Bjarne Stroustrup had his Reddit account suspended | Hacker News Reader

Bjarne Stroustrup had his Reddit account suspended

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I made a twitter account once. I followed maybe 4 people basically as a way to subscribe to whatever they were saying, then liked a few posts.

I got banned the same day and told that I had violated their tos in an undefined way and that attempts to contact support would be ignored. My only tweet was to say that I had finally made a dumb twitter account.

Maybe the assumption was that every human on earth must already have a twitter account, so any new account must be a bot?

These platforms are just ridiculous and we shouldn’t use them.

I ran into the exact same situation. Have been trying to get in contact with their support for weeks without getting any response at all. This is absolutely ridiculous! (Yet at the same time they get "hacked" by teenagers and I can't help but to feel karma has been served...)

edit: Should anybody from Twitter read this, please unblock @FrontAid_CMS. (I guess it's worth a try...)

Tex payer funded government organizations(like USGS) post information on private platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Their ability to ban users for arbitrary reasons is problematic.

You don't need a Twitter account to read those messages on Twitter.

It's also not the only channels by which that information is disseminated.

> You don't need a Twitter account to read those messages on Twitter.

Didn't the courts rule that the president can't block people on twitter? That seems to suggest "just read while logged out" isn't a valid excuse the courts will accept.

They ruled that elected politicians cannot block individuals from participating in the replies to their tweets because they deemed it was the equivalent of a public space. They didn't rule that Twitter couldn't themselves moderate who posts on the platform.

> they deemed it was the equivalent of a public space.

Then how Twitter is allowed to moderate who posts on "the equivalent of a public space"? By banning a user Twitter blocks the user from participating in such a public space.

Because the law restricts government officials from banning interactions from the public, not private companies doing that on their private property.

Sounds like a loophole if the government official uses a friendly private space. I think private space should lose such an ability to the extent where it is being "deputized" that way for the government official. Thus even banned accounts must be allowed to interact with Trump for example (as long as the accounts stays in the legal space of course).

> sounds like a loophole

That is not uncommon in the effects of the law overlapped with court rulings. If nobody has tried to challenge the loophole directly in court, then the law is mute on how it would interpret the situation faced with a contradiction.

You can't really search on Twitter while logged out. Browsing while logged out is nice, however, because the little annoyances remind me that the physical world is a better place to exist than there.

Were you using tor, brave, strong adblocking or a disposable email and refused to give your phone number? All these things will get you banned now when trying to open a new account.

uBlock Origin (with roughly default settings) has never tripped Reddit's new account security stuff for me. I could see how it would make financial sense for social networks to ban account creation from Tor and disposable emails given the high spam-to-legitimacy ratio, although it's understandably frustrating for people who want anonymity.

Reddit is fine but parent was talking about Twitter.

With twitter this is true since at least 4 years. Furthermore when reusing a dormant account after about 10 years you are flagged as a fraud.

Happened to me recently with Amazon after password reset. But not instantly, only after very carefully choosing and comparing about a dozen articles for about 500EUR during the night, then in the early morning finally putting it all into the basket and confirming the order. BAM! Two dozen popups about fradulent activity, account locked!

WTF?!

At least I managed to get called back on my landline instantly, from someone in Egypt. Very friendly. Account unlocked, but now I'm in CAPTCHA-hell. Unusable that way.

All very unsatisfactory. Gives one the feeling one is on someones shitlist.

Anyways, there are other options.

"Shrug..."

I got banned before I even posted anything. I had the account, then the third time I logged in it locked me out because of unspecified suspicious behavior. It was baffling.

Later I tried again with a different account and they wanted a phone number. It was a huge turnoff.

People give Signal heat about wanting a number but they won't even bat an eye at the same behavior from Twitter.

Frustrating to say the least.

Signal used phone numbers as user ID's. That has recently been changed.

Has it already? How can I change my logins?

Although they implemented Secure Value Recovery, they have not enabled "non-phone number based identifiers", at least in the UI. https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/

Source for this? The only thing I could find is this[1], which still requires a phone number sign up. I also checked the signal blog and couldn't find anything either.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/signal-to-move-away-from-phone...

On a related note, Twitter constantly gives me an error that I'm being "rate-limited" when I'm simply trying to read a tweet. A single tweet. Even if it's the first time I've accessed Twitter all month. Very bizarre.

I didn't know impersonating someone else on Reddit was a bannable offence... I thought the whole point of sites with throwaway usernames is everyone can pretend to be someone else, and provide proof of their identity (or not) as they see fit.

That may have been true in the past, but now AMAs are an important part of Reddit’s business model. Here’s an example [0]. Allowing randos to impersonate celebrities undermines that.

[0] https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/nfl-reddit-ama-video-rev...

AMAs ask for proof

the user agreement doesn't seem to make any mention of it being not allowed: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement#text-conte...

although it does include the wonderfully vague prohibition against "Using the Services in any manner that could negatively affect other users from fully enjoying the Services"

It's here in the content policy: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy

What interesting, though, is that in all my years on Reddit I've never heard of anyone being suspended for it. There are a lot of parody accounts that usually aren't clearly marked as such. It seems less likely that an admin just randomly decided to ban him, and more likely that some malicious person used this form to report him for impersonating himself: https://i.imgur.com/MtFMviD.png

It seems more likely that someone assumed that u/bstroustrup was someone impersonating Bjarne Stroustrup, without there being any malicious intent. The end result is the same of course.

Pretending not to be yourself isn't the same as pretending to be someone else though.

Ken Thompson's Reddit account: https://www.reddit.com/user/unixken

He also has a Github account with 3.4k followers, but no repositories: https://github.com/ken

I love Reddit, it’s one of the sites I spend hours a day on.

Out of curiosity I went to an on-site interview there, because it would be fun to work at a site I felt so strongly about. I was never more turned off from working at place as I was when I went. They weren’t horrible at all, but there was this level of arrogance that I didn’t enjoy, plus a level of complete unreadiness. Some of the teams I talked to were completely understaffed and the “old timers” felt detached. It seemed like they aren’t solving the problems that users want solved, and are driven by this alternate goal of “increasing engagement” even though they are one of the top sites on the Internet. Instead of making subreddits easier for moderators to manage and make better, they are taking an orthogonal route that benefits them but doesn’t help the real content creators on Reddit. It was very disappointing.

I got an offer but it was a “take it or leave it” one, so I left it.

It's not very noble work but it does sound fun to work on a team with resources. I interviewed at Google for a year and it was for a team trying to squeeze a half a percent more juice out of ads. It was dreadful.

>interviewed [...] for a year

Yikes.

This is a clickbait. I was expecting him to get banned for having an opinion contrary to the popular ideological consensus or something but the reality is even more ordinary: his Reddit account was suspended because Reddit does not believe it is him. This happens to celebrities every now and then as social networks struggle to get rid of thousands of people impersonating them for fun or evil. Real Sharon Stone (or Julia Roberts, I can't remember already) had her OkCupid (or Tinder or something else, I can neither remember this) account terminated in minutes after signing-up. I just wonder how do ordinary people actually having the same names do.

It looks like the account isn't fully banned. It's just exhibiting undefined behavior.

I very much hope that was a joke about C++.

Looks fixed now.

Earlier, his user page (https://old.reddit.com/user/bstroustrup) said, "This account has been suspended". Now when I load it, it looks normal.

As Reddit has ramped up their own activism, embraced political bias, and enacted heavy handed censorship, their actions against users have become increasingly imprecise and often absurd. It’s hard to peek behind the veil but mods of subreddits have lots of power these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if they can also take site wide actions at this point. They can also act as a hive mind due to mod meetings and mod orchestration from the admins and since the top subreddits share many common mods (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018). It’s time for alternatives: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...

I would enjoy a Reddit clone that had a simple sitewide ban on politics. The problem with politics is that it’s infectious: either a site keeps it highly contained and controlled or it slowly takes over most communities over time and dominates. This happened to Twitter and it’s happening to Reddit. I’m curious to see if it will happen to TikTok, which for most of its existence managed to avoid politics.

HN has avoided this fate by being extremely selective about which political topics are allowed and frankly by banning most of them.

My thinking is let Reddit continue down its course toward a site specifically for politics or politically-driven conversation about various topics and let all substantive non-political discourse move elsewhere.

Did he upvote something on an undesirable subreddit?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601595&goto=news

Someone must have failed to learn C++ so miserably

Overzealous mods run amok. Power tripping does weird things to people

Moderators can't suspend accounts; only administrators can do that.

If there is one thing I see folks persistently misunderstand, it is the separation between mods and admins, and which powers each group has. It is really unfortunate for mods, who end up getting blamed for all sorts of things that it is impossible for them to know or do.

Public moderation logs might help make this distinction more clear.

Is there a reason why mod logs should be private at all?

Brigading, mod harassment, doxxing, etc.

>Brigading

???

>mod harassment

It doesn't have to contain who did it

>doxxing

Then make it so you can't see what was deleted if the deletion reason is "doxing". Also make it a bannable offense for mods to misuse that reason. Also make it so that if there's a pattern of it happening in the subreddit, the whole moderation team will be replaced (to prevent mods from using sockpuppet accounts to do their dirty work).

You're reading it backwards. Its to support that kind of stuff, not discourage it. Reddit is pretty toxic.

tl;dr: Private is easier/cheaper.

Almost any set of policies and procedures can be gamed by a motivated set of participants, and the more information that is exposed by a moderation process, the easier it becomes to game the process, and the harder/more expensive it becomes to support a moderated environment, whether by volunteers or paid staff.

Public activity logs, detailed policies, and detailed procedures would be an amazing expression of transparency that would then immediately become a complicated house of cards requiring constant maintenance, defense, and review. For volunteers that is either a huge time-suck or a high threshold. For paid staff, the same, plus expensive, plus a target for law-suits.

> Almost any set of policies and procedures can be gamed by a motivated set of participants

Also a good point. For instance, even if mod logs obscure the content of deleted posts, a determined abuser can simply create new users whose names alone convey messages that are inappropriate for the community. (A concrete example: in a community surrounding a person named John Smith, a user named "JohnSmithIsARapist".)

While making moderation logs public is perhaps a plus for "transparency", it can have some rather negative effects in terms of community stability, especially in smaller groups. Even if the mod logs don't include the content of removed posts, the fact alone that a user had some of their posts removed by a moderator can feed a conflict. Having moderation actions occur silently helps keep a community on track.

In my experience, it has worked pretty well on Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/moderations

I think it helps that moderation transparency was one of the "founding goals" of that community. The dynamics there are also quite different from the dynamics on Reddit.

As another example, I moderate a small semi-public Discord server and we publish both the audit log (which Discord automatically creates) as well as the contents of our moderator-only chat room 24 hours after conversations take place. This extra bit of transparency makes users more comfortable with what's going on while giving moderators enough of their own space to make decisions unencumbered by involvement from community members.

Maybe; moderation is an area where it seems like[1] a lot of people act in bad faith, and so I'm not convinced that this would actually change a whole ton. Maybe it would though.

1: I'm not actually a moderator of any significant subreddits, so I am mostly going by what I see and hear, rather than personal experience. I used to be a really avid reader of /r/subredditdrama too, so I probably have bias towards the worst of it...

It doesn't help that Reddit's automatic spam filter will go over the heads of subreddit moderators and remove posts without their input. Users are aware that mods can remove posts but are generally unaware of the auto filter, so they'll get angry at mods for the removal.

I assume that mods have "local" powers in specific sub-reddits and admins have global sitewide powers?

That is a good first approximation, but the situation described in one of your siblings is a good example of a "local" action that moderators are not in charge of, so the split isn't that exact.

It wouldn't be unlikely that this has to be forwarded by moderators to administrators first as sort of a filter thing and then administrators are just suspending accounts without even reviewing the cases forwarded by the moderators.

I doubt it, given that the moderators are trying to fix it, if you read the /r/cpp thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/ia6u5t/why_has_reddit_...

Banning a user from logging in is something only Admins can do.

There aren't many admin staff on Reddit, and they tend to deal with stuff that will get the company in legal hot water if not dealt with.

Doesn't seem to be a case of overzealous moderation, but more like a kafkaesque process that never seems to get fixed and only rectified through outcry on social media platforms.

Seriously, it seems that stuff like this never gets fixed.

Seems like they're just trying to protect his account from impersonators.

Then there should be a documented process to allow him to establish his identity.

Well, they would be trying to protect his identity from impersonators. Bjarne presumably only has one reddit account, and he is presumably the only person who knows the password, so it isn't clear how an impersonator would access his acocunt.

Cancel culture claims another victim.

Social media and its consequences have been a disaster for nerds. Introverted nerds and intellectuals created the technology that enables social media to exist. That same technology is being used to exclude nerds from the internet.

What's left for nerds in the modern world? Nothing.

I don't use C++ right now but I might want to later and I don't like seeing its creator ostracized.

>Social media and its consequences have been a disaster for nerds. Introverted nerds and intellectuals created the technology that enables social media to exist. That same technology is being used to exclude nerds from the internet.

WTF are you talking about? Social media has been an unqualified blessing for nerds. Practically every pastime that used to belong to nerds (video games, programming, D&D, anime, using a computer) has exploded in popularity since the dawn of the web and become far more mainstream. There is no conspiracy to exclude nerds from the internet, at all. And I see no indication of "cancel culture" having any involvement here.

Reading your past comments, you seem to be suffering from a persecution complex tied to identifying as an "introvert," and a belief that some conspiracy of "extroverts" is persecuting people like yourself. That's not happening anywhere but in your own mind. Seek help.

What makes you think this has anything to do with “cancel culture”?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com