Back in the day, if I saw some braindead karma farming post on Reddit, I took a look at their post history and quite a few times it was a brand new account. I would simply reply “Welcome to Reddit! How has your first [week/day/hour] been?”. I think precisely twice it turned out to be a new human user, the rest of the time they would just delete the comment (or possibly even the account).
I got banned years ago from r/funny because I was browsing on “new” (like I do here), responded to a post with a lame joke within minutes after it posted, then the powers that be decided the poster was a spammer, and banned me too. I asked them why they banned me, but got absolutely nothing in response. It turns out, though, that being banned from there made absolutely no difference to my Reddit experience.
Now that Reddit is a public company, and courting income from paid official subreddits, it’s only a matter of time before there is a huge class-action lawsuit over their uneven moderation policies. Especially if companies start steering a good portion of their customer interaction there. It is super unfair to be cut off from legitimate customer service because of a power-tripping mod in a totally different part of Reddit.
Besides, I hit on the best way to ensure I never get banned from Reddit: I don’t go there anymore.
The problem, though, is when so many companies are outsourcing their customer service to social media like Reddit. And communities, like OP’s school, which have nothing to do with the current situation on other subreddits. “Ban evasion” is nothing but a power trip if the ban was bullshit to begin with.
If all Reddit had was pictures of cats and porn, then getting banned would not be as big a deal. Now that it is public, being used for legit reasons, and has “money”, I am waiting for a bunch of people who are being banned for arbitrary reasons to file a class-action lawsuit. I might even join, even though I haven’t been back since the APIcalypse. I was banned from /r/funny years ago and to this day I don’t really know why. (In fairness, though, that might have improved my life…)
I’m just waiting for the wrong person to get banned from some useless subreddit and then go ballistic and file a class action lawsuit. Double points if they are a shareholder too.
Looks like it
It depends on what type of old media. I have been purposely avoiding TV News, particularly 24 hour news stations. I watch them on Election Day, and when some major event is happening in real time, and that’s it. I’ve come to the conclusion that there simply isn’t enough news worth hearing about to fill up 24 hours every day, so TV news has to stretch to make things seem relevant.
On the other hand, I read a lot of what formerly was “print media” but is now web-based. If I lived in a city with a decent local dead tree newspaper, I would subscribe. To me, it takes some effort to distill the key topics of the day into words, and I find that effort is useful in filtering out some of the most sensational crap.
(And I think its important to note that Lemmy and Reddit isn’t itself a news site, it’s a link aggregator with comments, so even when you say you “get your news” from Lemmy, what you really mean is you get links that other people post to those same sources. You are still going to the old media sources, you are just only going to what the Hive Mind deems “interesting”.)
There were others too, but yeah, r/bitcoin was the worst. It got to the point where I simply stopped writing our r/bitcoin anywhere on Reddit, because I didn’t want to be accused of brigading.
r/dogecoin also got insufferable once Doge got above $.01. The worst thing that ever happened to the Dogecoin community was for the coin to actually be worth something.
The Mods on most crypto subs were horrible. Any opinion that is contrary to the groupthink would get you immediately disciplined.
And yeah, that happened on other subs too. But the crypto subs were particularly insidious because you knew that some of them were active since the beginning of crypto, which means they got in early, and are likely filthy rich. So they don’t have a day job anymore (other than shilling their latest crypto project), and have more time to be petty and vindictive.
Now that they are public, their mission is to deliver shareholder value. Every decision they make will have to lead to more money. And like it or not, “Facebook level crap” sells ads.
It’s not bad rules, it’s bad moderation. They are way too quick with their ban hammer. And just wait until we get AI mods
I believe the employees got taken care of here, at least the ones that worked for them directly and stuck it out. Equity compensation is such a key part of Silicon Valley culture that they probably couldn’t even hire devs straight out of college without offering them some stock.
Steve Huffman sold 500,000 shares as part of the ipo, so they were some of the shares sold immediately before they opened on the market (at the about $30/share price).
I suspected as much. I got the invite too, and thought about putting some money in. But I didn’t want to risk the chance of being King Steven’s exit liquidity, even if I could make some money on it, so I passed.
Right, but all those cases involved companies that were doing legit things with wireless. This is Reddit, though. Where do their businesses intercept?
The only thing I can think of is maybe they have some patent on actual trolls. They are from a Nordic country, after all.
A truly impartial AI moderator can enforce polite discourse instead of flamewars.
They’re basing it on data mining existing flagged comments, though. So their dumb bot will be trained on the dumbest samples. And it may not be able to tell the difference between why someone would get banned from /r/politics vs. r/conservative vs. r/catsstandingup
We all knew they would use bots for moderation eventually, I didn’t think it would happen this quickly though.
I just assumed that everyone with a username of word-word-number there was a bot or sockpuppet.
This offering wouldn’t be at any discount, though, it would be at the offering price. So you’d have to put your own money into buying stock in a business that doesn’t show a profit.
If you want Reddit stock for some reason, don’t buy the IPO. Wait until it crashes after the IPO.
Edit: I am tempted to sign up, though, just to get the details and post them here. Signing up doesn’t obligate you to anything… yet.
Awesome. I would gild this comment, except… Well, you know.
How many people got this?
In particular, it’s just lazy to escalate to a permaban right away. Even if they have a rule against reposts, removing a post along with a warning not to do it again is sufficient to educate the vast majority of people there who may not have seen the rule and only did it for the first time.
But that would take a few extra minutes, I suppose, to check someone’s post history and see if they are a serial rule breaker. Much easier to just wield the ban-hammer then ignore.