So why the hell does reddit ban people so easily? I got banned from one games sub for something i did not do and could not contact the mods since they also banned me from doing that.
So only option left is to make a new account so i get access to the sub so i can ask for help there since i had problems with the game. Well it worked and i got my problem with the game solved but after that i got permanently banned for ban evasion :/
There was no ill intent with any of my posts and was wrongfully banned the first time. Sure ban evasion is forbidden but it should not be so strictly moderated, concidering that a person can be banned by a mod just because they misunderstand one of ur comments or just generally want to cause harm to some users. There needs to be a way to avoid mods abusing their power and only way to do so is making a new account.
Now there is no way for me to get help with the game if i ever have more problems, or anyway i can help someone else who has problem i know how to solve. That's unreasonable.
"Ban Evasion" is such a bullshit concept anyway. Do something we don't like, and try and come back early? You can no longer come here, for life! And since I bet they IP ban, it bans your entire household! I wonder if there are some public places that are Reddit black holes, silently banning any Redditor who goes there because one person once called King Steven a greedy pigboy.
I left Reddit at the time of the great APIcalypse, and there were some businesses whose customer service was so abysmal that the only practical avenue for customer service was on Reddit. Getting a permanent ban for bullshit reasons can have an actual effect if you need support from one of these companies.
It surprises me that they haven't banned the wrong lawyer at the wrong time to prompt a class action lawsuit over how arbitrary it all is.
I was thinking about this today. They even have a thread over at reddit about it. The admins tried to tell people they only permaban after issueing several temp bans.
No they don't. I've only ever gotten permabans. I also don't think anything I did (some angry shitposts. No threats, harassment, or anything like that) deserved a permaban. Like they could have given me a temp ban or a subreddit ban, and I would have been fine with that. They for some reason went nuclear on me and went straight to site-wide permaban. I don't know why, I filed appeals, I sent messages. I tried to reason with them. Nothing. They go nuclear as standard practice and are completely inflexible about it.
My theory is it’s because they’ve left the banning and appeals process up entirely to AI at this point, there are no humans involved at any stage, so you get kicked for using a trigger word or some other nonsense and then nobody actually looks at the appeal.
Today my dad got permabanned from Reddit because he read a post while at my house, they counted that as ban evasion and now he can’t ever make another account without also getting instabanned.
I was banned from r/pics for questioning the authenticity of a picture. I did not say anything hurtful and I was just pointing out that some of the things they were saying weren’t adding up. I was even backed by others who were also stating that it didn’t add up and adding other points. Banned from the sub with a vaguely worded message that basically stated “if you can tell us why you are sorry for why we banned you, we’ll unban you”, to which I responded that I have absolutely no idea why I was banned. After that, I received a message that I was permabanned. It’s so stupid.
For automated bans I can tell you why - social media fingerprinting and anti-bot is really hard and it scales in favor of banning.
I working in anti fraud software development and the browser and apps give you incredible fingerprint that can identify anyone. However it has many false positives simple because the datasets are huge and peoppe use social media in weird but legit ways (cafe wifi etc). Generally big important systems like banks can alleviate that with support and KYC systems (know your customer) but social networks don't want/can't really do that in a scalable way.
Then, there's misalignment of incentives. The anti bot team does not care about false positives and these are almost never reported to the upper management so false bans become common and in the big picture not that big of a deal. Thats why you see so many websites use cloudflare anti bot when they are clearly losing sales when A|B tests are evaluated but the site admits never know that because cloudflare only tells them about successes not failures.
Finally, real bot developers are really fucking good. Wirh proper funding you just hire real people with real web browsers / real phones and thats why large scale bot operations like those of governments are almost impossible to defend against. Thats why Russia, China, India etc are investing so heavily in internet trolls - it's super effective and it's a hard problem to fight as it's easy to hide behind "xenophobia" and just deny everything. Any forensics would also implicate the social media hosts so the incentives all align for a perfect propaganda machine.
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