showerthoughts and so on that now I am automatically banned from subs that I never even posted in for posting in a sub that promotes medical misinformation. I send a message showing the message that I posted and one of the mods from one of the subs just blocked me from contacting them again. Basically my 14 year old account is useless now, because a message in a sub (regardless of content) triggered an automatic ban on most of the subs I subscribed to.


This violates the mod guidelines/TOS, but Reddit simply does not care.

They enjoy the echo-chamber they create.


I got banned from countless subreddits becuase I dared arguing with covide deniers on r/NoNewNormal. I didn't even agree with them and was always critical but that apperently doesn't matter


I got banned from around 15 popular subreddits (which I didn't read or participate anyway) for posting a comment in r/conspiracy which wasn't even related to the vax. There are thousands of cases like yours and mine and worst of all: it was fully automated. You literally posted anything into certain subreddits and you get autobanned in communities that aren't even related by any metric.

I didn't bother appealing since I don't care about those but it felt really dumb and perhaps a clear sign of Reddit's end times.


Did you get banned from anti-NoNewNormal subs for commenting in NoNewNormal? Or did the bannings come from subs like-minded to NoNewNormal because you disagreed with them?


From anti-nonewnormal subs. Its fully automated ban as far as I know


I got banned from one because a creep tagged me in one of those subs

I've never read or posted anything in them as far as I know

I'm actually kind of sympathetic to the ones trying to stop brigading though

The Chinese bots following me around for speaking about the uyghur genocide are pretty bad


>There was recently a member there who was banned from ... simply for being a member

this is false. you can't tell if another user is subscribed to another subreddit.


They probably commented in the other sub

I’ve seen multiple subreddits that block people who were active in a specific other subreddit


I got banned from /r/CanadaCoronavirus for saying "we are currently experimenting to learn how many boosters are needed. My rabies shots required 5 injections at specific intervals.".

They banned me for saying that vaccines are experimental.

I contacted the head mod and explained that I did not say and do not think the vaccines are "experimental".

They ignored my message for a week then upheld the ban, saying "the vaccines are not experimental". I guess it was my time to be shown the door and nothing I said after that mattered.

They are also the mod of /r/AskReddit and /r/Covid19


This kind of complete lack of reading comprehension seems to be a job requirement for Reddit mods.


"They appear to get some kind of sadistic pleasure in reading ban appeals and denying them, knowing full well that the bans are improper and the appeals are justified."

Or they get pleasure by making more money, in not paying enough people to manual review issues.


Except some of the people they've banned were making them lots of money, so it's not as simple as your suggestion.


I thought mods are unpaid?


Mods are not paid by Reddit, admins are paid but I think that some admins are also modding a few subs.


The r/cryptocurrency mods were paid by Reddit in their cryptocurrency called "moons" which can be traded for cash.


I'm conspiratorial enough to believe that some of the power mods are being paid, but not by reddit.


I've wondered for a while if reddit powermod /u/MaxwellHill isn't actually Ghislaine Maxwell (who apparently had some kind of association with former Reddit CEO Pao).

Reddit would be a great place to run interference AND a place for her to find troubled kids for "recruitment".

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is_...


There are mods that are paid, for example mods that run a company subreddit.

But, I am also sceptical about transparency of mods of large subreddit, ie the powermods.


I got banned for harassment because I said that something was kind of gay.


did you think that it was homosexual in nature?


Good.


What were you posting?

I've used a VPN constantly and I have a Reddit account in the 15-year club, it hasn't been an issue.


I haven't seen any issues with my 10+ year old accounts. They are probably marked as safe and only newer accounts at risk.


Probably my 10 years + verified email + MFA + never using a public VPN saves me a lot of grief in the abuse detection algorithm lottery.


No posts in the control account. Just VPN exit points "switching"


But couldn't it be that this specific behavior triggered a spam warning? I have no insight into Reddit regarding security, but would expect new/fresh and empty accounts under special scrutiny and when an account like that hops from IP to IP this would - if I were to build a heuristic at least trigger an alarm/ban/temporary lock of voting/posting functions.

Just an idea regarding your latest test. The part of the main account sucks - I am with you on that.


What is the most promising original-Reddit clone?


There isn't any, unless someone solves the spam or bot account problem.


There are a bunch of them, but by far the largest problem with new networks like this comes with the network affect. In the beginning no users use the network, but if no users use it no body migrates to the platform and the circle continues. This is the reason why it is so hard to migrate your social circle away from FB Messenger or Whatsapp.


Lemmy?

https://join-lemmy.org/


Lemmy is great for anyone who wants to deploy their own reddit clone and wants federation with other lemmy instances.


the OG is 4chan


4chan isn't the OG, it was long predated by Slashdot and Something Awful.


And those were predated by Usenet which still exists but nobody has solved the spam issues.


4chan is not like reddit


The interesting takeaway here should be that if you want to take down somebody's reddit account, getting them to use your wifi access point while routing traffic through some of the cited vpns is enough.

And you would never be discovered... Just blame it on reddit!


Setting up an at-home VPN is still a goal for me, so that I can connect to the internet from home - and more importantly, not reused by anyone with malicious intent - from anywhere.


I believed in Reddit very strongly. I did. And then they started pulling off all these user hostile moves. "This community is better in the app" when I wasn't logged in. I understand why. They need to protect their investors' interests: which is collect as much data as possible. But if what you're doing is introducing friction to your own users then that seems like a clearly stupid move. Then again of course Reddit admins don't know if I'm a user because, after all, I didn't log in. But perhaps I just wanted to check out a specific posts in my phone web view without opening the post in the fucking app?

So I deleted my account. And I don't miss it too much, I never really found actually interesting content on it. On the other hand I've regained so much time that I used to invest in mindless scrolling.


Interesting topic. Not defending the social media platforms or forum websites, but they do need to defend against spoofing of accounts, bots, etc. This obviously isn't the way to do it, but it is the fastest way for them to do so. One analogy for us as the users: It's the same as callerID and numbers being flagged as spam. You would never route your outbound phone calls through a phone gateway which everyone used. VPNs have become the defacto way for people to manage privacy on the internet and it has already been shown that VPNs are not as bulletproof as people once thought. There are other solutions out there. DM me for more.


HN is no different and will ban Tor accounts at will. You can try and see for yourself.


Yes, I went through dozens of HN accounts before I finally figured out that the IP address at my ex-wife's house was on some kind of HN automatic kill list. Every time I went over there and glanced at HN, that account would get silently shadowbanned. HN doesn't have any moral authority to lecture Reddit on this topic.


What??? Why is HN against privacy and encryption?


Why does your employer require you to use a 3rd party VPN routed through the US?


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/23/nsa-director...


All is not lost if your account is mistakenly suspended due to VPN usage. They still allow you to:

* Communicate with reddit admins via /r/reddit.com modmail

* Appeal your suspension via https://www.reddit.com/appeals

with a permanently suspended account. See https://reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045734911-My-acc...


Did that already, first for the original account, then the two older ones. Suspension reconfirmed almost immediately, on all three, indicative of an automated system in the backend. There is no Kimi (human intervention) behind this alleged appeal process.


Did you try modmail to the global admins? That has to go somewhere that's read by actual humans.


This is sadly the case for may online platforms.


I was permanently banned last year, for no reason I could find. I do somewhat rarely run a PIA VPN at times so maybe that flagged me.

I appealed the suspension, which sounded hopeless, but about 10 days later my account was restored.


It can be even worse than suspending you, as early as 2018 i noticed they were shadow banning you based on VPN (PIA also). Meaning you could still post but not be seen, or have the ability to notify people you replied to. I've never since bothered to have an account there. Reddit's CEO, like Jack Dorsey, denies 'shadow banning', even though you can test it by getting -100 karma and watching your comments reach nobody. The negative karma shadow ban is why Reddit is the biggest hivemind on the internet, FYI.


The -100 shadowban is mostly subreddit dependent, and done via automoderator by the mods of most larger subreddits.

An actual admin shadowban does happen and they are employed, but I don't think they're particularly hidden. As a mod I see "User is shadowbanned" when they message us if they've been shadowbanned from Reddit by the admins.


Yes, I would like to see the source that makes the claim that Reddit doesn't shadowban, because any mod of any subreddit can trivially refute that. I see shadowbanned users all the time, and Reddit calls them shadowbanned in the UI; it's not a secret. Nearly all of them are fairly new accounts, presumably having run afoul of some sort of automatic system. It definitely has plenty of false positives, but at the same time I also see essentially zero spam, so it's clear that they're trying to optimize for false positives rather than false negatives. It would be great if mods could at least approve a shadowbanned user for posting in their own subreddit, right now the only recourse is for them to make a new account and roll the dice again.


I was globally shadowbanned for using Mullvad VPN. Happened with multiple accounts. I usually posted in a subreddit where a mod would manually approve my comments, allowing me to get some hundred comment karma, but that still didnt fix it and the mod was getting tired of approving so i eventually gave up using reddit altogether


> Reddit's CEO, like Jack Dorsey, denies 'shadow banning', even though you can test it by getting -100 karma and watching your comments reach nobody

Jack Dorsey was the CEO of Twitter, not Reddit.

Edit: Fair, I stand corrected. Leaving comment as-is.


"like" implies he's not.


Twitter did a similar thing to combat misinformation IIRC, that's why i mentioned Jack.


I use a VPN and have had no issues, but that's just one data point.


As others have said here reddit is seriously going to trash. The mods have ruined it and if you don’t agree with their narrative you will have your comments deleted or your account banned. r/Canada for example is utter trash now and won’t allow respectful open debate. It feels like it is state ran or shill ran and a narrative being painted. I hope to see reddit fall out of favour for something more open and free to discuss, respectfully, differences of opinion.


My account was suspended. However I didn't use a VPN. I realised that my IP is wrongly categorized in the Geo databases like Maxmind and thus is flagged as a VPN IP..


There must be more to it than that. I use PIA VPN on reddit all the time (for at least the last 5 years or so), from various european endpoints, and I'm still fine there. I'm not shadowbanned as people do reply to my comments. The account is a decade old though so I assume that they factor account age into it as well.

I've also resolutely ignored the email verification pop up for years so I'm kind of surprised I'm still on it.


One of my reddit accounts was suspended because I exclusively use it within Tor. I contacted support about the matter and they restored the account once they saw it wasn't doing anything against the sitewide rules.


People shit on facebook but honestly how reddit is still pushing that redesign is unfathomable.


They're pushing the redesign because it works. I'd guess a good portion of their userbase is actually relatively new or young users, who prefer to scroll through endless wall of pictures/videos like they do on instagram. I'd never use Reddit like that, but seeing the discussions over the past few years it's obvious most (vocal) users are on mobile, and they use the instagram look.


The redesign has one major advantage from their point of view (which I suspect was the reason behind it in the first place) - the individual posts on main screen now take up much more screen space. This allows to seamlessly insert fairly large ads masquaraded as posts, which wasn't possible with the old design.


> the individual posts on main screen now take up much more screen space

It's insulting how deliberate this is. I just tried using the redesign for ~5 minutes to see if it was as bad as I remembered, and the amount of dead space on my screen is striking. I have a normal 16:9 monitor and roughly 2/3rds of the front page is just totally blank, meanwhile you have post titles taking up 3-4 lines of the tiny column they're forced into.


Two more major points: image/video hosting (i.e. they own the data), and inline autoplaying video.


If it wasn't for the Apollo reddit client I would have stopped using reddit a long time ago. I used to use it mostly in the browser on my laptop/desktop, but it has become unusable even when using old.reddit.com (and plugins to force old.reddit.com).

I now only use it as an app on my phone which has ruined a lot of the conversation because it's far more cumbersome to type on mobile, as well as stuff like switching between browser/reddit to copy a link or quote something on the web is a pain on mobile.

I'm surprised there isn't a growing competitor to reddit at this point (that I know of)


I’ve been using old.reddit and RES and the UX, at least, has been consistent.


> but it has become unusable even when using old.reddit.com

Can you elaborate on that? From what I've noticed old.reddit.com has essentially not changed over the past years.


https://old.reddit.com/

On Firefox, use Old Reddit Redirect: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...


This is also a one line UserScript if you're using Tampermonkey or whatever.


If old.reddit.com ever stops working that would be my cue to exit. The redesign is a case study in user hostile design and unusability.


I find the Chat feature to be an awful addition as well. Sometimes when I'm trying to sell things, people will send a chat instead of an Inbox message and I end up not seeing it for days because there's not much of a notification and Apollo for iOS doesn't support chat (maybe no unofficial Reddit client does?)


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30328120


I'd like to mention that in 2022 Reddit still does not have IPv6.

The reason I was given back around ~2010, is how they block IP addresses. Allegedly, according to an admin (who shall not be named) is how Reddit blocks spam with IP filtering. Apparently the technology only works with v4, and somehow Reddit deeply integrated the tech into their stack. Also the idea that allowing v6 would allow circumvention, which to some extent is probably true.

The TLDR is that Reddit is still not on v6 because they have a draconian IP filtering kit built into their technology stack.


It seems fine to me, had an account for 5+ years, 30k karma and use a VPN to access it at school daily.


Same VPN exit point? Maybe this is the difference between traveler like my case and someone protecting their comm over same infra path?!?


If you think Facebook is bad, just go to the reddit comment section on any post on ANY sub to see massive amounts of groupthink and suppression of any opposing ideas via downvotes.

Forming any attachment to a Reddit account is useless because the post/comment you make will be either suppressed or accepted based on the popular opinion that exists within the subreddit to which you are posting.

The issues outlined in this thread are exactly why I wipe my comment history every 2-3 months, export my subscriptions, delete my account, create new account & re-import my subscriptions.

It’s tough though because people will call you a shill if you have a new account. But then again, people will claim you sold your account to a viral marketing company if you have an older account. It’s messy all around.

Just wait until reddit acquires a ubiquitous hold on popular culture once Instagram finally dies off in 5-7 years. The problems discussed in this thread will amplify exponentially.


Thank you! Forewarned is forearmed


I don't think reddit accounts get banned by using VPN but it is more about what you are posting using your accounts.


It's really more about what kind of things people were posting from that VPN IP in the months/years before you. The abuse detection system will say "the tshirt spammer is back, flag this account" just because you used the same VPN as them.


I've definitely created a new account recently over VPN, posted a single question in a linux forum and then found the account was shadow banned.


You can always contact the reddit team and if your account is suspended wrongly, it would definitely be reinstated.


Also important to note that if you didn't post a lot, many subs will auto-remove content from low karma users. So it's possible to have misidentified a global shadow ban with a few subreddit's low karma filter. One of my spammer adversaries regularly games FreeKarma4U and a specific star wars game subreddit until they figure out our low karma filter threshold then they go nuts with the spam.


F reddit and F the mods.


i don't think you can post on 4chan using a vpn either.


Reddit bans users for complaining about mods. Deleting my accounts and not looking back. Twitter is more free and people are generally less offended by criticism.


This did happen to me once. I did once comment that code of one of mods was fact wrong (code snippet). The mod warned me about banning me from the sub. I just requested please see the code and you did type it incorrectly. Next day ban...


Arent you confusing mods with reddit admins?

Admins are employees of reddit who can ban you globaly from the whole website.

Mods are "random" people who created a subreddit or happen to moderate it. They are unpaid volunteers and can only ban you from the subreddit they moderate.

There is lots of drama about people trading mod spots (there is that person/group of persons who modereated like 250 subreddits), hacking someone to become head mod - and then using a sub to push agenda, or straight out selling mod spots. You can earn a suprising big amount of money if you mod certain subreddits (e.g. related to cryptocurrencies or news).

Reddit admins seem to not care at all who mods ban. Some time ago they introduced a process to remove mods who dont moderate a sub at all (remove illegal/against TOS conent) but that's that. If you are a mod you are a king of a sub, only other mod (of same subreddit, who was there ealier) can remove you. In theory admins could but they dont care, unless they have bad press.

That's why there are many "splinter" subreddits with similar names.


Thanks for the reply Not sure how much power mods have? May be they are tag the account as spam/<threat> and some AI/ML automagically bans the account.


What can actually happen is the user is banned from a sub and goes to another sub and complains. The mod that banned them complains/reports to admins that this is target harassment and gets the user banned from the site.

Complaining about top reddit admins will get you banned for targeted harassment as well.

They can do whatever they want since it's their site. I just don't think I'm interested in engaging when I can setup my own blog.


Twitter banned an ex-president. I don't think it's any more free. Use https://notabug.io/


> Twitter banned an ex-president.

For a good reason. I support bans if they're reasonable. Banning VPNs instead of accounts abusing a VPN is unreasonable.


There's a pretty big difference between banning someone after dozens of warnings and a robot silently banning you without even telling you for something you might not even have done

This politically charged advertising is badly misplaced


Beside the fact that twitter bans account too, the issue is that it is people centric, you have to follow people/account (and see all their posts including stuff you don't care about, and miss I treating tweets on a subject by people you don't follow) whereas Reddit is topic centric, you subscribe to subreddits.


It seems obvious that this is the result of someone else having abused Reddit too much from PIA addresses.

I also find blanket proxy bans reasonable: it’s akin to refusing service to those who wear a balaclava to a store.


I think the analogy is closer to "refusing service to those who refuse the rectal thermometer test upon entry to a store".


I see the analogy but there’s a pretty big difference between hiding your face and hiding your device’s IP address. The former is a social norm going back tens of thousands of years, the latter is an arbitrary and artificial artefact of man made technology in the last 30.

A better analogy is sending mail with either proxy return addresses or none at all. Both are socially acceptable in most circumstances.


Why a store would ban a balaclava if the person fully authenticates himself and has a long good track record and does nothing wrong?


In this case it’s like wandering in to a store with a balaclava on and receiving a permanent ban from the store.


Honestly I can't say that I don't understand them. It's so easy to make good bots, and spam/automated propaganda is a HUGE problem on any social network.

Also posting good (stolen) content automatically to farm karma to then be able to spam everywhere for a few hours is a very common tactic

If I had to run a free social media like reddit I would do the same, you have no idea how hard it is to handle that imo




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