Hacker News Reader

Comment by allana | Hacker News Reader

Hasn't Reddit been issuing shadow bans for the last decade? I think shadow banning people is really shitty.

In Reddit's case, they shadowbanned me immediately after I bought Reddit gold, and an unpaid, unaffiliated subreddit moderator let me know that my account was snowbanned.

Getting Reddit to reverse the ban took sending a message to an admin and waiting a few weeks.

This shadow ban, the continuing degredation of old.reddit.com (its showing incorrect URLs now), and people getting pissed off at me when I suggest breaking up their wall of text into paragraphs (replying "this is just Facebook!" or similar) have pushed me away.

I'm not on Facebook, and I don't want to interact with people who can't be bothered to put in a modicum of effort to comply with subreddit stanfards and rules. Sadly, Reddit has chosen to tailor itself to adopt this demographic over the last few years :c

View on HN

Only administrators or automatic spam detection tools can shadowban. Regular moderators cannot.

Reddit gold is not a subscription to Reddit. This is a donation function that displays a badge. You didn't have a premium account and you weren't above the rules.

Being picky, mean or downright unpleasant will get you banned you from certain places. Unless done in a polite and educational manner, calling out people for their lack of punctuation or grammatical errors is generally frowned upon and considered toxic behaviour since it does not contribute to the conversation.

You're wrong about multiple things here.

Regular moderators can effectively shadowban inside their subreddits by using AutoModerator and telling it to remove all posts made by certain users.

Reddit Gold has literally been renamed to Reddit Premium and is described officially as both a "premium membership" and a "subscription": https://www.reddit.com/premium

That’s not shadow banning. That’s regular banning. To shadow ban, the suspect has to not know they are being affected. Automoderator is not subtle.

Apparently you've never (knowingly) been shadowbanned by AutoMod. Deimorz (the guy you're responding to) created AutoMod when he worked at Reddit, and I can assure you that AutoMod is more than capable of removing all of your comments without you knowing (and the only way for you to know is to try to view your profile in incognito mode, or have someone else tell you that they can't see any of your comments).

An "effective shadowban" using AM to remove comments is not the same thing as a global shadowban issued by site-wide admins, by any stretch.

I created AutoModerator and was an admin for 4 years. I understand the differences intimately, but they're very similar from the affected user's perspective.

Does Tildes enable admins/mods to use either shadow banning or shadow removal?

No - I'm the only one that can remove posts at this point, and it puts a brightly-colored bold "This comment has been removed and is not visible to other users".

Wow I had no idea. That makes Tildes much more appealing.

>Regular moderators can effectively shadowban inside their subreddits by using AutoModerator and telling it to remove all posts made by certain users.

While your comment makes it sound like AutoMod just removes comments, what I think you're meaning to point out is that AutoMod can selectively hide all of a user's comments to everyone except for the comment author, which is the exact same as shadowbanning, and isn't just a simple comment removal.

A lot of subreddits use this feature now, too. Some automatically shadowban any user that doesn't have above a certain amount of karma, while others auto shadowban everyone and then only maintain a whitelist of authorized posters. If you've ever posted on a subreddit and gotten zero replies/votes, it's worth going into incognito mode and trying to view your comment from there. Chances are, your account is shadowbanned in that subreddit.

Yeah, that's how all comment removals on reddit work though (which, you're right, many users don't realize).

Users can only know their comments are removed if they check from logged-out or another account, or if the moderators notify them by posting a reply or messaging (which some do, but not a lot of the time overall).

Ah, you're right. I imagine most users aren't aware of this because they assume that if their comment was removed, they would see the "[removed]" tag like they see for everyone else's removed comments.

And either many redditors have never had their comments removed, or more likely, shadowbanning is apparently a lot more effective than people realized.

Yeah, it's not uncommon at all to see things like, "Edit: Wow, this whole chain of comments was removed, except for mine!" because people don't realize that the site actively hides whether your posts are removed.

Pretty much all of reddit's moderation tools were created 10+ years ago for anti-spam purposes, and have hardly been changed since then. They don't work very well for how they're actually used now.

It is really sad to see Reddit stagnate on spam handling, but the dev resources at Reddit seem to be laser focused on making the new UI & features that ease the transition from Facebook to Reddit.

Most of the subreddits with active mods and communities have yet to stylize and reimplement their custom CSS, sidebar and links on the new UI (or can't due to limitations of the new UI), which means lots of people using the new UI miss out on key features that differentiate a subreddit from the rest of Reddit.

In fact, mods have no other option. If a mod deletes one of your comments, you won't know unless they tell you.

Using a bot to automatically delete content is not the same as an administrator making your submissions and comments invisible to everyone but you.

I give it to you, a Subreddit AutoModerator Ban and a Reddit Shadowban are similar in result but not the same thing and should not be referred as such. As far as I know, a regular moderator cannot use AutoModerator to ban a user across the entire website.

For the re-branded Reddit Premium, you seem to be right. But the point is moot, having a premium account is not a protection from getting banned. See paid games where users with accounts worth thousands of dollars are banned.

(Edit: Oh, just noticed who I am talking to. Hi Deimorz! Great work on all of this.)

>Using a bot to automatically delete content is not the same as an administrator making your submissions and comments invisible to everyone but you.

This is exactly what automod does.

One is a flag on the user's account, the other is adding a username to a bot's watch-list. They act the same but are not the same thing.

That would be like saying that paying an employee to watch someone's account and manually delete every comments and submissions is a shadow ban. It is not. AutoModerator is an amazing piece of work but it is just that, a robot moderator.

But that's not the point. The point is that "an unpaid, unaffiliated subreddit moderator" cannot blanked ban you from the website (and that being a premium user won't protect you from such bans either).

>the other is adding a username to a bot's watch-list

Which is exactly the same as adding a flag to a user's account.

This is some bizarre hair splitting going on here.

>That would be like saying that paying an employee to watch someone's account and manually delete every comments and submissions is a shadow ban. It is not. AutoModerator is an amazing piece of work but it is just that, a robot moderator

I don't know what you're trying to say here. What exactly, in your mind, is the difference between "a robot moderator", which is code that controls what is and isn't visible on a subreddit, and core reddit code, which is also just code that controls what is and isn't visible on reddit?

>The point is that "an unpaid, unaffiliated subreddit moderator" cannot blanked ban you from the website

Reddit is infamous for having multiple poweruser mods that are moderators over many of the most popular subreddits, and many of these subreddits share banlists (even ones outside the 'powermod cabal'). A ban from any one of these 'unpaid, unaffiliated subreddit moderator' will result in a shadowban from the majority of the website.

I hear you and agree that yes, a 'premium subscription' does not mean you're immune from bans, but you seem to also misunderstand the banning mechanisms on reddit. 'Shadowbanning' is much more widely used across reddit than I think you are aware of.

We have gone well beyond the message I wanted to convey. But for the sake of XKCD:386, let me dig a little further in this hole.

You have just described two different things, with different names and different logics. The results of running both is the same but the two are not the same thing.

Moderators sharing lists of usernames to ban versus the software itself banning users globally is not the same thing either. Again, the result is similar, but the process and logic are different.

It is important to make a clear distinction between similar processes.

But yes, you're right, the results are identical and most users will not see the difference.

> A ban from any one of these 'unpaid, unaffiliated subreddit moderator' will result in a shadowban from the majority of the website.

Which sounds like a frightening and dangerous abuse of the moderator privilege to me. I'm astonished that Reddit has continued to allow this practice to continue. Also surprising are that you can comment in a subreddit and get banned from totally unrelated ones just because a mod decides it to be.

>Only administrators or automatic spam detection tools can shadowban. Regular moderators cannot.

Regular mods see shadowbanned posts in the modqueue. In my case, the admins confirmed the automated spam detection snowbanned my account shortly after I paid for Reddit Gold.

>You didn't have a premium account and you weren't above the rules.

I didn't break any rules or expect any special treatment, all I wanted was a silly badge...

>Being picky, mean or downright unpleasant will get you banned you from certain places.

I have never been warned or banned for any of this type of behavior on reddit.

It is critical to assume the other party is writing in good faith when interacting IMO.

>> Hasn't Reddit been issuing shadow bans for the last decade?

vBulletin has been doing it for well over 15 years too.

>the continuing degredation of old.reddit.com (its showing incorrect URLs now)

What do you mean by showing incorrect URLs? I use old.reddit.com all the time and haven't noticed anything wrong.

I've repeately seen links in subreddits that send me to an article, where if I viww the subreddit in the new UI, I see the post actually links me to a post in a different subreddit that eventually links to said article.

I reported a post which was then removed as a duplicate due to this bug recently, and OP ended up notifying myself and the mod of this bug (since only OP used the new UI).

allana, your comment has been voted into invisibility :]

Is what it is, I kinda expected that when going against the HN groupthink...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com