reddit is no longer what it once was. it is not an ai-content-generation farm. It years ago abandoned its original ethos in favor of ever more fascist tendencies such as this - the unilateral silencing of individuals without cause or recourse is just one of many. There are outright bans on opinion. The overton window is now enforced via LLM.
I've been accused of using AI by Redditors as well. I am unsure of what caused it, but I was banned in December with no warnings, no reason, and with no response at any of my appeals. I still have no idea why I was banned.
One thing I didn't notice OP mentioning is whether he was using a VPN or not. Of course that would make the suspicion level spike in any spam classifier.
I can't share the experience with OP as I have a longstanding reddit account and really only participate in niche subreddits using old reddit. My rule of thumb is to always be skeptical about ban grievance stories that don't provide all the details that a knowledgeable person would ask. What, precisely, was posted? What platform was it posted from? Was there a dancing around of IP addresses and estimated locations with VPNs?
If I were to make a new account, I'm wondering if I would run into the same issues. Surely it can't be that difficult for new users to join reddit?
There's a separate, larger discussion about aspects of the modern internet that people are going to have to get used to, in that "determining whether someone is a real person or not" will be necessary for a lot of services to stay alive. I don't believe the conspiracies that attempts to do this are all for mass surveillance. Mostly, a place for people to talk can only live if people trust that they're talking to other people. Right now, we're seeing some botched or overzealous implementations of this, which might describe what OP ran into.
People run these forums, but seemingly they all act like antisocial people. These unwritten rules reminds me of HR's shenanigans. Wear this, talk like that, cv should look like a flying cow, oh and you have to walk backwards to be sure.
The whole reddit experience is just plain ridiculous. It feels exactly like a site that was made by extraterrestrial entities who try to blend in.
New reddit UI/UX is slow and hard to read. old reddit is ok, but you always have a feeling you somehow went back to the 90s. Mind boggling. Site is overengineered and neglected at the same time and most of the moderators are trigger happy and just plain braindead. Perfect example why people should never be given power.
And people less and less want a good discussion, they want to hear their own voices and block you whenever they are losing in an argument. Also, a lot of control freaks roam around who think people are there to cater to their every whim. Others are just running amok, post some ragebait and never commit anything to the "discussion". Essentially enjoy watching as people getting at each others throats.
I have a strange feeling these discussion sites are only there to further alienate people from each other.
I'm trying to do the same thing to share my well being apps. I've only released one out of the two so far (a GrapheneOS dumbphone solution), but I can't post it on Reddit or Hacker News until I build up much more reputation.
I just made a Reddit account as a forward thinking to be able to use it eventually. Surprisingly I was able to sign up on a Mullvad exit IP and not get shadow banned immediately. I did use an anti-detect browser so maybe the browser is winning against Reddit's spam filters today?
1/3 of my comments are shadow banned, though. The only one that isn't is, "Petting my dog" in response to a random post asking what puts you in a better mood. While two other actually helpful posts have either been blocked by karma minimums or Reddit.
I can't really blame anyone, it's just a bad situation. Hacker News handles it better than most with the vouching but you have to understand how it works and the AI still gets through.
I’m struggling with this as I have apps I would like to share but I literally don’t know how. I can’t post on Reddit. I can post a Show HN, but I’ll probably break some unwritten rule and get shadowbanned. I can share with my friends, but they’re not really the target audience.
The only option I can think of is to just pay influencers, and I’m guessing the cost of influencer marketing is going to be a multiple of what I spent actually developing the app. What am I missing?
> I’m struggling with this as I have apps I would like to share
Youb and half the internet. How many apps did you install today from forcefully reading it on some social media or website your accessed to do anything other than look for apps?
At some point in the recent (last few years) past, reddit account bans became a fully-automated process with no oversight. Unfortunately, that leads to people getting banned for nothing. That happened to me.
In this case, you did violate reddiquette. Historically, you were expected to make 10 posts in a subreddit for every one self promo post. But violation of this usually led to a subreddit ban, not to a reddit ban. Also, no one actually cares about reddiquette anymore, not even Reddit.
I expect that they auto-ban self promos these days because they want people to pay for ads.
Yup, lost a 15 year account for multiple Rule 1 violations. All were either quotes from of a film, or obvious jokes. I got the final perm ban removed on appeal, at least allegedly, but my account remains banned and further appeals are straight up ignored. To add insult to injury, I made the mistake of logging in to an alt account on my phone and then that was banned too for evasion!
Reddit has already become an LLM-ridden cesspool as of late. What do they hope to accomplish by getting rid of long term users and making it difficult to onboard new, actual humans?
I don't even know what I lost it for. I was talking about Dwarf Fortress, trying to help someone backport a dfhack script to fix a bug (I was the author of the script). Next thing I know the post was deleted by admins and I was banned. Did an appeal but I didn't get a response.
Also, it's true. In some subs I swear a third of the comments are obvious bots. I don't think the admins care - as long as the officials user numbers keep going up, they're happy.
I haven't got 1k karma even after few years of usage. Perhaps you gained it too fast or in a suspicious way.
Have you followed rules of each subreddit carefully? There also was/is some issue when not all rules were visible in old vs new reddit so you could miss important information if you used the "wrong" reddit.
For a long time I had to ask the moderators to whitelist my posts due to low karma. But hadn't had problems, other than I'm apparently blacklisted from upvoting anything for some reason (it just doesn't apply when logged out or when asked other users).
Nowadays I don't visit Reddit too often because there is simply not much of interesting content, all the subreddits I visit introduced strict anti-AI policies, the result is that there is very little posts.
Yep. That all sounds about right. Reddit is for bot slop, astroturfing, and basement-dwelling troglodytes just itching to exercise the tiniest amount of power over other anonymous people on the internet. It's a very stupid place.
Account bans on Reddit. I signed up in 2009. I posted heavily for almost a decade. Then in 2018 the reddit admins banned the community r/gundeals. I messaged the admin account asking why politely. My account was banned. Later, r/gundeals was reinstated and the admins said they were wrong to have banned it. My account remains banned. I did not try to sign up again. Instead I started collecting RSS/Atom/etc feeds, I have over 1800 in my RSS reader now. I started posting on usenet again too. It's no reddit, but even if they were to un-ban me I wouldn't go back now.
Reddit was never the same after they started taking huge amounts of VC money, fired all the old staff that interacted with the community, and changed the interface and system so posting to your profile was normal in order to better fit the social structure of the users from the 2015->2020 facebook exodus they were depending upon to monetize. It's pretty much just facebook now.
Yes, mostly because site owners don't understand that when they put their website behind cloudflare (free) defaults it ends up blocking feed readers. Cloudflare is the greatest enemy to the open internet that current exists.
as long as reddit has a downvote system it will be better than facebook. obvious ragebait and inflamtory comment goes to the bottom of the comment chain even if they are the most interacted with because the majority of users downvote and move on, which is a better outcome that whatever happen on facebook when a user is making obvious bait (and is probably a bot)
Not enough info here to draw any conclusions. Changing IP only will likely trigger a ban-evasion ban.
I’ve been using Reddit since 2008, a dozen accounts, only got banned from one subreddit ever for calling out racism (actual, not the deflated, wishy-washy kind). It’s hard to take these stories at face value.
One reasons people’s experiences differ here is that IP ranges of certain countries (outside of the very mainstream west) are much faster to get banned.
I got a 3-day for "violence against places" after suggesting that a current ethnostate be disestablished and replaced by a secular multi-ethnic democracy. Appeals were rejected.
Surely you see how your anecdotal experience isn't sufficient to understand the false positive rate of these systems, right?
My 11 year old reddit account was banned a couple of hours into my engagement vacation to bhutan. After putting a local sim in my phone, I was first locked out of my account - I then passed their verification and unlocked it, just to wake up the next morning to an account ban. Their anti abuse systems are clearly very poorly calibrated for anybody who even slightly deviates from normal account access patterns.
AI slop and adverstories are a growing problem on Reddit. It worsens the S/N ratio of subreddit subscriber feeds and so I have little sympathy for those who contribute to it.
As a regular reddit user I can say that they aren't nearly aggressive enough about banning LLM generated spam, tons of smaller subreddits I used to enjoy following are getting choked with very obvious (it even fails pangram) AI spam posts.
> they aren't nearly aggressive enough about banning LLM generated spam
Why would they be? Reddit is filled with cretins in love with their own opinions, so they are fed to them via LLM slop.
Consider old.reddit is gone and mobile is next.
They are punting everyone to the app.
More LLM spam == more engagement.
More engagement == more ad impressions.
Which for some reason is all PrEP and COVID vaccines and depression medicines, those ads are all I see on that site now.
They are squeezing every last dollar out before it all collapses. Reddit is approaching the part in Goodfellas where they burn down the bar to collect the insurance money.
Reddit updoots on any of my comments in a political or social discussion have long been a signal for me to stop and reconsider my position. To be fair, the same is mostly true on HN, but there are far fewer degenerates here. Thankfully it only takes a few seconds to create a new account on each every few days.
you comment about a certain country and your account gets banned !! i had 50k karma !! nothing negative btw ! just the name of one country and that too with regards to a technical acquisition ! primesense and q.ai. where primesense detected face movements q can detect emotions !!
There are zero specifics to the complaint here. This could be as simple as "you violated the clearly posted rules of the specific community". Add to that what, at least externally (if not also actually) appears to be ban evasion, and there are plausible other reasons why what happened might have happened.
And then there's stuff like,
> I was also advised to sign up through the mobile app, as that would make my account seem more trustworthy.
I know someone who had to create two accounts for a video (so, on a desktop browser) and they had no such issues either. One of those accounts even safely created a thread on /r/technology.
I think OP is omitting a few much more important detail: What project, on which subs and always the same link? Because I have a suspicion they're all the same, and yeah, they got the ban evasion flag slapped onto them.
I have a 13K+ karma account on reddit that was banned from a subreddit of a very well known desktop environment, because I pointed out things that were happening and they just didn't like the fact that I was pointing them out. This, after having a history of contributing to said desktop environment for 10 years.
I messaged the moderators asking for a reinstatement, and not only the ban was not lifted; the mods taunted me via DMs.
Well, no problem. I just was helping people use Linux and that desktop environment better, and also helping to clarify many myths and misconceptions that were formed over the years in that desktop environment. I just left the subreddit and as someone here said, the only winning move is not to play.
Some people are just idiots and whatever power they have gets to their head. It's human nature.
In my experience, https://discuss.python.org/ was also pretty trigger-happy with the account bans (for posting a link to an already-presented PyData presentation and code that was totally uncommercial). Eventually found a more obscure category with a much smaller number of participants to post it in where it got an OK reception. It seemed they were just completely overwhelmed with off-topic submissions in the high-volume categories, and this was before AI slop even came into its own.
Reddit recently started being more aggressive about getting you to use their app. They got rid of the old.reddit workaround so I’ve just stopped dealing with the site.
71 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 11.4 ms ] threadThe anti AI slant is hilarious since the whole site is mined for AI.
And all the content generates actual revenue and you, the content generator, get abuse for your trouble.
The whole of everything is mined for AI. The decisions of the site owners to profit from the mining aren't necessarily the views of the contributors.
I mean.... that's a good reason to feel anti-AI sentiment, isn't it?
If I were to make a new account, I'm wondering if I would run into the same issues. Surely it can't be that difficult for new users to join reddit?
There's a separate, larger discussion about aspects of the modern internet that people are going to have to get used to, in that "determining whether someone is a real person or not" will be necessary for a lot of services to stay alive. I don't believe the conspiracies that attempts to do this are all for mass surveillance. Mostly, a place for people to talk can only live if people trust that they're talking to other people. Right now, we're seeing some botched or overzealous implementations of this, which might describe what OP ran into.
The whole reddit experience is just plain ridiculous. It feels exactly like a site that was made by extraterrestrial entities who try to blend in.
New reddit UI/UX is slow and hard to read. old reddit is ok, but you always have a feeling you somehow went back to the 90s. Mind boggling. Site is overengineered and neglected at the same time and most of the moderators are trigger happy and just plain braindead. Perfect example why people should never be given power.
And people less and less want a good discussion, they want to hear their own voices and block you whenever they are losing in an argument. Also, a lot of control freaks roam around who think people are there to cater to their every whim. Others are just running amok, post some ragebait and never commit anything to the "discussion". Essentially enjoy watching as people getting at each others throats.
I have a strange feeling these discussion sites are only there to further alienate people from each other.
I just made a Reddit account as a forward thinking to be able to use it eventually. Surprisingly I was able to sign up on a Mullvad exit IP and not get shadow banned immediately. I did use an anti-detect browser so maybe the browser is winning against Reddit's spam filters today?
1/3 of my comments are shadow banned, though. The only one that isn't is, "Petting my dog" in response to a random post asking what puts you in a better mood. While two other actually helpful posts have either been blocked by karma minimums or Reddit.
I can't really blame anyone, it's just a bad situation. Hacker News handles it better than most with the vouching but you have to understand how it works and the AI still gets through.
The only option I can think of is to just pay influencers, and I’m guessing the cost of influencer marketing is going to be a multiple of what I spent actually developing the app. What am I missing?
You’re missing that the content you want to post is the definition of spam.
The system is working as intended.
Youb and half the internet. How many apps did you install today from forcefully reading it on some social media or website your accessed to do anything other than look for apps?
In this case, you did violate reddiquette. Historically, you were expected to make 10 posts in a subreddit for every one self promo post. But violation of this usually led to a subreddit ban, not to a reddit ban. Also, no one actually cares about reddiquette anymore, not even Reddit.
I expect that they auto-ban self promos these days because they want people to pay for ads.
Reddit has already become an LLM-ridden cesspool as of late. What do they hope to accomplish by getting rid of long term users and making it difficult to onboard new, actual humans?
Also, it's true. In some subs I swear a third of the comments are obvious bots. I don't think the admins care - as long as the officials user numbers keep going up, they're happy.
Have you followed rules of each subreddit carefully? There also was/is some issue when not all rules were visible in old vs new reddit so you could miss important information if you used the "wrong" reddit.
For a long time I had to ask the moderators to whitelist my posts due to low karma. But hadn't had problems, other than I'm apparently blacklisted from upvoting anything for some reason (it just doesn't apply when logged out or when asked other users).
Nowadays I don't visit Reddit too often because there is simply not much of interesting content, all the subreddits I visit introduced strict anti-AI policies, the result is that there is very little posts.
makes me think of https://duckduckgo.com/?q=farside+bummer+of+a+birthmark+hal&...
Reddit was never the same after they started taking huge amounts of VC money, fired all the old staff that interacted with the community, and changed the interface and system so posting to your profile was normal in order to better fit the social structure of the users from the 2015->2020 facebook exodus they were depending upon to monetize. It's pretty much just facebook now.
as long as reddit has a downvote system it will be better than facebook. obvious ragebait and inflamtory comment goes to the bottom of the comment chain even if they are the most interacted with because the majority of users downvote and move on, which is a better outcome that whatever happen on facebook when a user is making obvious bait (and is probably a bot)
I’ve been using Reddit since 2008, a dozen accounts, only got banned from one subreddit ever for calling out racism (actual, not the deflated, wishy-washy kind). It’s hard to take these stories at face value.
The automod interpreted this as a threat of violence. My appeal was ignored.
My 11 year old reddit account was banned a couple of hours into my engagement vacation to bhutan. After putting a local sim in my phone, I was first locked out of my account - I then passed their verification and unlocked it, just to wake up the next morning to an account ban. Their anti abuse systems are clearly very poorly calibrated for anybody who even slightly deviates from normal account access patterns.
Why would they be? Reddit is filled with cretins in love with their own opinions, so they are fed to them via LLM slop.
Consider old.reddit is gone and mobile is next.
They are punting everyone to the app.
More LLM spam == more engagement.
More engagement == more ad impressions.
Which for some reason is all PrEP and COVID vaccines and depression medicines, those ads are all I see on that site now.
They are squeezing every last dollar out before it all collapses. Reddit is approaching the part in Goodfellas where they burn down the bar to collect the insurance money.
You should take your ban as a badge of honor, for having upset the worst, most petty, worthless people on the Internet.
Then go outside and take a walk and watch the leaves change colors.
And then there's stuff like,
> I was also advised to sign up through the mobile app, as that would make my account seem more trustworthy.
… which is just utterly off the mark.
I think OP is omitting a few much more important detail: What project, on which subs and always the same link? Because I have a suspicion they're all the same, and yeah, they got the ban evasion flag slapped onto them.
I messaged the moderators asking for a reinstatement, and not only the ban was not lifted; the mods taunted me via DMs.
Well, no problem. I just was helping people use Linux and that desktop environment better, and also helping to clarify many myths and misconceptions that were formed over the years in that desktop environment. I just left the subreddit and as someone here said, the only winning move is not to play.
Some people are just idiots and whatever power they have gets to their head. It's human nature.
Every time I think about posting, I think again.
Let it die like stackoverflow. AI won.