I made a mistake, I started using Reddit again
...and within a few weeks I was banned from r/iphone for "ban evasion", which I most definitely did not do.
I've had the same reddit account for over 16 years and other than a surprisingly HUGE number of deleted comments and posts (according to sites that track that) that seem perfectly benign to me (mostly deleted for stupidly trivial technicalities), I've never had any problems on the site. Sure, a few unpopular opinions here and there that get downvoted a little but, but nothing offensive, no trolling, etc.
So, I tried to respond, and here's how the conversation went:
Hello. I’m very confused by this ban notification. The only recent activity that I’ve had on this subreddit is to answer somebody’s question, and I cannot imagine how that answer in any way violated the rules. Can you please help me to at least understand what led to this?
...to which the mod replied:
Ban evasion not that hard to get
...and I responded:
I honestly do not know what you're talking about. It appears that you think that I have been posting with multiple accounts, but I have not. I've been using this same account for over 16 years without ever being accused of such a thing. I'd appreciate it if you could take a look and reconsider.
...to which I got:
No the system detects ban evader like you automatically
...
I'm sorry that you think that I have done such a thing, but I have not. I even co-moderate another subreddit that is a very serious one with its fair share of trolls to deal with, so I get it, but I honestly did not try to evade any prior bans.
... and the only response I get back is:
Stop
I'm so sick and tired of that site, I don't know why I went back after doing so well avoiding it after the somewhat recent events that caused me to uninstall all of the apps and stop using the site. The mods there are abusive and power-hungry and it's a toxic place to be. It's a shame because my account is over 16 years old and I remember the old days when it was nothing like it is now. :(
So, hopefully this time I'll stop using the site for good, this was the reminder that I needed. I've avoided Facebook and other social media due to the toxicity, I don't know why I expected reddit to be any better; please stay above the fray, Tildes!
If it’s any consolation, it's quite possible that the mood messaging you wasn’t born yet when you made your Reddit account : )
They certainly act like it!
So true. :)
My 16-year-old account was permanently banned because I said something mean once about Matt Walsh. Deserved or not, I'm still on Reddit and the same subreddits with a different account. The ban evasion stuff sounds like a joke.
I don't think there's anything wrong with using Reddit. However, I advise against being too invested in an identity that is completely beyond your control. You should probably do the same on Tildes, but I'll admit I don't do that myself.
I think I need to cut back on all of the major sites and limit myself to the minor sites -- I miss the old days of the Internet before it was opened up to the general public, it was so much friendlier back then when everybody used their real names and had civil discussions.
You're right though... I should start cycling my accounts more often and stop leaving a multi decade trail of breadcrumbs.
Sorry, you hit a pet peeve. Real names don't make people civil. They've even done studies to show so. What you are thinking of is having an identity you are attached to the reputation of which does not require you using your real name. But on the internet it is easier not to have that and feel you are anonymous (even using your real name). Smaller sites more like people would remember who is who which is what you probably more were seeing with a small site.
I concur, I was on IRC in the 90s in the portuguese network (the "OG" one with servers provided by ISPs and universities) and it was just a couple hundred people, everyone was anonymous but there was this pleasant small village feel with everyone being super nice and interesting to talk to. It was also obvious that I was very young and no one was ever creepy toward me.
There is a different downside to anonymous communities, though: everyone is a little wary of asking or answering personal questions online because we don’t want to reveal too much personal information.
Though, the same is true on Facebook. People will “vague post” because they have a large friends list.
Some people vaguepost purely for attention and enjoy the worried comments their post gets
Yes, I believe boxer_dogs_dance posted about this very thing. https://tildes.net/~tech/1e35/online_anonymity_study_found_stable_pseudonyms_created_a_more_civil_environment_than_real_user_names
Ehhhhh I saw plenty of flaming and trolls in the phpBB days before reddit was even conceived. There's plenty of this stupid shit on reddit these days, but it's less outright mean than I used to see, and the power tripping mods are no different; they just have less accountability because the community is larger.
I also miss the old days, but things got weird and mean then too. "Flame Wars" predate the web and IRC. BBS operators and other server mods would kick users. In the old days, nerds were far more marginalized, and I think more dysfunctional on or off the network. Or, perhaps more truthfully, the nerds that were online were the more dysfunctional of our number.
That said, there was certainly a purity of spirit that has become diluted. This is true in other areas of my life as well. Outdoor activity has become more popular, and trails which used to be much less travelled have become well-worn. I think this is probably a good thing overall, but I still grieve the personal experiences I can no-longer re-create in the woods.
Every forum needs moderation. Full self moderation leads to 4chan, no bueno. What makes Tildes awesome as far as I can see is that the moderation is limited and thoughtful, but more importantly, consistent. This takes dedication, skill, and talent, sadly lacking among much of reddit's moderators.
Tildes work well because it essentially has a single owner, moderator, and admin. That is good because the owner/moderator/admin is sensible and competent. However, relying on a single person's consistency to maintain that kind of thing seems unwise in itself. Hopefully, that won't ever be an issue.
There were once plans for a different model of governance. At this point, they seem to have been scraped and there's no reason to think they'll happen.
I think we haven’t reached the scale necessary for that model. If there were 100,000 users on Tildes, sure, but right now there isn’t quite enough. I don’t believe it’s scrapped per se, but postponed until such a time when Deimos being a benevolent dictator doesn’t work anymore.
Yea I agree. I think it depends on how you use it.
I like to check up on small-ish subreddits I'm a part of. I tend not to leave a comment unless I have something to say. I also checkup on the Front Page just to see what it's like.
Just like a person in an abusive relationship, it's hard not to go back to reddit because we remember the good times at the beginning and not how you're treated now. Just take the ban, use it as momentum to remind yourself why you dont want to go back to your abusive
partnerwebsite and try to move on to healthier places. Like tildes.Remember that it used to be the go to place for news and information, now it exists to foster "engagement" by rage farming. Not good for anyones mental health.
Oh man, it's sad how accurate that is. I deleted my account but I'll still occasionally browse at work when bored and I constantly see posts from the tiny, unhinged subs from my country that I didn't even know existed when I was logged in.
Yeah, I was thinking of the same analogy. It was a shocking wakeup call, but maybe for the better in the big picture.
Ugh, that mod interaction is infuriating to read. I’m curious, do you use a VPN? Reddit has been cracking down more on those lately. If your account has been detected using the same public IP as other users, that might have tripped the ban evasion flag. (I say that not being familiar with how the system works, it’s just speculation.) As an always-on VPN user I’ve personally noticed an increasing number of sites blocking me, not just Reddit. It started with the streaming services like Netflix but is now spreading to the rest of the web.
I think people have a very poor idea of what Reddit-the-company can do in terms of bans, and what Reddit moderators can do. Subreddit moderators have no idea if you're using a VPN, do not have access to shadowbans, or invisibly removing comments.
In this case, it appears the moderators just enabled the Reddit ban evasion detector and assumed its accuracy is 100%.
Good callout. This definitely seems like a case of a mod blindly trusting a tool with little regard for how it works or how false positives might arise.
Is /r/iPhone one of the ones that went dark in protest until the admins replaced them with scab moderators?
If so, it wouldn’t surprise me if the inheritors were not the best or most conscientious about their tooling or their communication skills.
No, these mods were not scabbed in that subreddit. It is mostly the same moderators from 3 years ago, based on looking at the list on the wayback machine.
I think a lot of mods are just burned out from the battles over the years. I know I am after 10+yrs of moderating. I've rarely done any moderating over the last couple of years. Even before the API shenanigans.
I've given up most of my subs, even if there were no mods to take it, only holding on to like three that I've put serious effort into. Even there, I do so little moderating. Reports just pile up, and I'll just usually mass remove all the reported comments, with barely a look. No one complains.
I banned someone recently because I knew they were engaging in ban evasion (literally posting the same stuff as they did a year or two ago before they got banned). But that's the last major thing I've done. And I didn't even issue a warning. If I do moderate anything, I rarely issue warnings these dates. Because it's not worth the time and energy to fight people, even if the violation is and straightforward and a slam dunk.
I'm not invested in the platform anymore. I got into the IPO, I got my little payment. I'm done. I'll still use the site, but I don't really care how it ends up. Not surprised other mods don't really care either.
The only VPN I use is to connect to my office network when I need to access a system there or my home network when I'm not home, neither of which were in use when I last posted a comment there, and neither of which would have flagged something.
That said, as I type this I realized that I do have iCloud+ and did post it using either my macbook or my iPhone, so it's possible that it went through the iCloud relay, which is effectively a VPN.
Honestly I wouldn’t blame “Reddit” for that. Bad mods is something that has afflicted all user moderated sites since time immemorial. There were bad mods in Reddit’s “good” days and “bad” days. You found a lazy one. It is what it is.
After Reddit's dumpster fire of missteps though I would not be surprised if the ratio of bad mods to good mods is far different now, with the former being the most common. Especially since Reddit was clearly ready to purge any mods they didn't like off the site
This topic is just another reminder to me that deleting my accounts after all that happened was the best choice for me.
I will only use it in search engines as a way to get a real user review/experience or for troubleshooting, and I would like to stop relying on it for those too. If it wasn't sometimes nearly the only source of some info, I'd block the entire site at DNS level. Maybe someday.
Another comment indicated that the ban evasion tool that Reddit developed for mods might be the culprit here, so to an extent I would say that it is on Reddit. The top comment in the post announcing that tool is someone critiquing its implementation as being flawed. Poorly designed tooling in the hands of bad mods is what this situation sounds like, which is at least partly on Reddit.
It's actually easy for me to understand poorly designed tooling from Reddit even if I'm not a moderator to use it myself, because I've noticed how Reddit's block feature is so poorly designed that it's easy to abuse, and what's more, they don't seem to respond to feedback or make much adjustments to them, they just seemingly move on to the next poorly designed thing they can implement.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Reddit to make a 100% accurate detector for something as nebulous as “ban evasion detection”. It seems like they make it pretty clear what the limitations are on the tools page, and that the final call is the mods.
It’s the mods fault to use this tool lazily.
And I don't think it's reasonable to expect a mod to have to somehow handle what are likely thousands of detection's a week as if each one is a homicide case?
This mod's reaction was lame, but it's for a MAJOR sub with 4 million members.
I cannot imagine how many it catches a day, and I'm sure some % of those are legit catches, and still have much the exact same conversation/arguments OP had.
At that point you either A. Don't use the tool or B. Use it and know you're going to have some % of false positives you'll never be able to handle.
If anything my biggest criticism is the mod wasting time responding at all since it's pretty clearly just B. "Look maybe you're telling the truth but I have no way of knowing and a zillion other of these and so it stands" would've been fine, but also somewhat useless.
There's just simply a major issue in handling these extremely large communities unless you get an obscene amount of manpower involved.
I agree with this. I still use reddit for specific subs because there is not a legitimate alternative forum on other sites (usually Tildes does not have a deep enough userbase for niche topics), and there is quite a few small subs that I frequent that have very good mods. I'm sympathetic to having a bad experience with bad mods, but this is more like getting into a car accident. It shouldn't happen, but it does because someone was less than ideal in that place and time.
I've definitely been treated like this on both IRC and traditional web forums (fora?) among others. Surprisingly, not on Discord so far! Maybe I've been lucky there.
join the /r/formula1 discord and you'll most likely get muted within the first week for no valid reason.
Yup. It happens on all sites, even here. I was temp banned once and a mod deleted my comments asking someone if they would buy USTs at this rate level at this dollar level (at the time of asking.) Everyone has off days and as long as there is moderation this is bound to happen.
I'm not even sure reddit has tools for mods that would suggest someone is evading a ban. I'm asking in our mod chat... but I've never seen anything like that.
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/15484544471444-Ban-Evasion-Filter
well well well... look at that. That's neat. I never ban anybody, I just have automod remove everything from them automatically. Good on reddit for getting that in place.
I've avoided banning people because one of the first guys I banned made four accounts and made a big mess of things. Thankfully he was an idiot who only added numbers to his name.
r/iphone must have the ban evasion filter on and trust it blindly. They probably also set it to 'low confidence' meaning there are a lot of false positives. Kind of idiotic, you may lose good community members that use VPNs.
As a mod, your're not supposed to use it solely to ban users. Reddit states it is not 100% accurate.
As a user, if you connect with a VPN or through an IP that has some ban evaders ascribed to it, you may be identified by mistake.
Here's more about the filter if your interested: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/15484544471444-Ban-Evasion-Filter
I had my Reddit account for 15 years.
I loved /r/politics.
One day I was news.google.com and saw several articles I wanted to post there. A bot associated with /r/politics told me I queue flooding. I tried contacting the mods on /r/politics and a Reddit-wide bot temp banned my account ( AEO bot == Anti Evil Operations ). I tried contacting /r/politics again and got permanently banned. I sent in a lot of appeals. I only got cryptic rejections as replies, then I did not even get those.
Reddit has shitty, buggy, faulty bots for banning people, the know it, and they don't care about remediating those mistakes.
I was generating polite, on topic conversations. What everyone wants.
I was treated like a bum and ejected after 15 years.
I think that the inability to have an unbiassed mediation of such decisions is the big problem there. Fine, use bots to automate things, there's a LOT of volume, but there needs to be a means for users to appeal it reasonably and it seems to me that some special consideration should be given to long time users without a history of problems.
According to one of the online user analyzers this is my worst rated comment:
With a score of -9, which reflects on the people who downvoted more than it does on me, I stand behind that comment and would post it again.
Such a system would cost Reddit money and they just don't care enough to spend it.
Reddit taking on image and video hosting instead of leaving that sole burden to Imgur was a great step in blowing out their costs
Money is just one part of it. Do you want Reddit employees to be the only moderators? What if you want to have more, let's say, "opinionated" moderation? I think that's fine, in the end. It's a choice.
It's probably for the best that communities define their own rules on Reddit, and do not work directly for Reddit. A paradigm where all moderators work for Reddit for financial gain is both very expensive for Reddit and also becomes a very different beast than what is there currently.
That doesn't have anything to do with my or OP's issue, which is buggy Reddit scripts banning innocent people from the site and having no recourse to get that fixed.
How does it? It's not buggy, it's just that any system will have false positives. The Ban Evasion Filter (docs) allows moderators to set that threshold to whatever they want, and of course not use it.
They use it because of issues of volume; only so many moderators, with too many users to moderate. So they accept that some will get mistakenly banned, but it is what it is. In the end, being banned from a subreddit is a very minor incident in your life, so it's not surprising moderators with limited bandwidth skew on the safe side.
Cough
I think what @stu2b50 is saying is that a system will always have “bugs/defect”, and that you cannot get a 100% bug-free system.
I'm sure it would seem different to him and you if you lost a 13-15 year account.
You might not be writing "oh well, bugs happen".
It really wouldn't. I put very little "value" in my reddit account. In fact, it did "happen" to me. I'm still banned from /r/technology because during the height of the GME fanaticism I argued that what was going on was government enforced regulation, not some grand conspiracy, for being "a shill".
My response was just "lol ok". I really don't care if I'm banned from a sub, whether it be small or a default.
Even if a program is working completely as intended, according to spec, with no undefined states possible - i.e. zero bugs - you are still going to run into the limitations of the statistical analysis itself. It will never be able to give a 100% confidence result, especially with the kind of limited and unreliable information it can use in a situation like this, so you have to pick some confidence threshold on which to act. By the very nature of the problem, there will be some false positive / negative outcomes, at which point the next steps become an issue of scale. A huge sub can’t handle a thorough investigation of every appeal like a small sub, so it’s cleaner and “fairer” to have a blanket policy than unevenly applied discretion.
False positives aren't "buggy software". Anything like this that isn't marking literally everything as negative or being tested on data it's overfitted to is going to have some amount of false positives. The way they responded to yours was silly, and it's very possible they have the threshold set inappropriately low. But it's not actually possible to completely eliminate false positives from something like this without turning the thing off entirely.
Of course it is, the software isn't doing what they want AND doing something they do NOT want.
Exactly what they should do as long if it is wrongfully banning good members of the site and they aren't providing sufficient means to correct the effects of those bugs.
Crap code + crap management together.
I work in data science (though not for a company like reddit) -- completely eliminating false positives is not possible. If a model turned up without any false positives on a test, it would actually be worse than if it came up with a handful of false positives, because not having any false positives indicates that it just memorized the training data and won't generalize.
There are absolutely instances of buggy software that will increase the number of false positives, but it's simply not the case that any number of false positives greater than zero is "buggy". It's not.
In any case, the actual failing here is clearly in the human moderators' response to the appeal. It's impossible to tell from your one case how well the automated detection is doing -- but it's very clear that the human moderators are being assholes who aren't considering their use of it effectively.
It isn't known if data science is an issue in the buggy software at Reddit.
Regardless of the type of software, if the software is hurting members or other people it should not be deployed.
That's the lowest score you've received after so long? That's impressive, it's pretty high all things considered. I've seen people downvoted much more simply because they had a typo or people didn't like the legitimate fact they shared.
Well, within the current API limits that those sites can access. More accurately, my last 1000 posts or so.
I've had my Reddit account for 13 years.
I saw someone spreading hate on the platform. I reported it, like anyone should.
Reddit banned my account site-wide because I was "abusing the report system". Like, what?
I and many others had that happen to them too.
Reddit doesn't give a %$((# if their buggy software penalizes good users.
The ban message explicitly told me a human did it and not a bot, which makes it even more frustrating:
Wow. That’s a whole other level. Amazing. They clearly don’t care.
when you report, report them as Spam > Harmful Bots. Do that on a few of their bad posts and there's a good chance their account will be shadowbanned.
I've been on and off Reddit for the last ~10 years and it's pretty much been going downhill the whole time. I kept my current account solely to check in on a couple small subs that I still follow and occasionally participate in, but I definitely don't use it like I used to. I stopped browsing on my phone when third-party apps were all taken down because I refused to use their app instead of RIF, and I always said I'd leave for good if they killed Old Reddit because that's the only layout that doesn't look horrendous to me.
I left a lot of larger subs I was reading because they all just turned toxic, and sadly I had to leave a lot of hobby subs too because they devolved from actual discussion about the hobby to post after post of "look what I just bought lol" and people humblebragging about all the stuff they have. A lot of threads nowadays are full of bots stealing replies from other users for karma farming or just using AI for all their posts. It feels weird to browse Reddit and feel like I'm in a room full of robots talking to each other instead of being able to have conversations with other people.
Your experience is definitely a frustrating one, and I get the feeling of hoping it'll become like the old days again someday, but unfortunately, the only direction Reddit is going in is even further down.
I think this is why reddit is only good for smaller subreddits and specific ones which are not centered around a controversial subject. Subreddits on videogame franchises are generally good, drama-based subreddits like /subredditdrama and /circlejerk are not. Specific theory-crafting subreddits like /theoryofreddit are alright, but many of the opinion-subreddits like /changemyview aren't (Which is ironic because it was one of the best subs for seeing other opinions). Political or religious/atheistic subreddits are a no-go, and the more niche they are the hateful they get. I think some hobby subs are fine, /vinyl is just people sharing their records while /cassetteculture and /lostwave are niche enough to be specific to the topic.
Mainstream reddit is almost always toxic and this has been the downfall of the site, in my opinion the main reason being that it's pointless to comment when you're competing against 5,000 or so other commenters. For instance, /askreddit or /nostupidquestions. It's becoming more obvious that there are bots or sockpuppeteers who utilize 4-month old accounts to say something specific. Here it is at least much easier to talk about current events without being dogpiled because you can have constructive comments on a topic without it devolving into a slapfight.
Yeah, Reddit really demonstrates the tragedy of the commons pretty well. I looked at their popular posts yesterday and there was a post on showerthoughts that stated that a hamburger was “a well balanced meal”. There were so many people who swore up and down that a McDonald’s hamburger is a health food.
That's some fourth grade level thinking on that showerposts thought then, haha. Same logic as thinking pizza is the same even when it isn't.
I deleted my Reddit account of 12 years and it was freeing. It may feel like you are losing something, but really nothing is lost because the account never had any value to begin with. I still go back occasionally from search engine results because it still has a pretty large knowledge base to pull from, but I try to stay away.
I still get upset sometimes on Tildes, but it's a lot easier to pull back and take a breather here than on Reddit. I like how Deimos is pretty hands off as a moderator, so we can resolve conflicts on our own more than on Reddit.
Have you ever been in a relationship where it didn't matter what you said, or how you said it, it only made things worse? Where every attempt at improvement would eventually bite you in the ass? Where any clarification generated only more confusion and resentment? Until you reached a point where it became evident that there were no words to convey your best intentions and sentiments, and conciliation was impossible?
At the same time, you regret parting ways. There is so much good in them! You know there is! (they don't drink sometimes...). Everyone knows they're no good for you. But you need your time.
The disagree/downvote did it for me. Downvotes for comments are inherently toxic. On top of that, it makes absolutely no sense for Reddit to allow users to downvote a comment they interacted with. So, let's say I disagree with what you say, and, instead of merely stating my disagreement, I also give you a downvote, making yours a zero-voted comment. A zero-voted comment essentially doesn't exist. Now I'm also expected to keep talking to someone who clearly chose to remove any visibility from my content? And as I keep going on that nested thread, I am expected to downvote every answer as well as they downvote mine just because they disagree with me? What kind of fucked up etiquette is that? Reddit is not only a PvP server, it is an extremely toxic PvP server where you kinda have to pretend that you're not fighting. And every time I try to convey that it doesn't have to be this way, people will interpret it as an attempt to win by placing myself on some elevated moral ground. Because, on a PvP server, it is in your best interest to interpret most communication as acts of aggression.
I no longer have a Reddit account.
Edit: I just thought of a perfect question to /r/fantasy. Fuck me!
I still go to reddit because I'll scroll /games for headlines and I enjoy reading bestofreddit update fan fiction. Not that I aggressively tried to participate before, but I don't really comment like I used to, if at all. I am less trusting of posts about products or information than I used to be, as I'm pretty sure since the great mod migration of late there don't seem to be people with ideals nursing the site any longer. Honestly, the loss of using a 3rd party app and the dark patterns they use on mobile don't encourage me to spend much time on the site. Honestly I've found myself filling my wasteful reddit time with tiktok since if I'm going to consume meaningless crap while I'm on the bathroom might as well take in meaningless video content.
Tildes is pretty much the only place I'm coming into where I am less guarded in terms of the opinions and posts/topics that come by the feed. I used to feel with reddit that I had a reasonably good place to get a good amount of earnest discussion about any topic, but that feeling has long since passed. I guess before the exodus it was already heading that way and the right now I feel like the quality on reddit has just tanked.
Had pretty much the same happen to me. I think it was also a 16 year old account. That's when I decided not to go back anymore. It's a low quality website at this point, with even lower quality mods. And they were shite to begin with.
Reddit is still immensely useful as a Google Search aid. I, like I'm sure many others, will append "reddit" to searches when looking for real, human discussions related to a product or service. Sure, there's astroturfing that one should keep their eyes peeled for, but for the most part their discussions are about the most helpful that you'll find online when researching.
I don't understand all the whinging by people about reddit. Maybe I don't frequent the biggest popular subreddits at all. Been using it for eons. No issues with my regular subreddits. Only issue for me is the bad UI of the website now. Really awkward to use (I'm using it via paid android app these days as a result ). Fwiw the only things that bother me with the site UI aside is all frequent use of meme art of gifs.. Annoying plus.
So you’re saying that my concern about being permanently banned without recourse from a major subreddit that is useful for technical support discussions is whinging (or, whining, as we’d say it here)?
A useful note for anyone that now access Reddit as a read-only website: some apps that were banned still work if you don't login. If they're not on the Playstore just get the apk otherwise. Don't know about iPhones. I'm using BaconReader. It works perfectly as long as I don't try to login.
Sounds like you have a good excuse to do some actual ban evasion.
I must admit that it briefly crossed my mind to use a VPN to create a new account and post a vociferous message lambasting the mods. :)
I found a friend on reddit (recognisable style, local subreddit) and enjoyed the quizzical looks he'd give me when I'd spout versions of his obscure opinions back at him during conversation on occasion.
Now he knows it's only more enjoyable. He sometimes even peppers in easter eggs for me.
I should clarify, we're very close and within our particular group of people this is not a violation type deal.