Ask HN: Account has been permanently suspended from Reddit
Just got the dreaded message "Your account has been permanently suspended from Reddit.", with no prior warnings or any idea on why this may have happened. Attempted to search through my history, but nothing stands out, and my 10K+ "karma" on both sides of Reddit participation (submissions and comments) makes me think that I have not really done anything warranting a ban.
Found two older accounts of mine, which I used for some tests on old phones, quite a while ago, and as soon as I logged in I got the same message: "Your account has been permanently suspended from Reddit."
Anyone having experienced this?
78 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadI got my random 10 year old personal account banned from Reddit recently because I was told my username "contains a slur" even though the term in question is an exact match for an existing subreddit and appears all over Reddit.
It doesn't really matter because I don't care enough about Reddit anymore. There's better communities for freedom of speech where you will not get blocked or banned when you don't express the same exact opinions in lock-step with everybody else. Reddit can have their corporate advertising friendly safe space.
Wait, did you get banned because you expressed your own opinion or because your username contained a slur?
Or do you mean that using slurs is something that should be allowed because it in itself is expressing your own opnion?
This is a separate topic, but Reddit seems to be becoming increasingly dismissive of opinions that don’t fit into the narrow pre-approved pro-corporate orthodoxy. I’ve been blocked from many subreddits in recent weeks simply for politely voicing pro-choice posts on anti-mandate subreddits.
OK. So, what was the slur?
I was suspended from reddit too, but my other accounts were never suspended, and to be fair I say a lot of stupid things on all my accounts
It shows banned and shadow-banned content.
Subreddits are banning people for simply participating in blacklisted topics / subreddits.
Reddit's censorship has gotten so bad I think it's a real societal risk considering how prevalent it is.
Yes they do. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30322984 explains how.
All that being said, implying that Reddit carries any sort of "societal risk" is a ridiculous statement.
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You can only havea working social credit system and survellience system online if you can collapse everyone down to a single UID of whatever (in this case usernmaes)
So if you have multiple accounts, and they can corerolate the multi-accounts to a single UID (person)
And you can use billions of bots and computational resources to track to whom a comment bleongs (the human) -- you have all that much more control and leverage over controlling that commentary coming from that human.
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I think they are ensuring they have laser connection to the previously anon reddit accounts such that they have a sniper rifle on any human that steps out of bounds.
How is reddit anyhow relevant to society. And how would a corporation cleaning/sterilizing an online forum be a societal risk. Is society that fragile?
And how can it be censorship? At least in my jurisdiction protection against censorship and free speech laws regulate the state's behavior, not private people or corporations. Not sure how this is in the US, though.
I just don't understand why people calling the behavior of private entities censorship.
But as said, I very likely are missing something fundamental.
A large portion of the population do not go to specific news sites directly but instead rely on a link aggregator, Reddit being the most popular in the world (I believe).
If a political entity were to gain significant control of the censorship mechanisms, you would have a massive societal risk IMO. I have been following the censorship problem on Reddit for a while now and I think this has now become the case.
I can't say which entities are operating here, but it seems resoundingly clear something very inorganic is happening in Reddit's systems.
All that effort isn't worth it IMHO for a site that has a very bizarre policy as what content or speech they find acceptable and what they don't. There is a few good subs yes, personally I can't support a website where its admins let the website be moderated by very questionable individuals, sex offenders when there are minors on their websites, and let these mods manipulate people with mental issues and autists into delusion and nonsense.
Subtle.
We should set up a system by which these platforms have a choice.
Either they are responsible for the content posted on their sites similar to a news organization and they enjoy the right to fully editorialize (create, remove, modify) the content on their sites.
OR
They are classified as providers and similar to ISPs they are not responsible for the content on their sites but they're also not free to modify it except under order from a court.
Give the sites the ability to choose how they are classified but once they pick they can't switch between the statuses. Then let the natural experiment play out and let's see what happens.
Generally the wheels of justice grind very slowly, but grind very finely, and do not tolerate attempts at "hacking" the justice system by just putting a e- prefix on something.
For some real world examples, there's no federal election law problem with my local bar giving away free beer during happy hour, and there's no federal election law problem with the local bar banning people from the premises for almost any reason including political beliefs. But they would get into HUGE federal election law trouble if they hacked the anti-bribery rules by pretending that giving away free beer to anyone displaying a vote-by-mail ballot to encourage participation in the voting process, and simultaneously banning from the premises anyone who voted for the "wrong" party, and then pretending that those are isolated activities that do not have a common effect of essentially bribing people with free beer if they vote the correct way.
There are also information dissemination legal issues. Like everyone else (probably?) my official election polling site is defined by a postcard from the municipal treasurer's clerk's office. That was delivered by the supposedly non-partisan USPS. In theory I could be deprived of my right to vote by the clerk deciding to deliver voting location postcards by Fedex and an activist stock owner's group pressuring Fedex into refusing to deliver to people whom historically voted in the "wrong" parties primary. There's no law that Fedex must accept all commerce regardless of political affiliation, but the courts would take a pretty dim view of Fedex implementing voter suppression as a secondary effect.
A problem that's already appeared on Reddit in a big way, is assumptions about group membership. A real world analogy is about 80% of primary voters where I live are faithful and vote for the same party in the general and primary election and about 20% of voters are unfaithful and vote for different parties in the primary and the general. Primary voting party is public knowledge where I live. So its public knowledge that there's a roughly 40% chance I voted for Hillary in 2016 and a 60% chance I voted for Bernie, and in theory people could use that knowledge against me. In theory its secret whom I voted for in the general, but lets just say it was mathematically very likely it was someone else. Anyway on Reddit its double plus un good think to participate in any way with known religious heretics and that will get you banned, even if you don't agree with them. And if Reddit is ever determined by a court to be operating under federal election law regulations, they will end up in BIG trouble for voter suppression and bribery.
All these situations are a pretty big problem to "groupthink" style social media sites that ban all members of one party vs the other.
ISPs block spam emails all the time. Should they be prevented from doing so?
Because it would give them legal protection from being responsible (to a degree) for what their users post.
To be clear: they enjoy these protections today.
If I upload copyrighted material to Reddit, then Reddit themselves cannot be sued for simply hosting it (assuming they take it down when notified).
If I upload a libelous set of statements to Reddit, then you can't sue Reddit themselves for libel.
What I'm saying is that if Reddit wants to heavily moderate and editorialize the content on their website then they should lose those protections.
I'm advocating for making them pick: either you can moderate speech as much as you like but you are responsible for the end product _or_ you can't moderate speech and you're not responsible.
In my view the problem is that today they are allowed to moderate speech as much as they like but have no responsibility for what they say.
This would never fly in a traditional news organization for instance. If NPR has one of their anchors play copyrighted material on air - NPR themselves are responsible. If the Wall St. Journal publishes someone's column that contains truly libelous about someone then Newscorp can get sued.
> ISPs block spam emails all the time. Should they be prevented from doing so?
You'd have to explain the context in which they do it to me more.
I'm not informed enough on that particular topic to have an opinion.
Is there any other social media website where you can even pseudonymously track who is moderating? Besides independent forums, Reddit is the only one I know of where it’s even possible to evaluate the individuals moderating to any degree.
What? Their official client literally supports multiple accounts.
I don't think this is true. There are some subs which encourage if not require you to post via a throwaway account.
At this point, there are hundreds of fingerprinting techniques they could be using.
Most HN participants will judge your post based on the content of your post, rather than taking the time to click thru to examine your position in the social hierarchy groupthink relative to mine or theirs, yours is merely 234 at this time, which is about one 59th of my exalted rank in the hierarchy. Given our power disparity I believe you're supposed to address me as Honored Sir, BTW. (just kidding... I think?)
As for Reddit its funny how classist it inherently is, given its political leanings of most of its few remaining unbanned participants.
I'm just saying public participation in conversation moderating is much like public participation in voting where its a pretty extreme power law where most people lurk or barely themselves to click a button, but a very small minority will put in huge efforts for their cause.
I got quite far with a new account and a VPN but one day I accidentally logged in without the VPN and I was snatched immediately.
My crime: simply stating the fact that IBM worked with Nazi Germany to create the census system which helped facilitate the extermination of Jewish people.
Basically, Reddit wants you to use a single account forever and never post or say anything remotely controversial. Which makes a lot of sense because that's how they make the most money.
I was innactive for a while before the suspension. My only guess is that the account had some market value due to age/karma and was hacked (weak password). And someone posted something that would lead to the suspension.
But I agree with other comments that reddit is definitely trying to sanitize accounts that might not look good for corporate.
I wrote asking why it was banned and they said it was a mistake and unbanned it. Maybe worth asking.
Reddit has had a great run, but they are preparing to IPO. We can expect it to get more controlled by its customers(the advertisers and financiers). I am planning to spin up an instance of Lemmy on my Yunohost. This is the federated free and open source alternative to Reddit. You can check out one instance at https://lemmy.ml/. The challenge will be getting more people to participate in the alternative that is designed to be free of such censorship.
I appealed and was denied flat out...
I have begun deleting my comment history on reddit - then I will delete my account
Good luck.
The reality here, reddit did you a great favour. Just take this as a sign to move on.
But same happened to me, it sucks