I didn't think it was possible to sum up reddit with a single image, but...

Perfection.

Kudos. Rarely does an image capture the whole story as well as this one does. Indeed. Of course it makes those of us who remember the good old days feel some grief.

I can't remember her name but there was a woman who was a mod on a bunch of the pet sub and she got caught marketing on how she could bring redditers to business and she go doxxed and drug on the internet for like a month. Today's admins have no problem doing that.
- She was the nose of the sleazy camel.

"Yeah but how is lemme any different?"

Want to know what's fucked? People on Reddit are openly advocating for Concentration Camps and the Mods have ID gated subs like alcoholics anonymous but if I bring up things like the leader of a sitting political party not only saying we should fund the Taliban with tax payers money but presenting it as a flagship policy for this party, I get my comment removed and my account shadow banned.

That's where we are on Reddit right now.

Their Contributor Quality Score is basically the social media equivalent of a Social Credit Score. Not like karma, it's a whole other system that demands you produce content for them or get shadow banned. It's bonkers.
- Jesus that's Dystopian.
I mean it wouldn't be the FIRST time an inexplicably beloved and dementia ridden Republican has funded the Taliban.
- I was referring to the UK. IIRC Farage is very much a monarchist.
AA is Id gated? what?? I'm pretty sure I've just posted on that subreddit within the last month and id never give it my id. not to mention it's fucking anonymous.
I straight up don't believe you
- Yeah, so fun fact: a lot of support group subreddits were blocked under the OSA. Some were unblocked, but the point still stands.
  The reason why they got blocked is that, when you look at sections 60 through 62, it's actually really vague and could block a lot of dark, distressing but necessary content. Like children's charities have voiced concerns over this. A forum for single dads and forums for people with certain medical conditions in the UK have had to shut down, and some sfw subreddits have been age blocked for LGBT content.
  Also, there are two parties who effectively decide what gets blocked: The website and the Government, and the Websites don't want to get in trouble with the government so they overblock. Some people have used the OSA for propaganda purposes, for example, the OSA gives an exemption for news media, so you can talk about things like Jimmy Savile and terrorism, but Twitter blocked posts that would be legal under this exception to claim it was the government who did that.
  On top of that, it's the websites and services who have to run the age checking service, which is why a lot of sites have shutdown or geoblocked the UK, because they don't have the money or resources. In short, the law is vague and service providers had to overblock to cover their arses.
Subs are ID gated because of laws like the Online Safety Act in the UK. Yes I had to contact my MP about that. The government apparently care more about concerned moms than they do about the opinion of actual technical people or freedom of speech.
- The government apparently care more about concerned moms than they about the opinion of actual technical people or freedom of speech.
  You are the first person I have actually encountered in any discussion of the OSA who mention "concerned parents" because I don't think they're getting enough blame for what the OSA has done. Like they're constantly either running articles like "The OSA would've saved my child's life" or "The OSA doesn't go far enough" and they have been the the crux of the whole shitshow from day one.
  Like we know Data Collectors, Social Authoritarians, and Government Spies have been the people doing most of the leg work but I don't think it would have passed if not for the years of "think of the children". Even the parents of Brianna Ghey, the murdered transgender teen, is saying that "if we had the OSA, my child would be alive", ignoring the fact the mainstream press and the government itself played a bigger role in her death than the internet ever did. The current fucking prime minister MOCKED TRANSGENDER PEOPLE in front of Brianna's father along with the then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

i actually knew one of these powerusers in the early 2010s. he had leukemia, and i signed up to be a match to donate spinal marrow for him. i visited him in the hospital a bunch. he hasn't acknowledged me since. that was a real bummer, but, i tend to see friends where they don't exist so that might be on me.

i am a little bummed that i got permabanned just because i was so close to all of the reddit founders and early employees. i personally prevented alexis from getting arrested for trying to openly smoke weed on the street in pittsburgh when it was still the kind of thing that got you put in prison for a few years if your skin is darker than popcorn.

steve huffman in particular is a shitter and always has been. think of that kid you knew growing up who would make up that his dad worked at SEGA and that Goku was going to be in the next Sonic game — that's spez, still, to this day. he is "mr. namedropper." steve, genuinely, i do not care that you saw Beyoncé at the airport.

ETA: since people are being weird about phrasing, i signed up to be a match. his alias back then was Dacvac. i literally sat in bars and watched him mod /r/pics on an iPad. believe me or don't, i'm just some schmoe online after all.

believe me or don't
It doesnt really matter either way but I'm inclined to believe you because you aren't exactly going to get kudos for being close to reddit founders on the fediverse so this is more like a confession than a brag. FWIW I enjoyed the context.
Idek what reddits target audience is anymore seems to be chronically online teen girls typically on snark/fanfic social media pages are becoming the majority, all they talk about is random drama and reality shows so they arent getting banned for saying stuff lol
he had leukemia, and i signed up to donate spinal marrow for him.
if you had actually donated bone marrow, you would know that's not how this works.
- i had signed up to see if I am a match, which i would have donated if i had been selected. please show me where i mentioned actually donating bone marrow.

Me: This video of a POS attacking a sleeping person (literally drop elbowing him in the head with the potential of snapping the neck) on the NYC subway with malicious assault says more about all of the people watching and filming while doing nothing about it than the attacker.

Reddit: You are permanently suspended from Reddit.

3 days ago.

Well, you referenced the potential death of a human which their advertisers definitely do not approve of. Luckily for them, the mods caught your horribly violent comment before it could reach the masses. The fact you were only permabanned, and not charged with a crime against humanity, is a blessing indeed!
Please be careful in the future when using words that might make someone else feel something, especially if that person (who you don't know) might have to face an uncomfortable reality. It's only fair that we censor genuine human expression in the name of brand image. After all, the advertisers are what's keeping the lights on around here. If we stopped listening to their demands, god knows what kind of horrible society might emerge.
- All extremely valid points, and in the future I will disable all adblockers and self-censor to keep the ~~blood money~~ resources flowing.
- This happened to me about a week ago
  And then somehow my account got banned for 3 days
  And then once the ban was up Reddit let me know that they'd looked into it and found nothing concerning

Why is Reddit used for anything but porn these days?

It's where people are. If you want to have any commercial success on the internet you almost need a presence on places like Reddit and Twitter
- You don't need quantity. Just quality.
for many video games it's the primary or even only place the devs communicate
- either that or twitter which is frankly an even worse cesspit
Coding also, and computer science

Its like a microcosm of US media in general.

Lemmy has that same problem, maybe even worse since our user base is way smaller
- I do think federation mitigates that problem somewhat. There are blocks between servers but its harder to exile users from posting on a third space that's not blocked.
- No because almost all the accounts here are people and it is unlikely there ate many psy-ops going on here unlike Reddit.

Is it all that much different to Lemmy instances?

At least on Lemmy I can go create my own instance and not have corpo mods forced into it and me forcefully removed. I'd much rather have that with 4 other members than a massive community I risk being ousted from for dumb bullshit any day
100% different since one company owns all of reddit. No one owns all of lemmy.

At one point while I was still on Reddit I learned that there was another site that indexed the users with the highest post and comment scores. I looked at the top of the list and saw accounts that were relentless repost monsters. I went ahead and blocked all of them, and my Reddit experience immediately improved, as I stopped seeing the exact same shit reposted over and over, day after day. Then the API-ocalypse came, and I walked away and never looked back.

Digg went sideways because of "power users," among other things.

Eh. There's more than one kind of poweruser. The "people who are too online" are very different from the "accounts that exist to leverage social media for advertisement".
Social media thrives on the whale users who are churning out content and hungry for engagement. It goes to shit when you've got your front page clogged with Native Ads and other shameless marketing gimmicks.
- Digg's powerusers were often revealed to be selling their influence.
- Rest in peace, I_RAPE_CATS.
While this is true, it's funny to watch them wrestle with the exact same problems right now. Literally on the front page of new Digg right now is converstions about fragmenting the user-base with blocks/bans, and how to establish friend groups.
- Wait is digg making some kind of comeback now?
I was like digg all over again

I permabanned reddit with these additions to my hosts file:

127.0.0.1 old.reddit.com

127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com

Fuck their astro-turfed corporate censorship.

It's better to use 0.0.0.0 which cannot be routed. 127 will connect to servers on your local machine, if they happen to exist.
- the advantage is that one day he might set a self signed SSL and redirect the request to libreddit

So glad to be out of that cesspool.

Me too, fuck reddit

One of my older Reddit accounts was blocked on several top subs for abusing the report button.

One of those super mods posted a photo of someone endangering their pet on multiple subs. The content was literally against site-wide rules but also broke sub-level rules on each of the subs it was posted. I reported the photo on each sub it was posted to separately. Unbeknownst to me at the time, that super mod was a mod of every single one of those subs. So, they had the ability to ban/block me on each one for "abuse".

It's kinda sad really that reddit mods get a power trip from banning people when reddit accounts are disposable unless you care about karma for some reason. I got banned site wide and from various subs multiple times and it would only take a few minutes to be up and running again with a new account. I even had a script to transfer over my subscriptions. Never got done for ban evasion either, despite having a static IP address. It got to the point where I'd create a new account at least once a month even if I wasn't banned just to have a clean slate.

I know there's at least one admin that also moderates r/news. That's how I got permbanned a second time. They don't like it when you point out obvious bots.

You'd think Spez's "landed gentry" would have better things to do.

i wonder how many of these four have secret ties to three letter agencies.

There’s more than circumstantial evidence that Ghislaine Maxwell was a power user and mod.
- whoa, an actually well-researched r/conspiracy post. like, incredibly well done.
- the fuck
- wow. fuck reddit even more if this is true.
- Nah, why would she use her name if she wanted to stay anonymous.
- I was hoping this would come up here.

Hmph. As a one time mod or top mod of several "default" subs I can confirm that the image is true.

I've been a mod of several niche subreddits and entire reddit is absolute 100% gamed and astroturfed. Being a mod is incredibly lucrative to the point that's full career for many mods.
In all fairness it was bound to happen and it's similar on all social media groups. The power and lack of transparency makes it incredibly easy to start profiting of your positions even when the goal is noble at first. There's this great podcast on cat drug black markets which perfectly illustrates this.
I find it funny seeing people complain about LLM hallucination and inaccuracy turn around and prefix site:reddit.com to their search queries in pure, blissful ignorance.
- I remember there was a guy making 6 figures in the CSGO community by posting ads for gambling sites disguised as memes.

If you assume they don't have multiple accounts

I would love to see a Reddit stylometric analysis

I had a bizarre run-in with a mod who harassed me in DMs. It was the mod to a TikTok group and this was around the TikTok ban.

Other than that, I got banned for three days multiple times for telling conservatives to go fuck themselves in as many words and as great detail as I possibly could.

I'd be curious to see what their AI permaban tag words are. So many words must be listed since they will ban you for violence if you even mention Luigi or say the word "dead."

I'd also love to be a fly on the wall for those conversations to see their thought process for how they deny the first amendment and how many bots they need to replace the one person they banned to make the site seem full.

The fucked up thing (well, one of them) is that, with whatever new AI auto-moderation sentiment analysis thing they've employed in the past year or so, you receive absolutely no indication that action has been taken against your comments. Unlike shadowbanning, which has been around for donkey's years, you still see your comments in-thread and can even get replies from certain users. It's difficult to explain, even harder to prove, but they're employing something such that certain tiers of users see your comments, while others don't. Think skill-based match-making from the gaming world, but applied to thread-based social media. I hung on for quite a while after the writing was applied to the proverbial wall, but once I realized this I erased every trace of Reddit from every corner of my life. Now I'm here!
- probably just an algorithm that groups users in accordance with known traits or interests or styles, furthering that 'in group' alignment feeling that comes from people who care about reddit comments lol
oh i can help with this one! calling gina curano a cunt is definitely one! now i cant have an account for more than 24 hrs without it being permabanned. they just ignore my appeals and requests to answer why i am permabanned over something as pathetic as that.
Just a point in all this. They can deny free speech all they want, they're not a gov org. Only the 1st applies to the gov stifling free speech, a private org can do it all day long with no repercussions.
- You are very smart

I seem to be somehow shadowbanned in r/politics, and anyone can see from my history I'm lefty as fuck. They've gotten so arbitrary that they can't even do partisan subs properly any more.

Or maybe r/politics isn't left-wing any more and have closed ranks around Democrat Neoliberals? Haven't stayed around for long enough to find out. Only ever visit now when I'm not paying attention and my finger slips.

I think it's the original generation of reddit libertarian conservatives using the sub as controlled oppositon. That place used to be a Ron Paul circle jerk. They don't necessarily like all of Trumpism but they recognize they're more aligned than with liberals. At most they're establishment Democrats but I think they're no farther left than center right.
No one hates lefties more than lefties seem to hate each other.
Jesus being an idiot conservative has just got to be the easiest fucking thing.
They have closed around center right as overt racism is tolerated and pointing it out is suppressed.
I got banned from worldnews because I asked for a less biased source thanThe Tablet on an Israel post.

I wonder how Lemmy compares.

Well i just saw pugjesus move ~10 comms to piefed so…
- Definitely more than 10.
  Some people have the time to be terminally online, and end up running everything just by sheer omnipresence.
- I absolutely think that's part of the strength of Lemmy.
  I have no idea why the Lemmy devs copied the reddit "lords and peasants" model of moderated interactions, and I don't know if Lemmy will survive long term against the tide of corruption that Reddit is in the late stages of right now. But at least it's pretty easy to move to a different fiefdom if you want to. If, for example, your home server lemmy.world gets all enshittified and filled with obnoxious interactions, you can just up and leave and still keep nearly all of your engagement if other people are in agreement.
  You can take a look at lemmy.ml or blahaj and see what Lemmy could look like if that wasn't possible. To me, moving servers when stuff gets weird is a healthy thing.
- We had a whole drama cycle about /c/196 trying to move. But this one didn't even get a peep :D
- Move as in Moderates or about posting content?
  Because the mods here aren't an absolute force since the instance owners have the final word about how someone moderates or if they have control over too many comms.
  Can't remember right now, but there have been some problems about mods power tripping and getting banned for it, that said, when the instance owner is the problem, the only smart move is to jump instances.
  That's why I've always said to think of your account as disposable, shit can always go bad because we are all humans.
  If you mean because he posts a lot... Well that's everyone's fault for not posting.
  If more people posted at least once, you wouldn't see only the same dudes posting everywhere.
- I do love how easy it is to block people on here. If I see the same article spammed over a bunch of instances, it’s block time for that user cos then I just assume they’re a bot.
We still have groups of power mods but they have less power here because we arent limited to a single sub and the rules of a single company. We also have an open mod log.
At the moment the Threadiverse has not enough users. But as soon as this is becoming a problem, it is the instance Admins job to carefully manage power user moderators. If the Admins don't do their job, the instance should be federated.
lol, you can see the same shit beginning to happen here.

Peak reddit

Didn’t that group fell apart some time ago? Or at least their accounts vanished? I can’t be bothered to go to that shitty site to check. I am referencing one of Upper Echelons newer videos talking about them.

I don't know, but I did see an article recently that reddit is capping how many big subs one person can moderate. I feel like it's too late though, as political, corporate, and government accounts are probably all over and coordinating. They could easily just hand off to each other or alts.

I think it is also just not true. Otherwise, please name the 4 and we'll take a look at the top 500 subreddits.

Checkmate, cause it's real difficult to operate multiple accounts at the same time!
*Someone who used multiple Reddit handles simultaneously for 15 years.
- You kinda needed to in the later years. Some communities would auto-ban you for posting in other communities.
  One of the funniest things you could do was find a moderate in an auto-ban community and just kinda post their name in passing conversation in a hostile community to bait them into responding. Then... POOF! Mod gone.
by the time i left i recognized gallowboob and a handful of others who dominated all the defaults and quite a few big subs.
I remember that you used to see all tye mods name of a subreddit. The past three years you can't anymore or not by default.