I was suspended from Reddit in its entirety because I said I wouldn't be offended if someone called me gay. I am not sure why think they I need to be offended by it. It does not seem like something to be ashamed of? But no big loss.
I'm sure they think they're being progressive. I was banned from /r/publicfreakout for mentioning racial inequality issues in the US in a video that starred a person of color. What's funny is that my comment was meant to spur progressive communication about the struggle for people of color. My comment on the video was highly upvoted and generated a ton of level-headed discussion about racial inequality. The mods, however, cited racism and banned me. I'm sure pretending like the issues don't exist is extremely productive for change.
Mods are arbitrary at the best of times, but in my case it came from an admin, banning me from the whole site. That seemed unusual. Particularly for something that seems so innocuous. The mods of the subreddit saw no reason to ban me.
I also made some silly quips about spez in the same timeframe. It is possible he was salty about it and arbitrarily chose a comment to reference in the banning, not being the true reason. It certainly would not be out of character.
People complain about the mods but theyre nothing compared to the admins...
Theres serious issues that far exceed those or the mods, not least of which being that they are even more prone to abuse of power without Any oversight of substance.
If you have a problem with an admin who banned you, your only recourse is to violate the TOS to make an alt to complain in a post in a sub where they will then immediately ban that alt account and remove the post "due to ban evasion"...
This is a core critical problem. I suspect reddit has significant automated processes on top of this.
In my original comment I mention mods banning for hate speech in an abusive / ironic manner (so nobody is truly worried for their safety for example).
I think reddit used to automatically forwards reports for this category for admin review probably due to a legal requirement. Due to the mass quantity of reports vs staff, I suspect they automatically flag mod reports as credible. As such they have automatic admin superbans.
Admin reviewed bans are a higher level of ban and super bans and use every possible privacy exploit to go far beyond basic account or cache banning. It’s far beyond even IP banning.
These seem to be intended for truly extreme, severe, violent actions such as credible acts of immediate impending mass violence, coordinating true terror, promoting actual adult offensive exploitive content, etc.
Instead, they map hate speech and some other serious reports to this category. Technically, it sounds like it makes sense on paper, but this is abused so heavily that essentially meme reports are nearly sending automatic SWAT raids to people’s homes.
I’m guessing these are only summarized in a broad category to staff as “Mod reported + Admin reviewed. User banned for performing or conspiring terrorism / active police verified death threats / extreme exploitative adult content / active police verified mass murder / hate speech”
That last one technically fitting the rest if it’s used correctly (or at least one could argue) but as a chain of OR listed reasons, someone who was ironically banned because the mod “hated that they disagreed with the mod’s decision to ban scumbag steve memes from the meme subreddit” is suddenly flagged in the same category of true terrorists, as if Bin Laden himself had his own subreddit and was posting live content of his active mass public attack.
This is one reason they want people to download their app. Any association such as unique app combinations installed or other accounts (including non-reddit accounts) can be linked to a user even when they opt out of traditional tracking. They can then sell this data or use it in a magnitude of ways.
This is a specific core problem I’ve been tracking but this is a general template example of many of Reddit’s problems I’ve strongly disagreed with that go beyond general debatable business choices or general preferences.
/r/publicfreakout is the opposite of progressive - the mods barely bother to disguise their posture in order to avoid the admin banhammer - the sub was amenable to a lot "race-realism" comments a few years back until there was a wave of bans that left the sub unscathed. I'm not surprised that you were banned for such a comment.
It's so weird what gets you banned. I'm a bit shocked by the gay thing though. In my experience they get weirdly defensive of big oppressive institutions. I got banned for a comment railing against the medical community. I don't recall exactly, but it wasn't really that bad.
HackerNews is no better. I've gotten feedback for calling out SV and the nation of Germany... I guess I could have been more "constructive", but what you find is these things are applied selectively.
I don't really agree that you need to be constructive when talking about big institutions; arguably this isn't even a good idea. There's no need to use kid gloves with bigoted nations or billionaires.
Yeah. Of all the comments I have made, I least expected it to be that one. As it was a complete Reddit ban, not just a subreddit ban, it is possible that it was just Huffman doing his usual round of trolling and not really about the comment at all. I had participated in a discussion about the API changes earlier the same day said comment was made, so I was "on the radar".
