Reddit has been dead for a while. There is still a lot of great information hidden along the noise, but it’s very much not a community that you can belong to. Your comments will almost never be taken seriously, or even be noticed. There’s almost no point in taking part in actual discourse on Reddit. People might think this is about politics, but I really don’t discuss politics on Reddit. Instead, any topic on Reddit gets this treatment, even when the topics are mundane. Smaller subreddits do still manage to avoid this, to be fair. But at any moment any small subreddit could get new mods, get banned, or even just see an influx of new users which permanently changes its character.
Mo3 123 days ago [-]
And the astroturfing and bots. So much in the bigger subs.
politelemon 124 days ago [-]
Looking at the language around "upvote several pieces of content banned for violating our policies will begin to receive a warning", and comments from the admin, it is quite clear that the definition will remain subjective and can change over time.
jfengel 124 days ago [-]
Of course. I can't imagine how you'd define such a thing objectively.
But a fair bit of content is more-or-less unanimously off limits, and it doesn't seem useful to say "I can't define it rigorously so I guess we have to allow the child torture porn". Communities are best-effort activities.
mft_ 124 days ago [-]
I assume this is relates to the posts in recent days suggesting Reddit is now penalising users for interacting with some posts about Luigi Mangione.
As we’ve seen previously, Reddit will continue to slowly evolve in a direction that suits its corporate owners, and protests may feel empowering in the short but fail to change anything in the longer term.
In the meantime, it would be a shame[0] if this was protested using the John Oliver approach[1] only with pictures of Luigi.
It's wild to me the blatant double standard that Reddit admins and mods have regarding violence in comments.
You can crack jokes left and right about Russian soldiers getting blown up by drones or Russian oligarchs and bureaucrats being pushed out of windows and 'falling onto bullets' but if someone says the same thing about American oligarchs the ban hammer comes out.
mft_ 123 days ago [-]
The closest I've seen to a class consciousness in America in recent times was the brief unity shown in response to the killing of Brian Thompson. People from both sides of the politcal spectrum who had suffered due to the Health Insurance industry didn't want to condemn what had happened, or outright supported it. I can fully understand how some people would be terrified by the current political divide being relaced by a genuine class divide.
It would be very interesting to understand the chain of cause-and-effect that led to Reddit implmenting this policy, and directing it specifically (it seems) at posts related to Luigi.
trod1234 120 days ago [-]
> The closest I've seen to a class consiousness in America ...
You are mistaken. You can no longer consider the vast majority of trending content on social media to be crafted by actual people. LLM has made sock puppetry and the accompanying distorted reflected appraisal, both cost effective at scale and ruinous.
The cause of the policy change is an escalation of what naturally follows their exploitation of both the original unpaid moderators that left in the exodus as well as the unpaid volunteers who have left or were driven out leading to the Cooling Effect on Social Media.
The moderators they have that remained are for the most part subverted, and have turned to Anaconda in the Chandelier-like strategies to rule their kingdom like their own personal feifdom driving the core elements that made the community valuable in the first place away.
Reddit is starting to notice this too, because accounts are using the karma system in conjunction with large amounts of sock puppets are acting as sybil attack vectors where extreme content stays up, and they take a stock market hit every time the trusted news initiative brings it up on-air.
Collectivism trends towards destruction every time its embraced by a large number of people. It may be slower or faster depending on certain things, but inevitably it comes up against an out-of-context problem couched in existential crisis that the members of such cannot recognize or foresee. The consequences vanish along with all those people, to the sands of time and chaos. Bronze-age collapse, Greece, Rome, etc.
History is important, and when the ignorant in privileged positions take their flocks along for the ride, the destruction that follows is quite sinful and evil.
The simple fact of the matter is, when the pillars of society fail and unwind, it falls back to a rule of violence and the natural world. This is well studied under social contract theory and aspects on the history of political economy.
This isn't a political divide, its a ruinous cycle of spiraling madness where business thinks it wins, but they win so much that they destroy themselves and lose everything, and it was able to happen because necessity and urgency was decoupled from the funding, through money printing.
There are several pillars to society, one of the pivotal ones is a rule of law which requires several components that themselves are interdependent, and which have objectively failed today. The purpose of law is non-violent conflict resolution. When you have it, violence isn't acceptable, when you don't it naturally happens as abuses become egregious. In such disadvantaged environments, it is about what one can or can't do, not whether it should or ought to happen.
Natural law certainly doesn't follow Tolstoy's pacifism or nihilism except to extinction.
weard_beard 123 days ago [-]
I recently got selected to take a survey on changes they are rolling out. I took the survey on a lark.
They are turning it into Digg. Giant ads after the first result of every content listing page pushing most results far below the fold.
Its going to cause a mass exodus.
fmxsh 123 days ago [-]
Did I just read:
> "This will begin with [targeting clearly objectionable content], but we may consider expanding this in the future [to opinions we do not like]."
And further down:
> "It is everyone’s collective responsibility [to ensure no one disagrees with us] ..."
I do see the problem of moderation, but don't think this in itself is a good solution long-term.
ty6853 123 days ago [-]
As reddit became more commercialized, somehow it turned into a place where mere opinions resulted in bans. Sometimes directly, but more often what happens is moderators allowed users with sanctioned opinions to relentlessly verbally deride those with unsanctioned opinions and then ban the target as soon as they reflected even one iota of the lashing back.
It has gotten to the point where even HN, a place full of progressive coastie techies, looks like a free speech bastion of thought diversity by comparison. I miss the pre ~2015s internet where even though everyone might hate you, you had the right to your opinion.
rmholt 123 days ago [-]
In contrary to modern popular belief, this is not the case (at least on reddit).
Unless you are advocating genocide, murder, outright advocating for ethnic cleansing, or are violently sexist/racist, you're fine.
survirtual 123 days ago [-]
This is not true.
When I was active on reddit, I advocated for nuclear energy using math and physics. One time, I wrote a comment calculating energy vs used land vs used infrastructure, including mining and logistics, to show how radically more efficient nuclear is than any other power source. It got little / no engagement.
That comment triggered me to check pushshift and see if I was banned for some reason. Turns out, every comment I had ever made about nuclear technology was shadow banned, even relatively innocuous ones. This was universally across all of reddit.
They don't allow advocating for nuclear energy, what else don't they allow?
One time, I wrote a historical warning about how the rich don't generally do well with massive wealth inequality during times of revolution. This was flag as violent content and I got a warning saying I would be banned if I did it again.
This was roughly ~5 years ago. How much do you think the noose has tightened since then?
Keep in mind, my comments were well thought out, posted in good faith, and respectful. I was not trying to hurt people or prove them wrong, just truth seeking and truth sharing.
It became clear to me truth is no longer allowed on mass platforms.
rmholt 123 days ago [-]
Is it possible your entire account got shadow banned, due to unrelated reasons? Afaik it's not even possible to shadow ban a single post, but they do that to entire accounts.
EDIT: Also that's a really pessimistic leap, "my account got shadow banned (on one platform, and you don't know it was the nuclear)" to "truth is no longer allowed on (implied all!) mass platforms"
EDIT2: Also, how the saying goes, shit happens. I got banned on so many servers and forums, for random reasons. And I moved on?? Create another account if you have to, it's not like they can enforce the no multiple accounts rule well
survirtual 123 days ago [-]
There must be some method to remove posts without informing a user and making it appear to them it is still visible, while making it invisible to everyone else (shadow removal), because that was the state all my posts related to nuclear power were in.
My posts that were humor or otherwise "low-impact" were unaffected. I had many submissions with well over 1,000 karma, but only the submissions that had no economic or political impact were ever seen.
This isn't conjecture or paranoia, it is verified, and I traced it back years once I realized it was happening. I wrote a lot about nuclear energy and I was writing to the void. That is a very cruel thing to do to someone.
gruez 123 days ago [-]
>Is it possible your entire account got shadow banned, due to unrelated reasons? Afaik it's not even possible to shadow ban a single post, but they do that to entire accounts.
AFAIK you can do subreddit "shadowbans" by setting automod to send all posts to modqueue, and then using another rule to approve every post except the ones you want banned.
ty6853 123 days ago [-]
You generally only get targetted like that (anywhere in life) if you both have wrong opinions and you have a sophisticated and persuasive holistic argument that wins people over. If they can prove you wrong they'll be happy to leave it displayed for all so everyone can see what an idiot you are and mission accomplished. And they already have prepared rebuttals for anything in the books or talks by prominent proponents/opponents, so you have to have innate and original thoughts to get to the point they can't use those attacks and you start persuading others. If you're just espousing what the 'greatest' thinkers of your persuasion argue, even if it's Hitler, you are generally safe because they already know how to defeat that using whatever their own greatest thinkers told them.
This is actually a very rare trait in the general populace so it makes targeting such persons fairly narrow pursuit while simultaneously if you explain it happened most people will think you are crazy.
survirtual 123 days ago [-]
Except in the case of the arguments I make about nuclear, they were verifiably and very obviously correct. I would talk about the energy density of u235 nuclear reactions vs burning coal, the energy of a neutron vs the energy of photons, things like intermittent generators and baseload, etc. it is not controversial, and anyone with some basic background in physics or chemistry could verify it.
ty6853 123 days ago [-]
Yes and the red pill moment is when you realize this is exactly why your speech was banned.
They will leave provably wrong stuff up as a head on pike to show you're an idiot. They will let correct but unpersuasive stuff up, because who cares. They will let correct (or just controversial) stuff already stated by someone prominent up (even if by kkk or nazis), because they already have a rebuttal canned for that to make you look bad.
What they won't let stand is a correct, holistically persuasive original argument for the wrong opinion. They have no defense for that but banning. And thus doesn't apply only to reddit.
survirtual 123 days ago [-]
Just to clarify, by wrong opinion, you are speaking to the "authority's" opinion of what right and wrong is, as opposed to the universe's objectively right and wrong?
As in, anything that can realistically challenge an entity with power (say, energy companies using non-renewable systems like oil vs infinite / abundant systems like nuclear) is deemed "wrong"?
everdrive 123 days ago [-]
There's a meme going around which takes a metaphorically-similar quote: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” The meme answers the rhetorical question with an outlier example: "children with leukemia." The joke here is that although the quote could often have merit it certainly does not apply to all cases.
There are plenty of ideas which people want to censor for reasons other than that the ideas are strictly correct. Particularly when it comes to politics, a lot of ideas just speak to opinion or disposition, and there is no strictly right or wrong answer. But of course, people want to censor opinions with disconcerting frequency.
My comments here shouldn't be taken as pro-censorship. I consider myself nearly a free-speech absolutist, but the desire to censor is much more about politics and tribalism than it is about anything else.
ty6853 123 days ago [-]
5 years ago was when it became totally unusable and I stopped trying to find a way to use it. COVID gave a lot of people with a half ounce of power the green light to trump up 'misinformation' as murderous/violent, which was applied writ large.
gruez 123 days ago [-]
You're conflating moderators and reddit staff. OP was talking about actions of subreddit moderators, ie. unpaid volunteers. Your list of banned subreddits reflects the actions taken by reddit staff.
ty6853 123 days ago [-]
I was banned from all of reddit by paid moderators after an ivy league lawyer specifically targetted me, sifted through years of history for their best approach, and convinced them that my opinion on gun control was incorrect legal advice. They literally revived a ~year old thread specifically to engineer the attack on my account.
I suspect it was done due to my opinions on covid.
123 days ago [-]
keyboard_slap 123 days ago [-]
...or expressing the opinion that there's more to manhood or womanhood than a declaration of manhood or womanhood. I don't want to get into a debate about transgender politics here, but it should be acknowledged that such debates were (still are?) impossible to have on Reddit.
xucian 123 days ago [-]
rip
Rendered at 01:14:55 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
But a fair bit of content is more-or-less unanimously off limits, and it doesn't seem useful to say "I can't define it rigorously so I guess we have to allow the child torture porn". Communities are best-effort activities.
As we’ve seen previously, Reddit will continue to slowly evolve in a direction that suits its corporate owners, and protests may feel empowering in the short but fail to change anything in the longer term.
In the meantime, it would be a shame[0] if this was protested using the John Oliver approach[1] only with pictures of Luigi.
[0] not really [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65949412.amp
You can crack jokes left and right about Russian soldiers getting blown up by drones or Russian oligarchs and bureaucrats being pushed out of windows and 'falling onto bullets' but if someone says the same thing about American oligarchs the ban hammer comes out.
It would be very interesting to understand the chain of cause-and-effect that led to Reddit implmenting this policy, and directing it specifically (it seems) at posts related to Luigi.
You are mistaken. You can no longer consider the vast majority of trending content on social media to be crafted by actual people. LLM has made sock puppetry and the accompanying distorted reflected appraisal, both cost effective at scale and ruinous.
The cause of the policy change is an escalation of what naturally follows their exploitation of both the original unpaid moderators that left in the exodus as well as the unpaid volunteers who have left or were driven out leading to the Cooling Effect on Social Media.
The moderators they have that remained are for the most part subverted, and have turned to Anaconda in the Chandelier-like strategies to rule their kingdom like their own personal feifdom driving the core elements that made the community valuable in the first place away.
Reddit is starting to notice this too, because accounts are using the karma system in conjunction with large amounts of sock puppets are acting as sybil attack vectors where extreme content stays up, and they take a stock market hit every time the trusted news initiative brings it up on-air.
Collectivism trends towards destruction every time its embraced by a large number of people. It may be slower or faster depending on certain things, but inevitably it comes up against an out-of-context problem couched in existential crisis that the members of such cannot recognize or foresee. The consequences vanish along with all those people, to the sands of time and chaos. Bronze-age collapse, Greece, Rome, etc.
History is important, and when the ignorant in privileged positions take their flocks along for the ride, the destruction that follows is quite sinful and evil.
The simple fact of the matter is, when the pillars of society fail and unwind, it falls back to a rule of violence and the natural world. This is well studied under social contract theory and aspects on the history of political economy.
This isn't a political divide, its a ruinous cycle of spiraling madness where business thinks it wins, but they win so much that they destroy themselves and lose everything, and it was able to happen because necessity and urgency was decoupled from the funding, through money printing.
There are several pillars to society, one of the pivotal ones is a rule of law which requires several components that themselves are interdependent, and which have objectively failed today. The purpose of law is non-violent conflict resolution. When you have it, violence isn't acceptable, when you don't it naturally happens as abuses become egregious. In such disadvantaged environments, it is about what one can or can't do, not whether it should or ought to happen.
Natural law certainly doesn't follow Tolstoy's pacifism or nihilism except to extinction.
They are turning it into Digg. Giant ads after the first result of every content listing page pushing most results far below the fold.
Its going to cause a mass exodus.
> "This will begin with [targeting clearly objectionable content], but we may consider expanding this in the future [to opinions we do not like]."
And further down:
> "It is everyone’s collective responsibility [to ensure no one disagrees with us] ..."
I do see the problem of moderation, but don't think this in itself is a good solution long-term.
It has gotten to the point where even HN, a place full of progressive coastie techies, looks like a free speech bastion of thought diversity by comparison. I miss the pre ~2015s internet where even though everyone might hate you, you had the right to your opinion.
Have a look at Banned Subreddits at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communi...
Unless you are advocating genocide, murder, outright advocating for ethnic cleansing, or are violently sexist/racist, you're fine.
When I was active on reddit, I advocated for nuclear energy using math and physics. One time, I wrote a comment calculating energy vs used land vs used infrastructure, including mining and logistics, to show how radically more efficient nuclear is than any other power source. It got little / no engagement.
That comment triggered me to check pushshift and see if I was banned for some reason. Turns out, every comment I had ever made about nuclear technology was shadow banned, even relatively innocuous ones. This was universally across all of reddit.
They don't allow advocating for nuclear energy, what else don't they allow?
One time, I wrote a historical warning about how the rich don't generally do well with massive wealth inequality during times of revolution. This was flag as violent content and I got a warning saying I would be banned if I did it again.
This was roughly ~5 years ago. How much do you think the noose has tightened since then?
Keep in mind, my comments were well thought out, posted in good faith, and respectful. I was not trying to hurt people or prove them wrong, just truth seeking and truth sharing.
It became clear to me truth is no longer allowed on mass platforms.
EDIT: Also that's a really pessimistic leap, "my account got shadow banned (on one platform, and you don't know it was the nuclear)" to "truth is no longer allowed on (implied all!) mass platforms"
EDIT2: Also, how the saying goes, shit happens. I got banned on so many servers and forums, for random reasons. And I moved on?? Create another account if you have to, it's not like they can enforce the no multiple accounts rule well
My posts that were humor or otherwise "low-impact" were unaffected. I had many submissions with well over 1,000 karma, but only the submissions that had no economic or political impact were ever seen.
This isn't conjecture or paranoia, it is verified, and I traced it back years once I realized it was happening. I wrote a lot about nuclear energy and I was writing to the void. That is a very cruel thing to do to someone.
AFAIK you can do subreddit "shadowbans" by setting automod to send all posts to modqueue, and then using another rule to approve every post except the ones you want banned.
This is actually a very rare trait in the general populace so it makes targeting such persons fairly narrow pursuit while simultaneously if you explain it happened most people will think you are crazy.
They will leave provably wrong stuff up as a head on pike to show you're an idiot. They will let correct but unpersuasive stuff up, because who cares. They will let correct (or just controversial) stuff already stated by someone prominent up (even if by kkk or nazis), because they already have a rebuttal canned for that to make you look bad.
What they won't let stand is a correct, holistically persuasive original argument for the wrong opinion. They have no defense for that but banning. And thus doesn't apply only to reddit.
As in, anything that can realistically challenge an entity with power (say, energy companies using non-renewable systems like oil vs infinite / abundant systems like nuclear) is deemed "wrong"?
There are plenty of ideas which people want to censor for reasons other than that the ideas are strictly correct. Particularly when it comes to politics, a lot of ideas just speak to opinion or disposition, and there is no strictly right or wrong answer. But of course, people want to censor opinions with disconcerting frequency.
My comments here shouldn't be taken as pro-censorship. I consider myself nearly a free-speech absolutist, but the desire to censor is much more about politics and tribalism than it is about anything else.
I suspect it was done due to my opinions on covid.