2d ago

Why does reddit ban so easily?

So why the hell does reddit ban people so easily? I got banned from one games sub for something i did not do and could not contact the mods since they also banned me from doing that.

So only option left is to make a new account so i get access to the sub so i can ask for help there since i had problems with the game. Well it worked and i got my problem with the game solved but after that i got permanently banned for ban evasion :/

There was no ill intent with any of my posts and was wrongfully banned the first time. Sure ban evasion is forbidden but it should not be so strictly moderated, concidering that a person can be banned by a mod just because they misunderstand one of ur comments or just generally want to cause harm to some users. There needs to be a way to avoid mods abusing their power and only way to do so is making a new account.

Now there is no way for me to get help with the game if i ever have more problems, or anyway i can help someone else who has problem i know how to solve. That's unreasonable.

58 comments

For automated bans I can tell you why - social media fingerprinting and anti-bot is really hard and it scales in favor of banning.
I working in anti fraud software development and the browser and apps give you incredible fingerprint that can identify anyone. However it has many false positives simple because the datasets are huge and peoppe use social media in weird but legit ways (cafe wifi etc). Generally big important systems like banks can alleviate that with support and KYC systems (know your customer) but social networks don't want/can't really do that in a scalable way.
Then, there's misalignment of incentives. The anti bot team does not care about false positives and these are almost never reported to the upper management so false bans become common and in the big picture not that big of a deal. Thats why you see so many websites use cloudflare anti bot when they are clearly losing sales when A|B tests are evaluated but the site admits never know that because cloudflare only tells them about successes not failures.
Finally, real bot developers are really fucking good. Wirh proper funding you just hire real people with real web browsers / real phones and thats why large scale bot operations like those of governments are almost impossible to defend against. Thats why Russia, China, India etc are investing so heavily in internet trolls - it's super effective and it's a hard problem to fight as it's easy to hide behind "xenophobia" and just deny everything. Any forensics would also implicate the social media hosts so the incentives all align for a perfect propaganda machine.

Today my dad got permabanned from Reddit because he read a post while at my house, they counted that as ban evasion and now he can’t ever make another account without also getting instabanned.

It started getting worse with trump running. Me things some right winged trolls took over just like the rest of Silicon Valley.

I was banned from r/pics for questioning the authenticity of a picture. I did not say anything hurtful and I was just pointing out that some of the things they were saying weren’t adding up. I was even backed by others who were also stating that it didn’t add up and adding other points. Banned from the sub with a vaguely worded message that basically stated “if you can tell us why you are sorry for why we banned you, we’ll unban you”, to which I responded that I have absolutely no idea why I was banned. After that, I received a message that I was permabanned. It’s so stupid.

My theory is it’s because they’ve left the banning and appeals process up entirely to AI at this point, there are no humans involved at any stage, so you get kicked for using a trigger word or some other nonsense and then nobody actually looks at the appeal.
- It's strange because I'm trying to get banned lol, and it won't. Ilve literally said to kill the people on the Epstein list and to Luigi shitty people
  
  Whoever is watching the Behind The Bastards sub will 1000% get you banned. Most of my bans, including my final one came from there. I got banned for a week for saying “I’m surprised Kanye hasn’t murder/suicided Kim or Taylor yet” in the BtB sub apparently it was inciting violence, my final ban was when I joked on a list of people naming insane things to be “pro” about and I wrote I was “pro-keying this car” which was inciting violence again apparently. you just have to comment in highly contentious subs and you’ll catch bans left and right

Reddit deserves to die! Leave it! It's become a tool for the government to control us.

Because they're just a corporate profit machine now. The days of reddit being a good platform for discussion are over.
- Let's hope it doesn't happen here
  
  it can here but you can make multiple accounts on different instances or host your own, you can have that sccount banned but not future ones entirely like reddit, I really don't like how they track your identity and get past a vpn.
  
  It does. Shitty admins do shitty things, regardless of platform.
  
  It's harder to cause that to happen in the Fediverse. All the sites that host copies of content would have to end up under the same controlling entity, or go offline at the same time.
  The limiting factor here is storage space. The whole thing is run by volunteers, so when they bow out, instances can and inevitably do go offline, and the content they hosted shared only lasts as long as the other instances are able to store and pass it around. They'll generally only do that as long as there's regular interest in it. Basically, old posts from dead instances will be the first things to go.
  I imagine instances may also purge their own old posts if there's a storage crisis, but the whole thing is new enough that I don't think it's quite got to that point yet.
  If you can afford to donate to your Fediverse instances (Lemmys, Mastodons, etc.), you can help keep them live and help keep old content available for posterity.
  (Even better, if you have time, money and the skill, you could run your own instance.)

"Ban Evasion" is such a bullshit concept anyway. Do something we don't like, and try and come back early? You can no longer come here, for life! And since I bet they IP ban, it bans your entire household! I wonder if there are some public places that are Reddit black holes, silently banning any Redditor who goes there because one person once called King Steven a greedy pigboy.
I left Reddit at the time of the great APIcalypse, and there were some businesses whose customer service was so abysmal that the only practical avenue for customer service was on Reddit. Getting a permanent ban for bullshit reasons can have an actual effect if you need support from one of these companies.
It surprises me that they haven't banned the wrong lawyer at the wrong time to prompt a class action lawsuit over how arbitrary it all is.
- My permaban was for using the Wi-Fi in a public place, so I think you’re right.
- A perm ban isnt an ip ban I dont think, at least for accoutns that exist on different devices never logged into the same devices
  
  It’s not, I’m the only one at my house who is perma-banned
- Thats the big problem i currently have. The game sub i was part of is the place where i always got help solving my problems quickly and it's the only place to have any meanigful conversation about the game.
  Now i can't do that anymore and since im perma banned on reddit i can't take part in health and mental health subs i was part of that were the only place to get support or have conversations regarding all my health problems :/
  
  I feel you man, got permabanned as well. Apparently you can not say mean things about Musk, Trump and Israel there, sooner or later it's going to be glorifying violence, and after that they sic a report bot on you or something and you get banned for multiple breaches of the rules, which are entirely ficticious (the breaches, not the rules). Afaik fascists got me banned so they've got one less voice calling out their bullshit.
  
  How I feel about comics and blender, but blender at least ive had better help on discord and yt comments since most creators are small they tend to reply quick, reddit was mostly nice for finding other small creators, wish theyd come over here lol, I tried mentioning lemmy in some discords and how the blender community has potential for getting eyes on your work but no luck
  
  Unless you pay for a static IP. There's a decent chance it will change if you reboot it or leave it powered off for a while.
- Banning IP? What is this, 2000? Almost every household has dynamic IP
  
  My IP never changes until I have a power outage. Even then the lease usually gets renewed with the same IP address
- My local library, every hotel and Starbucks are such black holes they do exist. They are also becoming more common.
  I live in a popular tourist area, iv seen signs that warn people to not log into their social media accounts while attending due to possible ban issues.
  Tho it covers twitter, Facebook and tiktok along with reddit.
  The really really big cons don't really deal with it since most of the big social media sites ignore the ips for those locations. Tho that's not entirely a full proof solution
  A buddy of mine got banned on reddit and Twitter both for ban evasion/no reason given respectively after logging in at a national level convention here. He worked for reasonably sized media company at the time too.
  Automated IP baning like always has been a mess and barely functional. It's basically never worked reliable and always has collateral damage.
  Hardware id and mac address banning do the same thing tho more in frequently.
- I've heard that certain well-connected people have been banned, like wall street people and politicians, but they know who to call at reddit HQ and get themselves unbanned. That's not the case for the rest of us, and I don't know about the rest of you but I can't afford a lawyer.
- My brother can still go to Reddit, but they always know it's me.

I was thinking about this today. They even have a thread over at reddit about it. The admins tried to tell people they only permaban after issueing several temp bans.
No they don't. I've only ever gotten permabans. I also don't think anything I did (some angry shitposts. No threats, harassment, or anything like that) deserved a permaban. Like they could have given me a temp ban or a subreddit ban, and I would have been fine with that. They for some reason went nuclear on me and went straight to site-wide permaban. I don't know why, I filed appeals, I sent messages. I tried to reason with them. Nothing. They go nuclear as standard practice and are completely inflexible about it.
- Yep, it seems unreasonably harsh to ban someone over really minor stuff or sometimes even because mod misunderstands ur comment. Sure i get it if it's some really vile or violent stuff, harrasment or something, but i did not do any of those things.
  Like you said, it seems like it's the nuclear option right away for even the minor stuff.

Hey, fellow banned for nothing.
I challenged a mod for my making a comment in a heated chain. I guess just since I was there I was evil.
I told the mod they were wrong and soft.
lol he cried to Reddit and they permabanned me.
I’ve said some controversial shit on Reddit in the last 12 years and never had a problem.
Reddit is gone.
Oh well, it looks nice here.
- My account is 12 years old and I totally agree that things have changed regarding what is tolerated. Years ago it was common place to see threads of users going after each other calling each other "a fucking asshole" and worse.
- It is nice here, but many of the subs that interest me have very little traffic compared to the ones on Reddit. I do hope they grow.
- The mods in reddit have way too much power, especially after ban evasion became a thing. Hopefully this place keeps growing.
  
  I already like it more than the stupid Reddit app. This is closer to Reddit a decade ago. Reddit has a knack for this. Still remember when Imgur was just an image hosting site FOR Reddit and then it turned in to tumblr. All those tumblr people that went to Imgur, liked Imgur because Reddit was too confusing. Now those people are on Reddit. I just want to keep staying away from those people. I’m basically talking about the hive mind, professional victim types.

The want people stuck in the Doom scroll wheel, not people thinking and arguing.
Easier to control.
Or a non conspiracy theory: it's cheaper to use "AI" to ban even if it is quite bad at it.

I’ve been warned for posting a gif of Luigi (the Nintendo one) because they’re cracking down hard on anything remotely related to the other Luigi.
Also got banned for 3 days for commenting about a certain billionaires drug problem lol
- I got in trouble once for saying Luigi’s name. In a Nintendo sub. While talking about the game, Mario and Luigi: Brothership. Guess that was too dangerous.
- Thats crazy! Reddit really is going downhill.

permanently banned for ban evasion
Time to make another account then?
- I think they will just keep banning the new accounts because now im banned from reddit, so whenever i make a new account it is technically concidered ban evasion and will lead to a ban :/
  
  how would they know it's you? Don't use your personal email (on any social network), use VPN(on any social network), don't use their app- just use the browser (on any social network).
- Reddit is so over zealous that this is basically impossible. Every account basically for ever will just get auto smacked.
  You would need to move cities, change how and where you post, change what subs you sub to, change every device you own.
  Reddit is one of the most invasive companies in the world when it comes to how deep and wide they dig to ban, ban evasion. Shits wild. Lol
  
  They still accept those single use temporary emails and you can use VPN to connect. Don't use their app, just use the browser and you're good

Because one can not tell any truth in the face of US citizens. They like to believe they are always right. And that we care.

They only care about short term profit and they don't understand what actually made their platform valuable. Reddit is a lost cause.
- Seems like it

58 comments