Anonymity is the only way to combat this. Make sure your online identity isn't connected to your real name. Ideally, you should have separate identities for each website. Using Tor or a VPN is also a good idea.
People might read this and think that people were banned for upvoting things that were insanely bigoted, or personal attacks.
While I'm sure that was the case, the slope was indeed slippery, and reddit ended up banning people for upvoting posts such as "John Brown did nothing wrong" and "it is justifiable to kill slave-owners".
Moderators that agreed that this was unreasonable then saw their subreddits (some fairly major) banned for advocating violations of reddit policy.
All in order to score PR points and do some both-sidesisms. The actual ethical good didn't matter, it was all PR to Reddit.
As a daily reddit user, I wasn't aware of this:
"Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities."
> Make sure your online identity isn't connected to your real name.
Yeah, well, my userid here, on reddit, twitter, twitch, github.....is my last name, so I guess I'm stuck. (:
I expressed a critical opinion on a video game that I, overall, greatly enjoy, but have been feeling increasing frustration over how the developers have been supporting it. The comment certainly wasn't racist, sexist, political, etc. It was simply critical of an aspect of the game that I felt was holding me back from fully enjoying the game.
What made it even worse was my comment was shadow banned. It shows up on my profile. It shows up when I'm logged in. But, it doesn't show up in an incognito tab, it's [removed].
I started noticing this happening in a lot more places. I add a comment that I'd expect would get some sort of reaction (either positive or negative), but it gets nothing. Turns out, these comments were being removed without me be aware.
In the past, content removal would almost always come with an explanation - and that reason was likely clearly justified.
reddit has become a real cess pool and its not the users and what they post but the back door rules and such and pettiness among to moderators of many subs
Yup, this is so common I made a site showing where it happens [1]. Prior to this there was no easy way to see what had been removed from your account. Even I as a developer had no idea it was happening for years because (1) mods do sometimes send removal messages, leading me to believe they are always sent, and (2) as you wrote above, removed comments do show up in the thread when you are logged in. Everyone else sees [removed].