Reddit seems to have introduced sitewide AI moderation bots that are sweeping up users and outright banning them, without warning or explanation, for crimes like including links in their posts. This has started to hit some pretty well-known artists in r/comics.
It’s inconsistent and unpredictable - which makes it worse, since you don’t know what the rules are. As companies like Reddit give up more and more control to unaccountable machines, this kind of thing is getting more common.
Reddit has always had kind of a strange relationship with contributors and what is often called “self-promotion”. On one hand, it wants Content… But it can’t seem to decide where it wants the content to come from.
It’s nice that we’ve got alternative spaces like this.
Anyway, have some links:
- More comics:
- Patreon
I was on Reddit since 2009, registered in 2011… Had the occasional 3-7 days bans, usually when I called out power tripping subreddit mods over modmail, who’ve tended to respond with the “help this user is harassing me” button (and even a decade ago Reddit was leaning towards trusting subreddit moderators over average users).
Recently got banned for “ban evasion” - got banned from a tankie subreddit, someone else replied a “😂” to the power tripping mod, who must’ve reported it as ban evasion because a few hours later permanent banhammer struck my main account, my tech account, my porn account, my politics account… the list goes on.
So yeah, fuck Reddit. They had so many chances to be better, and chose to be greedy at every single one of them.
I got permanently banned for describing Minecraft features, like cheekily describing the parallels between the villagers and antisemitic stereotypes. I was permanently banned for that, appealed the ban, and before the appeal was able to go through I was banned again on every account for… whatever the fuck, they didn’t tell me. I assume ban evasion, but I didn’t even post on any of my alts.
I appealed that ban as well, but decided it wasn’t worth it and deleted the app from my phone and the bookmark from my browser before I could find out if it went through.