That would be like saying that paying an employee to watch someone's account and manually delete every comments and submissions is a shadow ban. It is not. AutoModerator is an amazing piece of work but it is just that, a robot moderator.

But that's not the point. The point is that "an unpaid, unaffiliated subreddit moderator" cannot blanked ban you from the website (and that being a premium user won't protect you from such bans either).

Which is exactly the same as adding a flag to a user's account.

This is some bizarre hair splitting going on here.

>That would be like saying that paying an employee to watch someone's account and manually delete every comments and submissions is a shadow ban. It is not. AutoModerator is an amazing piece of work but it is just that, a robot moderator

I don't know what you're trying to say here. What exactly, in your mind, is the difference between "a robot moderator", which is code that controls what is and isn't visible on a subreddit, and core reddit code, which is also just code that controls what is and isn't visible on reddit?

>The point is that "an unpaid, unaffiliated subreddit moderator" cannot blanked ban you from the website

Reddit is infamous for having multiple poweruser mods that are moderators over many of the most popular subreddits, and many of these subreddits share banlists (even ones outside the 'powermod cabal'). A ban from any one of these 'unpaid, unaffiliated subreddit moderator' will result in a shadowban from the majority of the website.

I hear you and agree that yes, a 'premium subscription' does not mean you're immune from bans, but you seem to also misunderstand the banning mechanisms on reddit. 'Shadowbanning' is much more widely used across reddit than I think you are aware of.

Which sounds like a frightening and dangerous abuse of the moderator privilege to me. I'm astonished that Reddit has continued to allow this practice to continue. Also surprising are that you can comment in a subreddit and get banned from totally unrelated ones just because a mod decides it to be.

You have just described two different things, with different names and different logics. The results of running both is the same but the two are not the same thing.

Moderators sharing lists of usernames to ban versus the software itself banning users globally is not the same thing either. Again, the result is similar, but the process and logic are different.

It is important to make a clear distinction between similar processes.

But yes, you're right, the results are identical and most users will not see the difference.