Was recently granted the privilege of a permanent ban on reddit for a username I had for over four years and it led me down the rabbit hole of seeing more and more claims from other people who went through similar experiences. Hell, there’s a lot of them. Frivolous reports resulting in punishment, appeals being automatically denied, the works, etc.
It might just be a presumption, seeing how many bots slide under the radar each day on that site through posts and comments, but I have a strong feeling that most (seemingly random) admin bans are designed to flush out active and semi-active human users rather than weed out bot code posing as people online. The end goal? Whether it’s to create an automated, cyclical platform designed to extract marketing and ad revenue from a steady stream of new users or anything else for that matter, I know not. All I know for certain is that the ban tendencies have ramped up in the recent year and the people actually being punished for it are those who have been using it for long periods of time and manage to conveniently fall on the edge of a subjective TOS offense.
I had my suspicions that it was gradually turning into an AI-fueled cesspit, but now I’ve had my chance to really believe that it has. Good riddance in that case
I think they just have no idea what they’re doing. There’s no master plan. It is devolving into botshit, but not on purpose; it’s just because all the people with anything remotely resembling qualifications to run one of the world’s biggest social media sites have left the building at this point.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
No, I don’t think there’s an ulterior motive. Reddit kicked out all the active mods and mods who knew what they were doing, and then brought in people with zero mod experience. Of course you’re going to get more issues with mod abuse now. Not everyone has the temperament to be a responsible mod, and I think Reddit is simply reaping the consequences of its choices
Let them weed the humans out. Then the bots can talk to each other over there and all the humans can move here!
Don’t worry. It’s going to get worse because they’ve went deeper with their partnership with Google. Google has access to reddit’s API and user data while reddit gets access to a back-end AI. What you are suspecting is only the start of things to come.
Our capitalist overlords are currently in a bind where they’d prefer all of social media is AI shrimp Jesus, and that is currently profitable this quarter. So I guess not actually a bind. Carry on.
