3 ms·

My account on Reddit, and so as I am the founder also the sub r/AmazonRedshift, on 2023-09-30 looked to have been banned by an automated system. The sub appear

My account on Reddit, and so as I am the founder also the sub r/AmazonRedshift, on 2023-09-30 looked to have been banned by an automated system. The sub appeared to be working normally, I posted about the Amazon Redshift Serverless PDF, and then Reddit began behaving oddly. After some investigation, and some guesswork, I concluded my account had been silently shadow-banned, and the sub banned (and then shortly after, deleted). (Shadow-banning means when you log in as yourself, you see all your posts, and you see them in the threads where they were made. If you view Reddit when logged out, you then see all your posts have been deleted.) Two years of posts and the sub disappeared, instantly, abruptly, without warning, reason, appeal process or notification, and Reddit is trying to lead me into thinking my account is still active. Make of that what you will. Having had that experience, I concluded Reddit is not a safe place to invest time in.

dmix 3y ago
The lack of transparency with this stuff is really annoying. I guess they want to hide it from users so their admins aren't flooded with users complaining or something? Or so spam bots keep running in circles? But it's ripe for abuse and false positives. Most users wouldn't know what "shadow banned" even means or that it exists.
- peeters 3y ago
  Yeah the point of shadow banning is so that trolls/bots continue to scream into the void, rather than creating a new account. I'm guessing it's only so long before human trolls notice, and I'm guessing that bots could just have automated ways of checking ("was my last post visible to an unauthenticated user?")
  - the_doctah 3y ago
    Very easy to verify. Make a post, go to the permalink, log out, and see if your post is still visible.
  - wraptile 3y ago
    This argument never made sense as it's trivial to verify even for most amateur bot creators. Just pull the public page and check if the comment is there - that's like a single line of code: Selector(httpx.get(url)).xpath("//div[text(),'my comment']")

dmix 3y ago

The lack of transparency with this stuff is really annoying. I guess they want to hide it from users so their admins aren't flooded with users complaining or something? Or so spam bots keep running in circles? But it's ripe for abuse and false positives. Most users wouldn't know what "shadow banned" even means or that it exists.

peeters 3y ago
Yeah the point of shadow banning is so that trolls/bots continue to scream into the void, rather than creating a new account. I'm guessing it's only so long before human trolls notice, and I'm guessing that bots could just have automated ways of checking ("was my last post visible to an unauthenticated user?")
- the_doctah 3y ago
  Very easy to verify. Make a post, go to the permalink, log out, and see if your post is still visible.
- wraptile 3y ago
  This argument never made sense as it's trivial to verify even for most amateur bot creators. Just pull the public page and check if the comment is there - that's like a single line of code: Selector(httpx.get(url)).xpath("//div[text(),'my comment']")