If you ask investors, Reddit is doing great. Its current market cap sits at nearly $22 billion, three times what it debuted at during its March 2024 IPO. Once a little-known successor to Fark and Digg, and a great place to engage in down-to-earth communication and meet interesting people, it’s now one of the most well-known social (or anti-social) media platforms in the world.
From a user perspective, though, the site is less friendly than ever. The latest change — made with zero fanfare, as usual — now allows complete strangers to reduce your account’s functionality for any reason they see fit. Now, if someone blocks you, you’re no longer able to edit, delete, or even view your own comments, with exactly zero recourse for you, the person who originally posted them.
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Reddit’s block function has prevented users from further participating in comment chains for quite some time, which already opened up the potential for abusing control over certain discussions. The latest update to blocking not only stops a user’s ability to comment further, it makes it look like they never commented at all — but only to the blocked user. Others can still see and reply to the original comment, despite its invisibility to the apparent owner.
While Reddit never announced the change, it’s seemingly been in place for some users — but not all — for varying lengths of time. Mentions of the change can be found as far back as June 2024, but got little widespread attention. Now, according to Android Police’s and others’ experience, the update appears to be rolling out even more widely.
The longer I’m on lemmy, the more I realize just how dumb reddit user controls are
When I was on reddit, it seemed to matter so much how old your account was on any given subreddit, but now i realize it’s extraordinarily bad opsec to have a single account.
All this to say: there being a single point of authority that can issue IP bans and shadowblocks and generally have control over user identity information is just so needlessly stupid.
Last night, I kept getting “Empty response from endpoint” on and off. This morning, it was all I got, replying to any thread anywhere, including forums I never visit. Tried the website, “Failed to create comment.”
No indication as to why. No message stating I’d been banned or otherwise had my account restricted. No email either. Just cryptic error messages.
I wasn’t going around making trouble, either. Just posting stuff that didn’t break any rules. I’m careful about that.
You do something they don’t like on Twitter, they specifically tell you you’re limited and for how long. I guess Reddit thinks communicating with users about changes to their accounts is totally unimportant?
So I deleted my account and came here.
have you tried from differen devices, turning VPN, or a diff location. it usually tells if you’re banned, but unable to create acct could be something on thier side of the issue?
I deleted my account, so there’s nothing to test.
I’m assuming this is some shit AI moderation experiment, or some mechanical response to being blocked or reported that lets them off the hook for human review.
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this.
Are they saying that if someone blocks you, you’re essentially shadow-banned in all of Reddit? Or are they saying that you, the person being blocked, can’t see the blockers comments? Can individual comments be blocked and that’s what this is referring to?
I left during the API diaspora and haven’t been back, so I’m perfectly happy not understanding what going on here.
Seems like it would be pretty trivial to make a botnet that just went around blocking users from every new top comment/post. Even better if you just manually do it with that old, organic account you never got around to deleting. That would very easily cause a huge disruption for Reddit.
No wonder I couldn’t comment properly, guess I’ll go to r/conservative and mass block everyone that will be hilarious
so reddit just added shadow-banning to its arsenal of tools that hurt users and do absolutely nothing for moderators.
just in case anyone was wondering why i’m here now…
I’m here because I was perma-banned for no reason 🤔 then the whole ban evasion policy. Forget that site
I had the same thing. I received a temp ban then I got several emails saying multiple accounts were permabanned
Yeah it’s a ridiculous auto ban system. I had a couple of accounts that were ~8 years old? All banned. Made a new account with burner email and VPN. Banned.
I’m glad I’ve been using ReVanced and patched Reddit app for free premium. Otherwise it’s absolutely garbage the app and the site.
It did pop me back on to Lemmy.
There seems to be no consistency with perm bans. Burner email and VPN banned - maybe the browser you used had a reddit kill cookie in it.
Ive faced this the last time I used reddit. (Ive left the app for 4-5 months now, had reduced the use already for more than a year) The local sub of my state has turned into RW propaganda due to this feature alone, and mods dont care.
My west coast area also had the same thing, right wingers and tankies. Always goody two shoes like you should do
Yeah this policy in practice makes no fucking sense.
I definitely experienced this last month. I had a weirdo block me randomly because I happen to not be a fan of historical figure, Aaron Burr. They apparently really really like Aaron Burr—so they blocked me. Whatever.
I didn’t get a notification or anything. It just looked like they’d deleted their account and never existed on my side. Ok. I shrugged and thought it was a weird UI thing and moved on.
That was until I started talking to other people and the Blocker kept unblocking me to leave me more messages only to immediately Reblock me.
I knew this was happening because I would get an email alert that I had a comment. But when I went to see the comment on Reddit, it was gone.
I don’t even know or understand what the Blocker wanted from me (except maybe falling in love with Aaron Burr-which isn’t on the table —he’s not my type).
In practice, this new policy ended up having the Blocker spam the person they’re Blocking and removing their ability to prevent being spammed.
Dude I’ve never blocked anyone or had any real trouble on any site or forum. The only time I’ve had trouble is on Reddit and only over the last 3-months. Good riddance.
Maybe you just need to wait for it.
I’m descendant of Aaron Burr’s grandfather and I don’t even like him. He was a cunt and a swindler if not with purpose (not to mention that other thing he did), why someone would choose that hill to die on I have no idea.
This seems like a fantastic use case for a script that cycles through users and blocks them at random and at scale.
Yeah, this might actually make me sign back up just to script kiddie the shit out of things.
