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Is this the right place for me to raise my gripe about reddit's new approach to user bans? As of the most recent changes, once User A bans user B, B cannot repl
by mustacheemperor 5y ago
Is this the right place for me to raise my gripe about reddit's new approach to user bans? As of the most recent changes, once User A bans user B, B cannot reply to any comment replying to any thread or subthread originating from User A. So if User A is OP of a crowded post on the front page of a sub, User B can't reply to any comment that itself replies to the OP. This means that in the case of subreddits like /r/virtualreality (as one example), the conspiracy theorists who post hypernegative meme takes about facebook are gradually oversaturating the front page by simply banning every user who calls them out for acting like a wackjob in the comments.
It puts a lot more burden for content moderation on the sub mods, since the community doesn't have as much ability to voice disagreement in replies (once a resident troll bans enough dissenting repliers, the only people who can reply are the remaining community minority that agree). It's also hard for the mods to detect, since they don't get any visibility to the ban system from their side. I would be hesitant to take advice on how to manage a social media communication platform at scale from anyone presiding over recent decisions at Reddit, since they seem to have equipped the most toxic users with the tools to pseudo-organically poison the well for open discussion.