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Comment by brokenmachine | Hacker News Reader

I've been permanently banned on reddit as well for no apparent reason before.

I also sometimes express controversial opinions, but I try not to be rude.

You will eventually get banned from Reddit if you express anything that doesn't align with the hive-mind. If you disagree you are banned. Expressing dissent will get you banned. The rules don't actually matter.

If you post in a subreddit that the subreddit you are posting in does not like, you are banned.

That's the most ridiculous thing in my opinion. It's literally mods denying users access to other parts of the site.

The only way to stay unbanned is to not engage. Downvote and move on. That's not a great way to create interesting conversation and a useful site though...

Reddit is still a great resource, but it's shooting itself in the foot.

It's too big. There's no dang keeping an eye on everything and keeping things civil.

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>If you post in a subreddit that the subreddit you are posting in does not like, you are banned

Yeah but that's usually individual subreddits, not the whole site.

The larger subs are trash fires, but I've found several where you could actually discuss things. Subreddits for shows, technical topics, etc tended to have less drama.

But an individual subreddit can impact your ability to use the whole site.

I was banned by one sub for having a different opinion from the hivemind, and having the audacity to try and discuss it. A year later I decided I wanted to start over with Reddit, not because of any bans, but because I wanted to revamp my sub list and it seemed easier to start over. Browsing /r/all, I saw a post and made a comment. It happened to be on the sub I was banned from with the other account (the sub was often on the front page). They took this as me making an account to get around the ban (which wasn’t my motivation) and banned me from the whole site. So one sub can kill all your access. Coming from /r/all, I didn’t even realize I was commenting there until I got the perma-ban. The comment I made wasn’t even provocative, it just matched the IP of the other account.

The thing is, there is no way to know what subs you’re banned from. I would have been more than happy to hide/block all those subs on my new account so I never saw them, but what are they and how can I actually do that? Those features don’t exist. So users get banned because they lack the information and tools needed to follow the rules.

I agree that the small subs are generally more chill. I’d often run out of stuff to look at on subreddits I was subscribed to, so I’d head to /r/all to see what the site as a whole was up to. I had 30-40 subreddits hidden from /r/all to clean it up and get rid of the stuff that would always leave me as a contrarian, but I guess that wasn’t good enough.

>It happened to be on the sub I was banned from with the other account

This is precisely what happened to me as well.

>I would have been more than happy to hide/block all those subs on my new account so I never saw them, but what are they and how can I actually do that?

I don't get why they don't just not allow the post. Which subs they're banned from is not secret information, and they're allowing you to post in other subs.

It especially seems like just being annoying for it's own sake when you were banned for practically nothing in the first place.

They've become too big to moderate so they don't care.

But they are punishing engagement, which I have to believe will not turn out well for them in the end. It'll become even more of a brainless echo-chamber.

>They've become too big to moderate so they don't care.

The big issue is there are no moderation standards. The mods of a sub can do whatever they want and there is no real appeal process. I was banned from /r/atheism for replying to a joke with another joke. The mods apparently thought I was a super religious person trying to overtake the sub or something. I tried to appeal and they told me to write a long paper, where I talked at length about how and why I was wrong and how and why it won’t happened again. It would have taken me hours, and I would have been lying, because I don’t think I did anything wrong. They simply didn’t understand the jokes in the comments and have egos so big they want people to write pages and pages of text to make sure people know who to bow to. Kind of ironic that the mods of an atheism subreddit were trying to act like gods.

>But they are punishing engagement, which I have to believe will not turn out well for them in the end. It'll become even more of a brainless echo-chamber.

The echo chamber has been in effect for a while, but it’s gotten so much worse. It used to be some downvotes here and there. Now they simply ban anyone who doesn’t bend a knee to the “correct” opinion. That type of environment isn’t enjoyable.

Give it time and I’m sure society will shift away from this madness. It’s only a matter of time before all these people turn on each other, I’ve already seen it happen a few times. That’s when people will hopefully wake up and figure out that we need to be tolerant of other people’s views in order to have the freedom to express our own views.

>Kind of ironic that the mods of an atheism subreddit were trying to act like gods.

Sounds like some kind of involuntary BDSM (dom) situation.

People like that are why I prefer to call myself agnostic.

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