Up until a few months ago, I was a great fan of Reddit. It was my go-to place for hot takes on all my hobbies and local news. I had lots of great interactions with people, and someone on r/jazz said I changed their life with an artist recommendation. It calls itself the “Heart of the Internet”, but it is more like an electronic pacemaker, ticking away, keeping its shareholders happy.
As I said, I loved it. Not any more, though. I have fallen afoul of the Reddit moderators, and apparently, I will never be able to use the site again.
Like most social media, it is hard not to offend someone with something you say. You will always get a ban at some point, but you just delete the offending comments and carry on. My first taste of this was when I was banned from r/mildlyinfuriating, which was mildly infuriating. Apparently, at some point in the past, I had posted a snarky trolling comment in one of the incel subs. Then, a year later, I posted a “great!” type comment in r/mildlyinfuriating. It seems there had been some great war between the two subs, and if you posted in one, you weren’t allowed to post in the other. Even though both comments were harmless, the bots put two and two together, and I got kicked out. It was easily remedied and after a morning, life went on.
The big ban was when Elon Musk was going through his Nazi phase. Everyone was piling in on Reddit. I may have commented r/elonmusk, which I later discovered was purely for fanboys and where dissent was not allowed. That got me a ban from that sub. Presumably by one of the mods. That was ok as I have a couple of accounts and it’s not like I spent a lot of time there anyway.
Fast forward five months, and someone posts videos of Musks humanoid robots. The robots are moving at a normal rate, but the humans in the background are flying around like a double speed Benny Hill video. With my good account, I just asked to see the original videos. What I posted was irrelevant. Reddit knew the two accounts were linked, and down came the ban hammer. “You are being banned for ban evasion, i.e. a previous account of yours was banned and you’re trying to dodge the ban”. Honestly, it was five months ago, and I had forgotten about the first ban.
So what went wrong? Firstly, a lot of the banning is done by bots. These faceless upholders of the law have no concept of context and purely ban you because you posted when you weren’t supposed to. The second post could have been me professing my love for Musk and his work, and it would still have banned me. Secondly, Reddit has a graph somewhere showing how all your accounts are related. I guess it is IP address-related, as all the accounts I have since created are banned as well.
My question is, why on earth did it let me post the second comment in the first place? It knows I have a ban on one account. If it had said, “I am sorry, one of your accounts appears to have a ban on this sub; we can’t let you post here”, I would have shrugged and got on with my day. As it is, I am writing this blog. If you know how the accounts are related, then you can easily stop people from doing things they shouldn’t. I wouldn’t go as far as calling it entrapment, but Reddit is making a lot of people unnecessarily angry with it with its “ban first and ask questions later” moderation. I appreciate that some of the subs are quite contentious and there are various inter-sub rivalries, but I can’t help feeling I am an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire. I have tried appealing, but I doubt if a human actually saw my appeal.