If you ask investors, Reddit is doing great. Its current market cap sits at nearly $22 billion, three times what it debuted at during its March 2024 IPO. Once a little-known successor to Fark and Digg, and a great place to engage in down-to-earth communication and meet interesting people, it’s now one of the most well-known social (or anti-social) media platforms in the world.
From a user perspective, though, the site is less friendly than ever. The latest change — made with zero fanfare, as usual — now allows complete strangers to reduce your account’s functionality for any reason they see fit. Now, if someone blocks you, you’re no longer able to edit, delete, or even view your own comments, with exactly zero recourse for you, the person who originally posted them.
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Reddit’s block function has prevented users from further participating in comment chains for quite some time, which already opened up the potential for abusing control over certain discussions. The latest update to blocking not only stops a user’s ability to comment further, it makes it look like they never commented at all — but only to the blocked user. Others can still see and reply to the original comment, despite its invisibility to the apparent owner.
While Reddit never announced the change, it’s seemingly been in place for some users — but not all — for varying lengths of time. Mentions of the change can be found as far back as June 2024, but got little widespread attention. Now, according to Android Police’s and others’ experience, the update appears to be rolling out even more widely.
Yeah this policy in practice makes no fucking sense.
I definitely experienced this last month. I had a weirdo block me randomly because I happen to not be a fan of historical figure, Aaron Burr. They apparently really really like Aaron Burr—so they blocked me. Whatever.
I didn’t get a notification or anything. It just looked like they’d deleted their account and never existed on my side. Ok. I shrugged and thought it was a weird UI thing and moved on.
That was until I started talking to other people and the Blocker kept unblocking me to leave me more messages only to immediately Reblock me.
I knew this was happening because I would get an email alert that I had a comment. But when I went to see the comment on Reddit, it was gone.
I don’t even know or understand what the Blocker wanted from me (except maybe falling in love with Aaron Burr-which isn’t on the table —he’s not my type).
In practice, this new policy ended up having the Blocker spam the person they’re Blocking and removing their ability to prevent being spammed.
Dude I’ve never blocked anyone or had any real trouble on any site or forum. The only time I’ve had trouble is on Reddit and only over the last 3-months. Good riddance.
reddit is desperate for more engagement, so its basically FB. i block people all the time, but my comment chain is still continued to be abused by people, and even some have the audacity to make a new account to evade the block. this is a known issue since more than a year though. i blocked people but they still commented regardless of it being blocked.
it may block the original person you blocked, but it wont stop others from commenting, nor would you notice if the blocked person creates another account to harass you.
The longer I’m on lemmy, the more I realize just how dumb reddit user controls are
When I was on reddit, it seemed to matter so much how old your account was on any given subreddit, but now i realize it’s extraordinarily bad opsec to have a single account.
All this to say: there being a single point of authority that can issue IP bans and shadowblocks and generally have control over user identity information is just so needlessly stupid.
so reddit just added shadow-banning to its arsenal of tools that hurt users and do absolutely nothing for moderators.
just in case anyone was wondering why i’m here now…
They have been shadow banning since unidan days, it’s just last month alone their shadow banning went out of control. Someone posted a statiscal data graph of the week in a different forum I was banned the shadowbanning was up like 500%, also include permabans. It seems reddit has been relying shadow banning so people will find it harder to evade them. Also their using AI to do most of not all of their banning. They were able to measure it because they had hundred or thousands of acc
I’m here because I was perma-banned for no reason 🤔 then the whole ban evasion policy. Forget that site
digg is gonna relaunch soon and kill it. it’ll become like facebook. pure poetic justice. i was on reddit back in 2008. it isn’t even fair now to say it’s just a shell of what it used to be. btw old.lemmy.world is a thing i like. and it (kinda) works with RES, too!
Are they seriously relaunching digg??? lol that’s funny. They relaunched my space and a bunch of zoomers showed up iirc. Maybe what’s old is new again. Next they should do geocities.
it won’t be any better - i just hope it kills this “news amagomaltherahjhagal” bullshit (edit+) when everyone figures out it’s all ad-bait bullshit that’s ruining out lives.
I just signed up to the mailing list. Reddit has become a cesspool of idiots and power tripping mods.
i think they want to be 9gag. remember that site? me neither.
Funnyjunk still going? i used to be a funnyjunker and 9gag hater
doesn’t it feel weird to pine for THOSE old days?
Nah they just want to get those sweet sweet clicks from Cheezberger… How does a site survive by just cutting and pasting another site???
Oh that’s just all of the internet now.
reddit will die when digg comes back as worse than reddit. all ill rejoice. all will suffer.
i live in a small developing country and if i comment or post anything at all my account will be banned instantly.
appealing does nothing. it’s just an empty hole you can send messages into.
Wow that’s crazy. So is your entire country region IP blocked?
we basically have one state-owned service provider which leases out infrastructure to the smaller service providers. I think if you started to blacklist problematic traffic by ASN you would include huge swaths of residential IPs, cellphones, everything. I don’t know what the pattern is that they are using to blacklist.
