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.
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
digg is gonna relaunch soon and kill it. it’ll become like facebook. pure poetic justice. i was on reddit back in 2008. it isn’t even fair now to say it’s just a shell of what it used to be. btw old.lemmy.world is a thing i like. and it (kinda) works with RES, too!
I just signed up to the mailing list. Reddit has become a cesspool of idiots and power tripping mods.
i think they want to be 9gag. remember that site? me neither.
Funnyjunk still going? i used to be a funnyjunker and 9gag hater
Nah they just want to get those sweet sweet clicks from Cheezberger… How does a site survive by just cutting and pasting another site???
Oh that’s just all of the internet now.
Are they seriously relaunching digg??? lol that’s funny. They relaunched my space and a bunch of zoomers showed up iirc. Maybe what’s old is new again. Next they should do geocities.
No wonder I couldn’t comment properly, guess I’ll go to r/conservative and mass block everyone that will be hilarious
If you do, please let us know how it goes. Brilliant.
Reddit temporarily timed me out from blocking. So it sounds like I’d need a bot for this
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.
It sounds like that in certain circumstances, if I make a comment and then you block me, I can lose the ability to edit my comment. That’s the problem.
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.
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.
The impact of this would be proportional to how successful you are at making comments at the top of comment chains
Just make an LLM bot that comments on anything in new that has a chance of blowing up. Early comments get the top spots. Bonus points for circlular upvoting bot armies.
There’s also the classic bot idea of just copying the top comment from the previous repost of the OP
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.
reddit is desperate for more engagement, so its basically FB. i block people all the time, but my comment chain is still continued to be abused by people, and even some have the audacity to make a new account to evade the block. this is a known issue since more than a year though. i blocked people but they still commented regardless of it being blocked.
it may block the original person you blocked, but it wont stop others from commenting, nor would you notice if the blocked person creates another account to harass you.
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.
