Reddit

This post in /r/AskHistorians apparently caused a mod conflict and confused sub users.

A couple of highlights:

Hello everyone wondering where the answer is […] We are not asking anyone to completely re-write something to suit our tastes, but to contextualize what is written within the reality of the times. As this question hit /r/all, it’s very clear that there is a large audience reading it, with various degrees of knowledge about the period and the novel/film.

They did, though, and people called them out, to be met by some confusion, followed by another mod response:

In sum, you had the poor timing of posting right at the point when the mod team ‘turns over’ several times - US slips off to Bed and then Europe wakes up. It meant that you were dealing with, essentially, a string of mods in different time zones and different “shifts” which created something of a Moderator game of telephone about what we had been expecting out of an answer in the thread.

General confusion ensued.

There were several conflicting mod DMs that weren’t captured publicly, too, but were responded to in the OP. Asked to include all races, then asked to narrow it down, asked to include a disclaimer (I did, at the bottom), then asked to move it to the top, asked to remove things, then to include those same things. It was maddening.

E: re-reading, I don’t think I’ve ever used race words so often in my life, jesus.

e: I only included this photo because I couldn’t seem to submit this post without a photo for some reason. It’s only tangentially related to the Reddit post, but this is an example of my education on the subject.

Compare my first link to this: https://www.reveddit.com/v/AskHistorians/comments/69670k/did_southern_girls_around_the_civil_war_really/

Thank you for that link, @NotAnotherLemmyUser!

I can't even view the website anymore. It gives me this. Does the same thing from my home PC and my work PC.

It's a massive pain in the ass because when I google search for information, half the results are from reddit. Those results are all useless now. I can't see the information.

Fuck that place. Fuck the shit-eating motherfuckers who are running it into the ground. I'm so tired of self-entitled elitism. Someone needs to tell these fuckers that they're not better than anyone else and just because they don't like someone's opinion that's not a good reason to exclude them, silence them, and isolate them. WTF.

Ironically, it worked with one of Mullvad VPN servers.

This is just something I've noticed and I don't understand, that being that there seems to be a strange difference between a suspension and a ban.

When someone is banned from the platform, they still completely exist. You can go through all of their posts and all of their comments, and the only difference for them will be that they have a big red bar now at the top and they can't engage with the platform.

Suspensions are different for some reason though. When someone gets suspended, they are completely wiped off the platform. All of their posts and comments are automatically hidden/removed, and you can't view their profile anymore. I've also noticed that getting a suspension is different for the user too. Instead of just telling you you've been banned, your profile picture will for some reason turn back to the default, and every time you click it, a server error message comes up at the top, however you can still click away at it and access your profile and such. But like it doesn't tell you that your account is suspended. You can only see that message if you try to access that profile on a different account or on an incognito tab.

I've also noticed that users never get given a reason for being suspended, or even alerted that they have been, whereas bans usually come with a reason.

What is the reasoning for this difference? One would think that a suspension is lighter than a ban, but it seems like suspensions just like Thanos-snap you off the platform without mercy, whereas a permaban at least keeps your account alive and gives you the chance to appeal. It's just a really weird discrepancy I've noticed and was wondering if anyone has noticed as well, or even knows why?

My Previous Post (Read it first, as this post might not make sense to you, without reading the previous post first)

I saw a lot of people defending Ars Technica in my previous post. Here is a simple proof that they are an evil company:

ProPublica Posts:

Ars Technica post:

As it can be seen here, the original source of the info/Investigation was Propublica and even in terms of the story cover photo, Propublica used a custom cover.

Yet, despite all of that, as expected Reddit manipulated upvotes to boost the Ars Technica story and even deleted the second ProPublica story from Reddit.

Journalism will be fucked up, because of Condé Nast and their parent company manipulation.

I was reading a YC dissident's blogpost midway when I refreshed the page. Just like that Poof! with big brother magic it's now forever gone from the interwebs. Apparently OP has "Changed His Mind" to the point of deleting it instead of updating it, fancy that.

The post died in silence with only one witness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35373019#44204676

Remember how everyone agreed it was probably her, we had hella high upvote posts, see none of them now only found one filled with skeptics

They want your content to make their site worth visiting, they just don't want you

I started to notice some thing weird while using Reddit, every link post from Condé Nast owned news outlet was getting a high amount of upvotes and awards while other publications had a very normal rate of awards( usually zero, with the exception of the sponsored ones) and upvotes.

That when I started to investigate this matter till I found out about this.

They are boosting their publications on Reddit on the major subreddits. They are trying to give their publications a advantage over all the other news outlets.

They have the ability to kill the other news outlets if they keep doing that. Avoid them as if your freedom is dependent on it.

I found Reddit about 6 years ago, took a little while to understand what it was about but when I finally got it, I felt like I had found the best place on the internet. Somewhere I could be my true self without being myself. Every time I logged in, I felt free. Like solo roaming the streets of a new city in a foreign country for the first time. Intellectual conversation, assistance on vague problems, sharing life experiences, advice, watching porn you didn’t know existed, and then slipping out the back door when you were done.

As many here already know, those days are gone. The freedom is gone, it feels like a communist regime and it seems that their success is their downfall. The entire personality of Reddit has changed and will never come back, it even shows in the users. The community is broken, unauthentic and the Truth has left the conversation. Freedom is dead over there. What a shame. It’s like my favorite bar burnt down.

But the thing that really gets me is that it didn’t just change, it became the exact opposite. It has become the exact reason why someone built it, in the first place.

I read that it’s attracting the most new users of all the social apps. Best performing app, which means the end is near. Soon it will just be a limb of the pretend society that we used to hide from behind the walls of Reddit. And for some reason, I just want to see it burn.

Wife sent me a Reddit link. I clicked on it and this is what I see.

Auto modded? On a subreddit about venting? Wtf.

From this article:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-30/-the-haves-and-have-yachts-review-how-the-ultrarich-destabilized-the-us

Am I the only one who really hates that comment section is slowly turning into gen-z discord channel where people communicate in reaction gifs?

I know I've been kind of going crazy with my posts, but I've just been thinking about this a lot. I think I've come to the conclusion that Reddit is probably trying to no longer be a forum board.

As people have pointed out, Reddit is making it increasingly difficult to actually post or comment on their platform. Firstly, half of the subreddits have stupid karma or account age requirements which makes it so you can barely post anywhere. On top of that, even if you do meet these obscure requirements, half the time the automod will flag you as a spammer or something and take it down instantly.

I won't go too long on this, but obviously banning is a big thing too. Reddit just indiscriminately bans everyone nowadays. They don't even need to give you a reason, they'll just permaban you for nothing and that's that. And they enforce their rules with absolutely zero mercy. No warnings, no second chances, all infractions regardless of how tiny or massive they are carry the same exact punishment and that is a lifelong ban from the entire platform. Not to mention their AI is so advanced that not even going into witness protection could hide you from their ban evasion detection systems, so good luck trying to dodge that.

You know what's super easy though? Scrolling through posts. There are absolutely zero hiccups or roadblocks when you scroll through the front page. It is only when you try to actually contribute to the site that Reddit basically makes it a full-time job for you to work out their systems.

I can only assume that Reddit is seriously just trying to eliminate actual human engagement from their platform. Why? Because if someone is posting on a sub or commenting on a post, then they aren't scrolling, and if they aren't scrolling, then they aren't getting ads. Reddit is just taking the Dead Internet Theory to the extreme basically. No human engagement, just scroll scroll scroll. It has literally become the exact opposite of what a discussion board is supposed to be, and basically is becoming some amorphous Instagram wannabe where you just scroll endlessly and never actually engage with any content on the website. Who knows though who's gonna actually be making posts once all of the actual users are gone, probably just AI?

Anyway, there's my rant. It'll probably be my last post for a while on this topic, I am just so sick and tired of Reddit. It has put the internet is this stupid stranglehold where there is no forum board that is even remotely as populated as it, but simultaneously eliminating all aspects of it that give me a reason to use it, so there is just this black hole right now that Reddit refuses to fill seemingly. I'll keep an eye on Lemmy and other platforms for now and see how they grow, but for now I probably just won't be using any discussion forums anymore because they basically don't exist for what I want.

Thank you everyone for commenting on my posts and teaching me about this side of Reddit, and sorry for this insanely long post!

When I say dead users, I mean ones who have been banned, suspended, or deleted (probably after they got banned). I see this so often when browsing posts, and it is so reflective of the problems I have been faced with as well. I'll be scrolling through a post, and sometimes unironically like 50% of all comments have the stupid little profile picture with its back turned, and when I hover over it it has either been suspended or deleted.

I have been having major issues where I've basically been permanently wiped off the platform over some bullshit permaban and can't get it appealed, and it is just shocking that so many other people are obviously just getting completely swept away by these same bullshit bans. How is Reddit going to survive like this? It's to the point where any sort of long-term engagement on the site just seems impossible because soon enough the CIA-level, all seeing AI will catch you in its net and then you're done.

Even if they miraculously change their system to not have the world's most oppressive ban system, what happens to everyone who's already been banned? Will a decent percentage of the entire platform just be fucked for life because they were on the platform at the wrong place and the wrong time?

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.