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