Why I'm Leaving Reddit
dp.cx
dp.cx
Now, seriously, when you post your own content, deep down it's always more about self-promotion than something that interests the community. You post because you're afraid no one else will do it - you just did the same here on HN. It's frowned upon in most places, not because it means you're a spammer bastard, but because it's so hard to draw the line: if every company started posting their own stuff it would fill the boards with trash.
I've done it too, but have started refraining from posting my own stuff because of that. If I'm allowed, everyone should be, and I don't think that's a good idea.
- participating in the discussion on subjects related to your business/product.
- not posting links to your content until a minimum amount of Karma is achieved.
- not linking to your own facebook/twitter pages unless someone asks to.
- using related discussions to explain how a given problem might be fixed, offering options, and mentioning that you provide one of those options.
This also applies to HN, but do realize that the community here is more tight knit and more focused on learning than many other places. So you can make a post of how your product is awesome (in a technical manner) and people will appreciate the content and participate in the discussion.
But! Reddit is not generally a place where you find people like HN members. The average there is more about passing time, and hanging out. Though particular sub-reddits have their own culture, you will should expect the typical group of trolls (sometimes, the moderators are the trolls).
If you plan to post to a specific sub-reddit, then contact the moderators before posting, and get to know them. I always, always do this and have never been perma-banned. The way to do it is to introduce yourself in a friendly manner and ask for their blessing. Explain to them the who/what/how/why/when if what your are doing. Let them know that you dont want to spam the community but want to take part in it. Thus, imparting your knowledge about the domain with the insight gained from providing a product in the market is something that is valuable for the community at large.
You will also need a good sense of humor and a flame suit.
I find that suspicious.
> I’ll be leaving my account, but I won’t be back.
Okay, but his user page shows a 404: http://www.reddit.com/user/gms8994
Maybe that's what usually happens to shadowbanned users; I have no idea.
edit: I can still see at least some of his submissions - http://www.reddit.com/r/Celebs/new/?count=125&after=t3_1... - http://i.imgur.com/pL4bs.png
edit 2: trevorj brings up a good point: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5062850
Shadowbanned users are 404d as well.
I'm tempted to dig out my toy project that fiddled with the Reddit API to try and find it; since you last submitted something four days ago, it gives me a definitive bound to search through, buuuuut this sandwich isn't going to eat itself.
That's not covered in this article. And it seems crazy to me that they would vote to shadowban you without attempting to talk to you at least a little. Is that what happened? If so, that's nuts.
The fun of closed walls.
A week or so ago, it was pointed out to me that ircmaxell was also banned from reddit - I think it was a shadowban as well, since his username still appears as the submitter on some items, rather than "[deleted]" - because he was submitting too many links to his own blog.
Now, this isn't just some average blogger. Anthony is a very well known PHP developer - by which I mean he develops PHP, not just in PHP, and has voting rights regarding the direction the language takes. (Please don't hold that against him, Jeff.)
While I'm sure he was posting a lot of submissions for his own site, it was really great stuff. The first I really heard of him was due to a series of articles he and another developer wrote as a guide to understanding the internals of PHP with directions on what various C code was and how it hung together. It wasn't spam, at least not by any definition I care to recognize.
This didn't matter. Quality didn't matter. Apparently, one of the moderators to /r/php even went to bat for him with the admins, asking that the ban be lifted. The admins didn't care.
Meanwhile, many people submit a lot of content they also made themselves - memes. If you want to make a bunch of advice animal image macros and upload them to imgur, that's fine. If you write a five part dive into the guts of PHP's internals, you're banned.
It's funny too, because maybe I'm remembering incorrectly since it's been so long, but I seem to recall early reddit specifically saying that it was cool to submit your own stuff, and even encouraging it. Now, there's some sort ratio of yours-to-others content that you need to keep in balance, otherwise you're marked a spammer, regardless of how good your own content happens to be.
Also, addlepate, you've been hellbanned:
addlepate 8 days ago | link [dead]
Are you sure about all that? I never get votes or replies. Also, as implemented,
HN's hellbanning is quite obvious when it happens.
It's a valid mechanism for outright spam, but seems to get overused as sites get more mature. I think you should basically never hellban anyone who has ever done anything even marginally useful on your site. Either talk to such miscreants or explicitly ban them so they know what you did.
[1] It was a meta post. JoS didn't allow meta posts. But it was hard to know this because.. it's a meta rule. And you could keep posting meta posts in ignorance and never get feedback that this was undesired behavior.
It's a matter of ratio. Is their marginally useful contribution worth the hassle that they cause?
Rooting a troll out of something like HN, or Reddit, or a forum is hard. They probably have more time than you.
You said elsewhere in this thread that shadowbanning is required because otherwise they just create a new account. But the new account starts with none of the positive karma the old one did, so it is hellbanned in the usual way.
Literally all this takes is that the site support non-deceptive versions of ignore/kill/nuke/blast and use them the first few times. If the guy sees his stories being flagged and continues, then stop showing him that his stories are flagged.
My guess is that you posted too many links like the pop mech link, which had an auto playing video the first time I visited before a cookie was set saying I'd seen it (I'm guess they do this because I didn't see it again)
Links like that are extremely annoying and the quickest way to express it is to hit the 'report' link.
If you ban someone, they just re-register, and you have to hunt them down again.
If you close registration, your site slowly withers away.
If you verify registrations one at a time, your time slowly withers away.
If you charge for registration, you better be SomethingAwful or MetaFilter, or your site will rapidly wither away.
I've had to mod a few communities here and there, and while I admit that I'm not particularly good at it, it has definitely taught me that it's mostly a thankless slog.
All it did was make me lose a bit of respect for the people who moderate this place. If the mod had actually sent me a message telling me why I was banned, I could have at least learned from it.
An ideal shadow-ban makes it difficult to realize you're shadow-banned.