
Bjarne Stroustrup had his Reddit account suspended - ingve
https://twitter.com/blelbach/status/1295018218298335232
======
gentleman11
I made a twitter account once. I followed maybe 4 people basically as a way to
subscribe to whatever they were saying, then liked a few posts.

I got banned the same day and told that I had violated their tos in an
undefined way and that attempts to contact support would be ignored. My only
tweet was to say that I had finally made a dumb twitter account.

Maybe the assumption was that every human on earth must already have a twitter
account, so any new account must be a bot?

These platforms are just ridiculous and we shouldn’t use them.

~~~
patrickaljord
Were you using tor, brave, strong adblocking or a disposable email and refused
to give your phone number? All these things will get you banned now when
trying to open a new account.

~~~
snazz
uBlock Origin (with roughly default settings) has never tripped Reddit's new
account security stuff for me. I could see how it would make financial sense
for social networks to ban account creation from Tor and disposable emails
given the high spam-to-legitimacy ratio, although it's understandably
frustrating for people who want anonymity.

~~~
patrickaljord
Reddit is fine but parent was talking about Twitter.

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londons_explore
I didn't know impersonating someone else on Reddit was a bannable offence... I
thought the whole point of sites with throwaway usernames is everyone can
pretend to be someone else, and provide proof of their identity (or not) as
they see fit.

~~~
nxrabl
That may have been true in the past, but now AMAs are an important part of
Reddit’s business model. Here’s an example [0]. Allowing randos to impersonate
celebrities undermines that.

[0] [https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/nfl-reddit-ama-video-
rev...](https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/nfl-reddit-ama-video-revenue)

~~~
shultays
AMAs ask for proof

------
mseepgood
Ken Thompson's Reddit account:
[https://www.reddit.com/user/unixken](https://www.reddit.com/user/unixken)

He also has a Github account with 3.4k followers, but no repositories:
[https://github.com/ken](https://github.com/ken)

------
remote_phone
I love Reddit, it’s one of the sites I spend hours a day on.

Out of curiosity I went to an on-site interview there, because it would be fun
to work at a site I felt so strongly about. I was never more turned off from
working at place as I was when I went. They weren’t horrible at all, but there
was this level of arrogance that I didn’t enjoy, plus a level of complete
unreadiness. Some of the teams I talked to were completely understaffed and
the “old timers” felt detached. It seemed like they aren’t solving the
problems that users want solved, and are driven by this alternate goal of
“increasing engagement” even though they are one of the top sites on the
Internet. Instead of making subreddits easier for moderators to manage and
make better, they are taking an orthogonal route that benefits them but
doesn’t help the real content creators on Reddit. It was very disappointing.

I got an offer but it was a “take it or leave it” one, so I left it.

~~~
ykevinator
It's not very noble work but it does sound fun to work on a team with
resources. I interviewed at Google for a year and it was for a team trying to
squeeze a half a percent more juice out of ads. It was dreadful.

~~~
juped
>interviewed [...] for a year

Yikes.

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qwerty456127
This is a clickbait. I was expecting him to get banned for having an opinion
contrary to the popular ideological consensus or something but the reality is
even more ordinary: his Reddit account was suspended because Reddit does not
believe it is him. This happens to celebrities every now and then as social
networks struggle to get rid of thousands of people impersonating them for fun
or evil. Real Sharon Stone (or Julia Roberts, I can't remember already) had
her OkCupid (or Tinder or something else, I can neither remember this) account
terminated in minutes after signing-up. I just wonder how do ordinary people
actually having the same names do.

------
ryandrake
It looks like the account isn't fully banned. It's just exhibiting undefined
behavior.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
I very much hope that was a joke about C++.

------
adrianmonk
Looks fixed now.

Earlier, his user page
([https://old.reddit.com/user/bstroustrup](https://old.reddit.com/user/bstroustrup))
said, "This account has been suspended". Now when I load it, it looks normal.

------
throwawaysea
As Reddit has ramped up their own activism, embraced political bias, and
enacted heavy handed censorship, their actions against users have become
increasingly imprecise and often absurd. It’s hard to peek behind the veil but
mods of subreddits have lots of power these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if
they can also take site wide actions at this point. They can also act as a
hive mind due to mod meetings and mod orchestration from the admins and since
the top subreddits share many common mods (see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018)).
It’s time for alternatives:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...](https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/list_of_active_reddit_alternatives_v5/)

~~~
nilkn
I would enjoy a Reddit clone that had a simple sitewide ban on politics. The
problem with politics is that it’s infectious: either a site keeps it highly
contained and controlled or it slowly takes over most communities over time
and dominates. This happened to Twitter and it’s happening to Reddit. I’m
curious to see if it will happen to TikTok, which for most of its existence
managed to avoid politics.

HN has avoided this fate by being extremely selective about which political
topics are allowed and frankly by banning most of them.

My thinking is let Reddit continue down its course toward a site specifically
for politics or politically-driven conversation about various topics and let
all substantive non-political discourse move elsewhere.

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Razengan
Did he upvote something on an undesirable subreddit?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601595&goto=news](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601595&goto=news)

------
quantaum_dot
Someone must have failed to learn C++ so miserably

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ww520
Overzealous mods run amok. Power tripping does weird things to people

~~~
teraflop
Moderators can't suspend accounts; only administrators can do that.

~~~
steveklabnik
If there is one thing I see folks persistently misunderstand, it is the
separation between mods and admins, and which powers each group has. It is
really unfortunate for mods, who end up getting blamed for all sorts of things
that it is impossible for them to know or do.

~~~
wyldfire
Public moderation logs might help make this distinction more clear.

~~~
gruez
Is there a reason why mod logs should be private at all?

~~~
PenguinCoder
Brigading, mod harassment, doxxing, etc.

~~~
gruez
>Brigading

???

>mod harassment

It doesn't have to contain who did it

>doxxing

Then make it so you can't see what was deleted if the deletion reason is
"doxing". Also make it a bannable offense for mods to misuse that reason. Also
make it so that if there's a pattern of it happening in the subreddit, the
whole moderation team will be replaced (to prevent mods from using sockpuppet
accounts to do their dirty work).

~~~
VLM
You're reading it backwards. Its to support that kind of stuff, not discourage
it. Reddit is pretty toxic.

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ZinZirconium
Cancel culture claims another victim.

Social media and its consequences have been a disaster for nerds. Introverted
nerds and intellectuals created the technology that enables social media to
exist. That same technology is being used to exclude nerds from the internet.

What's left for nerds in the modern world? Nothing.

I don't use C++ right now but I might want to later and I don't like seeing
its creator ostracized.

~~~
krapp
>Social media and its consequences have been a disaster for nerds. Introverted
nerds and intellectuals created the technology that enables social media to
exist. That same technology is being used to exclude nerds from the internet.

WTF are you talking about? Social media has been an unqualified blessing for
nerds. Practically every pastime that used to belong to nerds (video games,
programming, D&D, anime, _using a computer_ ) has exploded in popularity since
the dawn of the web and become far more mainstream. There is no conspiracy to
exclude nerds from the internet, at all. And I see no indication of "cancel
culture" having any involvement here.

Reading your past comments, you seem to be suffering from a persecution
complex tied to identifying as an "introvert," and a belief that some
conspiracy of "extroverts" is persecuting people like yourself. That's not
happening anywhere but in your own mind. Seek help.

