Comment by faangguyindia
14 hours ago
Reddit is on the same track. What I've noticed is that moderators have become increasingly hostile. Reddit's AI moderation, which is designed to remove AI slop, has removed multiple top contributors I used to follow on programming, electronics, bodybuilding, welding, machining, and 3Dprinting subs. And the worst part is that Reddit site admins have no idea about this. I know a guy who reckons he can get any account banned from Reddit by simply mass reporting it using residential IP providers and OpenClaw.
Good luck trying to write any helpful posts in the community anymore, someone will come along and respond with "AI."
Reddit turned toxic long ago, like ten years ago and they brought in Ellen Pao to fix things, and she somehow managed to make things worse.
Ellen Pao was the glass scapegoat CEO designed to take all the flak for what the other investors and board members wanted to do.
BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.
Only the new Reddit, old.reddit.com still works for that too.
Though I'm not sure how long that'll last. I would be surprised if old.reddit.com is still functional in a couple of years. When it gets removed, or when it bit rots to the point that it's no longer really feasible to use it, I'm off that site. New Reddit doesn't work for me.
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> BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.
I think this may depend on your country, I've never seen this (Spain), not on the new website nor old.reddit.com or anywhere else, NSFW or not.
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Not when I open it from a web browser without being logged in. It just ask if I'm 18 and if I click yes, it lets me see the post (including images).
This is right up there with amazon changing imdb.com, so that you need to actually be logged in to read any of the reviews on a movie.
I see that and I instantly go to rotten tomatoes, pure idiocy, pure stupid. You can just tell when those in charge, never ever dog food.
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What’s strange is that they’ll try to verify with Persona even after Apple has shared an age range with them.
If you trust Apple, why verify with Persona above that? If you don’t trust Apple, why bother integrating the Apple age check? The answer must be something silly like “we did it because Apple asked us to but we don’t trust what Apple tells us because we’re not sure if it’s compliant”.
It’s too bad, because I trust Apple with my data way more than Reddit and infinitely more than Persona. I hope Reddit comes to their senses because I’m never giving my data to Persona.
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my experience with reddit has been much more about its politization rather than anything about quality
"my side is right, the other is wrong" - has been too common of an occurrence, both in comments but also in posts and such frontpages as /r/all
Reddit has many different subs that suffer from its problems in different degrees, so there's still islands of relative calm and sanity, usually in low-traffic subs. To some extent this was also true of different sites in the overall StackExchange network, but SO itself always dominated the network, it was designed and run as a monoculture, and that culture was, well ... gestures vaguely in SO's direction
It’s very easy to destroy a specific sub (if it’s not too big and doesn’t have half a dozen mods).
it's like those ddos rings, but works on social networks.
You can create a sub and a Discord group, then ask people in the Discord group to launch a mass report against your competing sub and its moderators. You can use scanners to find questionable stuff that you can report, and more often than not, this will get the mod banned. If the sub doesn’t have multiple mods (with unique IPs, as Reddit tracks fingerprints), the sub is now in the hands of Reddit’s mod team.
Back then it was not this easy, but now with AI and residential IPs you can create lots of fake users and reports etc... and take almost any avg redditor down.
Yup, there was some political bill discussion about some recent issue and others were posting links, so I thought I'd concur with an interesting vote breakdown link showing how each house/party voted. Something anyone I would gather was in good faith. Nope, instant longtime account shadow permanent ban. Wow.
It’s a meta discussion and borderline scandalous but you can see it here in HN too. There always was some of this but you get such polarizing and rude comments here on a pretty regular basis. I know I am guilty of doing the same when I encounter it myself. I suspect over time this site itself will fall to the same problems.
I tend to see the opposite problem. Some of the programming adjacent subreddits are completely swamped in posts that are clearly AI generated thinly veiled advertisements.
Can confirm for some dumb joke subs.
You want to blow off some steam, and there is a laundry list of rules to read through.
Yeah, not bothering with all that.
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It's so weird how slightly different usage can create vastly different experiences and impressions of a site. I wouldn't really describe Reddit as "politically biased to the left", but I never go to the front page, just a few select subs. I don't see any political bias in subs about Hollow Knight or weed. I DO see bias in my country's political site, but it swings all over the place depending on who's in power at the given time.
I see a similar thing on X (well, I would if I still used it) where my personal feed is very, very different from the curated 'for you' one.
often people make a sub, it gets popular because of specific content. then the original mod gets banned, now their sub is orphan and reddit team assigns it to someone else.
many times you'll notice the new mod became active as a contributor on specific sub only 2-3 days before the OG mod gets banned and sub declared orphan.
Coincidence?
How can reddit even hand over a sub to someone who has nothing to do with a community? Simply because they install and control who controls the sub.
Mods get "comment/post removal" power, so they use it to shape the community towards specific "narrative", there is no audit trail for any mod specific actions unless you are a mod you perhaps can't see what all a mod is doing on a sub.
Also, they can simply make an automod/bot rule which simply removes your comment by creating a rule with your username after that you'll not know your comment is gone but others will not see it!
I'm not sure why that would kill reddit? It's an inherent feature of the political left that an echo chamber is preferable to any reasoned debate. Any space that allows flowing debate will lean conservative and leftist will complain, downvote, etc and ultimately spend less time on the platform.
A typical social media "debate":
Conservative: we should do an atrocity
Leftist: no and why is this allowed on the platform?
Conservative: haaaa you can't ban me, it's free speech, cope or gtfo
Leftist: why am I on this platform full of idiots again *leaves*
Liberal: can't we just learn to get along?