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?
Update: Created a new account (there are two subs I still want to follow… obviously any others are a lost cause) and the account is half-broken. It can apparently comment, but the profile and my avatar won’t load.
I’ll leave it for a few days and see if it improves, but I’m not hopeful. I don’t think I’ll bother trying to use Reddit for general purposes unless they get a better CEO. By that time, my guess is that Lemmy and the new Digg will have vacuumed away enough sane users that Reddit will never recover.
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.
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.
actually its a self-shadowban, but people sitll can comment on your thread that you blocked the original commentor on, but you cant see the comments unless someone responded to you, and you cant comment on it either, unless you unblock. its a known thing for a long time. you have to delete your comment in order to prevent peeople from chiming in to your thread.
That’s where I’m confused, isn’t blocking a user-wide thing? How would Reddit know that you were blocked because of a specific comment?
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.
Yeah I could still comment normally to the chain itself and my comments. Other people in the thread were talking to me directly and normally. They were responding to my comments. I didn’t switch accounts to evade the block though. That’s so ridiculous I’m sorry someone bothered you like that.
I’ve never blocked anyone in the 12 years I was on Reddit. I’ll mock obvious bigoted trolls if they’re being actively terrible to people in my community. But that’s the limit for me engaging in an unhelpful back and forth. Usually they get bored within an hour or so when I stop giving them energy.
I’m sorry about the negative experience you’ve had on the other side of it. I think it’s pretty clear that the ability to block someone and not interact with them is important but the way it’s implemented is a crappy experience for everyone. Not to mention it seems easily exploitable.
I’ve upvoted you a lot on Lemmy so please don’t block me haha
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.
/Jerk: Excuse me the other thing? Wow amazing amazing you fell for Jefferson and Hamilton propaganda 🥲🤣🤣🤣 I can’t believe you fell for a CONSPIRACY THEORY the truth is that Aaron Burr was a normal person who loved his family and was the VICTIM for decades because of Jefferson and Hamilton targeted harassment campaign against this wonderful man! You are Aaron Burr’s descendent and FAMILY and the lies about him were so successful that even his descendants fell for them. Innocent until proven guilty and Burr was DECLARED innocent!!!😇 Why are you so mad and upset and obsessed with Arron Burr what is wrong with you? You are so unhinged for Aaron Burr (blocks unblocks sends another version of the above reblocks, repeat)
/Unjerk: I actually said something way kinder about Burr than you did initially. I said something general like “To be fair, Burr wasn’t that great of a guy. And there’s the whole criminal conspiracy with the bribing Generals thing and trying to recruit soldiers while Vice President thing too.” I didn’t even get into the duel.
Whatever we can be obsessed losers together. Spending every second of every day seething against the memory of precious spineless baby angle Aaron Burr (a man I never think about)
the Blocker kept unblocking me to leave me more messages only to immediately Reblock me.
Wow. How empty some people’s lives are. How mentally deranged do you have to be to do this
Maybe you just need to wait for it.
My Blocker writes me a comment every day
I can’t read it cuz the shadowban at play
Huh, last time I tried blocking someone I accidentally unblocked them right after then I couldn’t block them again for 24 hours, so I had to keep getting notifications about their bullshit trolling, glad to see they removed this feature so block spamming can be used to it’s full effect
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!
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.
Neocities.org is basically geocities lol
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.
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.
Funnyjunk still going? i used to be a funnyjunker and 9gag hater
i live in a small developing country and if i comment or post anything at all my account will be banned instantly.
appealing does nothing. it’s just an empty hole you can send messages into.
Wow that’s crazy. So is your entire country region IP blocked?
we basically have one state-owned service provider which leases out infrastructure to the smaller service providers. I think if you started to blacklist problematic traffic by ASN you would include huge swaths of residential IPs, cellphones, everything. I don’t know what the pattern is that they are using to blacklist.
Did they actually tell you you were banned, or did they just give you cryptic error messages and wait for you to figure it out?
It looked like an auto mod message that I was permanently banned for no reason and to go to the help page to find out more. Of course that was useless. I tried to appeal. They said no. I said f#@k spez and left.
To be honest I’ve had more meaningful engagement in this thread then in 8 years with 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.
I’m going to mainly use lemmy now, but a reddit account is still useful. I like my local city subreddit.
My plan is to go to a public library to make an account and then slowly use it every time I go to the library.
Then use a browser that blocks fingerprinting and use a VPN. If that fails I’ll give up.
They have been shadow banning since unidan days, it’s just last month alone their shadow banning went out of control. Someone posted a statiscal data graph of the week in a different forum I was banned the shadowbanning was up like 500%, also include permabans. It seems reddit has been relying shadow banning so people will find it harder to evade them. Also their using AI to do most of not all of their banning. They were able to measure it because they had hundred or thousands of acc
I made a throwaway a few weeks ago and posted a comment promoting lemmy-- shadowbanned immediately
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
This seems like a fantastic use case for a script that cycles through users and blocks them at random and at scale.
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
I’ll log in and just block /u/spez on all his posts.
You think admins will be affected by this? Doubtful.
You’ll be lucky if it lets you block him in the first place, but it probably won’t have the required effect.
It only affects people who replied to you and/or if you have comments high up in conment chains, basically if you have a top voted comment, no one whom you blocked can participate in that comment chain, doesn’t matter if they try to reply to someone who replied to you.
Yeah, this might actually make me sign back up just to script kiddie the shit out of things.
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
Good bot.
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.
Everyone block spez!
On it.
