Reddit is going the same way.
I know many people who have got banned and never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.
Thing is, they use AI to ban people; over time, many false positives accumulate and not everyone has the time and energy to appeal bans.
Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.
But the Reddit management is seeing this as a "win," not able to see the consequence of doing this.
I stopped using Reddit not because I got banned, but because it has been steadily converted from the world's most popular forum platform to a trash heap of engagement hacks and shady practices. Moreso than SO, which was already struggling with existential problems before AI, Reddit did itself in.
I stopped when they killed old.reddit.com for non-logged-in users.
They're also blocking you from using even the new site on mobile.
The updated Firefox plugin still works.
Reddit has the most advanced AI system.
I tried to post on r/showerthoughts several times over the past 10 years. And every time it deleted my post saying my thought wasn't original. I was wow how they would even know that, and this was pre-AI.
I've been struggling to find something that scratches the Reddit itch, in the lineage of Slashdot, then Fark, then Digg. Any recommendations? I don't mean niche communities, there needs to be enough of a mainstream critical mass the makes it _the_ place to go. I don't think it's Lemmy, though maybe it could be.
there is an amazing opportunity on the internet for proper community that isnt slinging shooting to either extreme of the political spectrum. we need a decent discussion board like reddit without the horrible mods banning or automods deleteing something because it wasnt EXACTLY following 19 different rules in the sub baar.
> there is an amazing opportunity on the internet for proper community
But how will you design it to survive in this age of malicious actors and persona farms?
Reddit is an absolutely hostile platform now, the amount of dogpiling is insane. Say the wrong thing and apparently you're simultaneously a bot, and a valid target for harassment (why people are so invested in harassing people they think are bots, I have no clue?)
I thought that calling people bots was just a way to dehumanize what they perceive as an opponent, just like in wars, but they know that it's a person.
I went on Reddit recently to look something up and some of the niche subreddits were decent but I was shocked at the amount of just total garbage that's there now (including lots of weird misogyny) so it's not just the bans that are a problem. It feels like every social media platform is just miserable to use now. Except occasionally posting here my only social media is just Discord servers with my actual real life friends.
Everything moved to Discord now. Reddit started ignoring subreddit subscriptions which made the whole platform a homogeneous blob of slop. Discord has maintained separation between communities and has minimal discoverability features so users stick to the servers they participate which builds a sense of community.
Honestly, agree. I find the niche subreddits are nice because they are still very human, in terms of both users and mods, but once they get a bit bigger it just gets destroyed by new users and bots.
Problem is there are no niche subreddits anymore, there are no walls between subreddits at all. Reddit runs on a modern algorithm where any individual post which scores well will be shown to the whole site regardless of users individual subscriptions.
There was that 1 person who used to work(paid?/volunteer?) at Reddit that actively tried to cultivate high-quality AMA on Reddit. Ever since they've been gone. It hasn't felt the same.
Some amount of hope and optimism that was around has definitely dried up or at least moved elsewhere into other smaller communities.
Everything is overly centralized around a particular influencer/podcaster/celebrity/product or whatever nowadays, it's harder to find topic based or open community-based places. The other places still exist, but still difficult to find and keep going.
I do hope the pendulum swings back towards hopeful optimistic culturally rich community vibes in many digital spaces.
Victoria (I think)!
Yeah, AMAs lost their charm for me after she got the can.
I think the various reddit dramas over the years have taken their toll on the site even if they didn't completely kill it. You can see it in moderation these days, individual sub mods have called out the fact that no one pays them and they don't have the motivation to spend all day enforcing quality for free. No one has stepped up to replace them so most moderation on Reddit is site wide LLM powered moderation.
The Reddit banning algorithm is strange in its own way.
In the past, I had tried to maintain a two accounts setup by policy. My main account (focused on camera, optics and photography etc) got gilded several times, with some posts appearing on their 'Popular' feed. I have used a secondary account(s) on occasions which engages in politics, tech, immigration etc. It has got flagged for contentious debates and I have been Reddit-banned once on one of them (for political criticisms and arguments against right wing; not my finest hour).
Whenever I tried to create a secondary since that incident, it gets banned immediately by their algorithms. It is insanely invasive in how they are able to detect someone. But I am surprised they never touch the gilded one - even if the same device/app was used for registration.
A theory to that feels there is more to than meets the eye in the way they use their filters to ban accounts. They are more lenient to older accounts (having Awards) or the ones which have got recognized in some way (appearing on Main Feed / Popular), but willing to discard the ordinary. Their user management policy is definitely intriguing
I am so deeply banned from Reddit it feels retaliatory in some way.
Twitter, too for that matter, but for different reasons.
In general, in online communities - i think there is no such thing as free moderators. If you aren't paying them in money then you pay them in power.
I refused to make a Reddit account. I knew my personality would lead me to wasting entirely too much time on the site if I could reply. (Like here... >sigh<)
When they killed "old.reddit.com" for non-logged-in users I stopped reading it at all. It's completely useless to me now. The "new" UI is garbage and makes me enable JavaScript.
I suppose I was never their target market anyway.
There's Old Reddit Redirect extension in Firefox, but honestly, you're not missing out on anything there anyway.
doesnt work as of today
I am totally addicted to reddit. Good instincts - stay off it hahaha
Surprised to hear this, I'm not alone!
My account was banned back around 2021. I had a separate account on mobile, which got subsequently banned for 'evading a ban'. Have been unable to create an account since then, even on entirely new machines, different OS, renewed IP. Whatever tracking techniques they use are downright scary.
The worst part is that all of this started because a mod in a right-leaning sub silenced my account, then decided to turn it into a permanent ban for no reason.
Nowadays, I'd still like to visit r/programming for a change, and share some of my work, but otherwise it's such a cesspool of AI-generated content and bots that the appeal has almost entirely faded.
Ive experienced this as well, i confronted some reddit devs at a conference about their ability to track sock accounts and they kinda just smiled and acknowledged what I suspected vaguely.
It's kind of like the opposite of the Nazi bar problem.
You purge some Nazis, then run out of Nazis to purge, but you've got a good purge system going...
> Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.
Meanwhile bots are running rampant and I can't scroll through the site for 10 minutes without seeing an obvious bot post or comment. Dead internet is real.
and hopefully soon we have decentralized protocols as the standard when we think about user spaces. amen
We had it. Reddit should have just been NNTP. You can't "monetize" NNTP though.
I used to be a lot more enthusiastic about decentralized protocols. I don't know how to solve the AI problem though. I think the Internet as we knew it for assumed-human interaction is dead, and the surest way to believe you're interacting with humans now is through existing trusts, such as accounts older than AI and highly-moderated forums, and to charge for access.
Reddit still has a place for very niche communities. To this day it can be the best place for a lot of things.
But what's really clear for anything newsworthy or controversial or political is just how much Reddit is botted and brigaded and how easy that is. And Reddit seems totally unwilling to tackle this at all. But you can get something to r/news or even r/all frontpage with even a few hundred accounts.
One example that comes to mind of Reddit enabling this kind of thing is the feature they added where if you click a user they can hide their history. You can still find it, particularly in the LLM era (but it doesn't even require you go to that far), but most people don't go looking because of that extra effort. It's a shame because the botting becomes really obvious.
I honestly think all social media (including Reddit) needs to be required to make public what country an account is posting from, particularly when it comes to politics or anything controversial. My thesis is that you would see just how botted these areas are, how so many accounts with big followings are overseas and likely bots.
You might be tempted to say "they'll just use a VPN". This is a solvable problem however because VPN IP ranges can and will be identified and should invoke more scrutiny. For example, streamers use this kind of thing to find people evading geogating. But also you can't hide latency. Issue someone a challenge and there's only so fast they can respond.
My account of well over a year and 11k karma was banned by admins presumably for an admin-deleted comment where I said "Hi kids, buy our product!" as a Steve-Buschemi-meme reference, and was flagged as spam. To your point they also have their Comment Quality Score (CQS) which lowers you automatically if you use Proton email aliases, lowers you if you use VPN to access the site, among other things.
Made several polite appeals and requests for clarification, all which went unanswered.
I was banned from subreddits for belonging to r/conservative. Mods wanted me to disavow that subreddit to atone for the sin of belonging to that subreddit.
Reddit is by far the most toxic place on the web, yet somehow manages to get the least amount of scrutiny from regulators. Makes you wonder why, doesn't it?
all hidden accounts posting political propaganda day and night in the name of privacy was enough to turn me off
Also subreddit mods can ban your entire account..wtf. I was banned for arguing in a poltical subreddit. So if a mod doesn't like your political beliefs they can ban you (and your devices apparently) from the site.
And can confirm, they are suspiciously good at detecting sock accounts.