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Reddit has seemed rudderless for a long time. Their ads platform is damned near useless compared to their competitors. It's a wonder they have any revenue at a

Reddit has seemed rudderless for a long time. Their ads platform is damned near useless compared to their competitors. It's a wonder they have any revenue at all. Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.

martin8412 3y ago
A lot of subreddits blanket ban you if you've posted in other subreddits that the mods don't like.
- RhodesianHunter 3y ago
  Reddit Admin itself will blanket ban accounts in entire sub-threads with no recourse or explanation. Participate in a well informed debate on monetary policy, but some idiot downthread went on an anti-semitic rant? Your account will be banned. Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. You will receive a link in a message to the message you wrote for which you were banned, but since it was deleted it will be a worthless link. You will receive a link to a form to appeal your ban, which goes straight to dev/null.
  - delfinom 3y ago
    >Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. Worse, they use browser fingerprinting AND IP.
    - waboremo 3y ago
      Yeah they track quite a lot of bits of data for users. It's the very reason why most new users are found bemoaning how annoying it is to start posting on reddit. It's your email, social account, ip/location, browser fingerprint info, search terms, information from their partners (ad networks, apps) and cookies, subs you visit, what you upvote/downvote/save/report, which page on reddit you're coming from/going to, etc. They use these to then determine blocks/shadowbans/counteract your votes and so on. Has this resulted in a substantial quality increase on reddit? Oh absolutely not, you'll get chatgpt bots, people harassing you, completely unrelated comments, report abuse, etc. but they'll never give up that much data.
    - alam2000 3y ago
      [dead]
- SlimyHog 3y ago
  I got banned from some subreddit that I've never visited for making fun of someone in /r/conservative, just because I posted there.
- bri3d 3y ago
  This is has always been an interesting aspect of Reddit. On the one hand, this is fine: Reddit is supposed to be a collection of independently moderated sub-communities with their own rules and administration. On the other hand, you have a unified identity and content history across those communities, so it's a lot easier for one community to take action based on your history in another, which is a strange dynamic. I actually think Facebook Groups are onto something with the way post history and profiles work: each Facebook Group a user posts in creates a separate sub-profile for that user which is specific to the Group. Users in that Group can see a user's post history in that Group, and that user's "main" profile depending on their privacy settings, but a user can't walk "across" to see a user's post history in other Groups unless they search from that other Group. I feel like per-subreddit post histories along with a global user profile would help move Reddit more towards the "sub-community" vision if that's the direction they want to go. The issues Reddit have are: * Cross-stalking, as discussed above. * Content discovery. This is the same problem every user-generated content platform has. What sub-communities get surfaced on the logged-out front page? Cross-pollinated to existing users? Every type of content will be objectionable to someone, so deciding what to show is always going to be a lightning-rod issue with advertiser dollars at stake. * Global moderation. What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of Reddit? What happens when that user is completely banned (do all of their old posts disappear?) Should large-scale content moderation like spam be handled at a platform or a community level?
  - barking_biscuit 3y ago
    > What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of Reddit? explicit deepfakes
- delecti 3y ago
  Not to victim-blame, but which subreddits? I pop into new subreddits from time to time, and I don't know that I've ever been banned from a subreddit in my accounts 14+ year history. I'm also less sympathetic if the bans were because you posted somewhere like the_donald (I can't think of a more timely controversial sub) vs somewhere innocuous like r/gaming or r/technology.
  - JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago
    Ikr. I feel like there's lots of problematic folks? doing a lot of heckin wrongthink out there in the current climate? and its making me feel like so unsafe?
    - delecti 3y ago
      A moderator's job is to keep their subreddit a functioning community. It seems entirely reasonable to me that they might notice a pattern and cast a wide net to save themselves a lot of hassle.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
granshaw 3y ago
Far from it. They have great recent user growth and everybody is appending “Reddit” to the end of their google searches in the quest for non-gamed search results
- RhodesianHunter 3y ago
  I didn't say anything about user growth. I said their ads platform is trash, which is evident to anyone who has attempted to use it.
  - granshaw 3y ago
    Fair enough. I did notice the distinction when rereading your comment
- vGPU 3y ago
  Primarily because google has become completely useless. I get more accurate search results with Yandex, Brave, and bing, in that order. That’s how bad it is. And I hate Yandex. They’re always making me do captcha challenges.
- asdff 3y ago
  It's not a sustainable position though. Advertisers aren't idiots, the market will adjust as it makes sense to adjust. You already have bot accounts flooding certain keywords on reddit with product placement. If everyone ends up on reddit, that's where the SEO spam crap you see today will follow them. If everyones on twitter, it goes there. If everyone goes to mastodon, so be it, there be the bots. It almost doesn't matter what the service is exactly, once it hits a critical mass it gets enshittified just because of the business opportunity it presents.
flutas 3y ago
> Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate. I reported someone in the news sub. Paraphrasing but apparently reporting someone for saying "they should all burn to death" (talking about govt officials) 1: isn't ban worthy, and 2: is "abuse of the report button" and led to me getting a 3 day ban. I'm out.
- nifoc 3y ago
  I used to have a (long) list of posts/comments that they refused to remove after I reported them. Most of these were (at least to me) _very_ obvious cases of being against the TOS (and the law). I messaged this list to the admins. I emailed it to their support team. Never got a reply. Not even support answered my email. I truly believe they just don't care.
  - pierat 3y ago
    Whereas I had 3 accounts permanently suspended for calling someone an idiot on /r/idiotsincars for "harassing speech". I have other accounts, but they took out 1 old account and a squatted account. Like, really? For using the term "idiot" on a subreddit with that very word? I have here, Masto, and a few other places that at least have mostly sane policies. All I know is that reddit is definitely on the decline. And this whole API debacle is going to be their own Digg V4 moment.
    - waboremo 3y ago
      There is no sane middle ground on most of reddit. There are subs where you'll get reprimanded far quicker for "annoying mods" by bothering to report anything, and then there are the other subs that are so uptight and intense that your comments can only be fluff anything else gets slapped down for one of the vague rules it has. Good luck debating subreddit mods for their vague rules, you'll just annoy them and admins do not care in the slightest to resolve these petty things. They've created systems that makes it obnoxious for everyone involved. Tiny subs excluded, but at that point the form of reddit just doesn't suit smaller communities well. The way reddit sorts best, new, top, plus a bunch of obnoxious automod filters keeps smaller communities (even if "small" in this sense is 50000 followers) feeling absolutely dead.
numpad0 3y ago
None of those social media are rudderless, just that, money’s circulating in hyperspace and the lower dimension slice of those just has to be mostly consistent on time axis. We are looking at a cross section at ballast deck of a ship.

martin8412 3y ago

A lot of subreddits blanket ban you if you've posted in other subreddits that the mods don't like.

RhodesianHunter 3y ago
Reddit Admin itself will blanket ban accounts in entire sub-threads with no recourse or explanation. Participate in a well informed debate on monetary policy, but some idiot downthread went on an anti-semitic rant? Your account will be banned. Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. You will receive a link in a message to the message you wrote for which you were banned, but since it was deleted it will be a worthless link. You will receive a link to a form to appeal your ban, which goes straight to dev/null.
- delfinom 3y ago
  >Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. Worse, they use browser fingerprinting AND IP.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    Yeah they track quite a lot of bits of data for users. It's the very reason why most new users are found bemoaning how annoying it is to start posting on reddit. It's your email, social account, ip/location, browser fingerprint info, search terms, information from their partners (ad networks, apps) and cookies, subs you visit, what you upvote/downvote/save/report, which page on reddit you're coming from/going to, etc. They use these to then determine blocks/shadowbans/counteract your votes and so on. Has this resulted in a substantial quality increase on reddit? Oh absolutely not, you'll get chatgpt bots, people harassing you, completely unrelated comments, report abuse, etc. but they'll never give up that much data.
  - alam2000 3y ago
    [dead]
SlimyHog 3y ago
I got banned from some subreddit that I've never visited for making fun of someone in /r/conservative, just because I posted there.
bri3d 3y ago
This is has always been an interesting aspect of Reddit. On the one hand, this is fine: Reddit is supposed to be a collection of independently moderated sub-communities with their own rules and administration. On the other hand, you have a unified identity and content history across those communities, so it's a lot easier for one community to take action based on your history in another, which is a strange dynamic. I actually think Facebook Groups are onto something with the way post history and profiles work: each Facebook Group a user posts in creates a separate sub-profile for that user which is specific to the Group. Users in that Group can see a user's post history in that Group, and that user's "main" profile depending on their privacy settings, but a user can't walk "across" to see a user's post history in other Groups unless they search from that other Group. I feel like per-subreddit post histories along with a global user profile would help move Reddit more towards the "sub-community" vision if that's the direction they want to go. The issues Reddit have are: * Cross-stalking, as discussed above. * Content discovery. This is the same problem every user-generated content platform has. What sub-communities get surfaced on the logged-out front page? Cross-pollinated to existing users? Every type of content will be objectionable to someone, so deciding what to show is always going to be a lightning-rod issue with advertiser dollars at stake. * Global moderation. What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of Reddit? What happens when that user is completely banned (do all of their old posts disappear?) Should large-scale content moderation like spam be handled at a platform or a community level?
- barking_biscuit 3y ago
  > What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of Reddit? explicit deepfakes
delecti 3y ago
Not to victim-blame, but which subreddits? I pop into new subreddits from time to time, and I don't know that I've ever been banned from a subreddit in my accounts 14+ year history. I'm also less sympathetic if the bans were because you posted somewhere like the_donald (I can't think of a more timely controversial sub) vs somewhere innocuous like r/gaming or r/technology.
- JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago
  Ikr. I feel like there's lots of problematic folks? doing a lot of heckin wrongthink out there in the current climate? and its making me feel like so unsafe?
  - delecti 3y ago
    A moderator's job is to keep their subreddit a functioning community. It seems entirely reasonable to me that they might notice a pattern and cast a wide net to save themselves a lot of hassle.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

granshaw 3y ago

Far from it. They have great recent user growth and everybody is appending “Reddit” to the end of their google searches in the quest for non-gamed search results

RhodesianHunter 3y ago
I didn't say anything about user growth. I said their ads platform is trash, which is evident to anyone who has attempted to use it.
- granshaw 3y ago
  Fair enough. I did notice the distinction when rereading your comment
vGPU 3y ago
Primarily because google has become completely useless. I get more accurate search results with Yandex, Brave, and bing, in that order. That’s how bad it is. And I hate Yandex. They’re always making me do captcha challenges.
asdff 3y ago
It's not a sustainable position though. Advertisers aren't idiots, the market will adjust as it makes sense to adjust. You already have bot accounts flooding certain keywords on reddit with product placement. If everyone ends up on reddit, that's where the SEO spam crap you see today will follow them. If everyones on twitter, it goes there. If everyone goes to mastodon, so be it, there be the bots. It almost doesn't matter what the service is exactly, once it hits a critical mass it gets enshittified just because of the business opportunity it presents.

flutas 3y ago

> Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate. I reported someone in the news sub. Paraphrasing but apparently reporting someone for saying "they should all burn to death" (talking about govt officials) 1: isn't ban worthy, and 2: is "abuse of the report button" and led to me getting a 3 day ban. I'm out.

nifoc 3y ago
I used to have a (long) list of posts/comments that they refused to remove after I reported them. Most of these were (at least to me) _very_ obvious cases of being against the TOS (and the law). I messaged this list to the admins. I emailed it to their support team. Never got a reply. Not even support answered my email. I truly believe they just don't care.
- pierat 3y ago
  Whereas I had 3 accounts permanently suspended for calling someone an idiot on /r/idiotsincars for "harassing speech". I have other accounts, but they took out 1 old account and a squatted account. Like, really? For using the term "idiot" on a subreddit with that very word? I have here, Masto, and a few other places that at least have mostly sane policies. All I know is that reddit is definitely on the decline. And this whole API debacle is going to be their own Digg V4 moment.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    There is no sane middle ground on most of reddit. There are subs where you'll get reprimanded far quicker for "annoying mods" by bothering to report anything, and then there are the other subs that are so uptight and intense that your comments can only be fluff anything else gets slapped down for one of the vague rules it has. Good luck debating subreddit mods for their vague rules, you'll just annoy them and admins do not care in the slightest to resolve these petty things. They've created systems that makes it obnoxious for everyone involved. Tiny subs excluded, but at that point the form of reddit just doesn't suit smaller communities well. The way reddit sorts best, new, top, plus a bunch of obnoxious automod filters keeps smaller communities (even if "small" in this sense is 50000 followers) feeling absolutely dead.

numpad0 3y ago

None of those social media are rudderless, just that, money’s circulating in hyperspace and the lower dimension slice of those just has to be mostly consistent on time axis. We are looking at a cross section at ballast deck of a ship.