Tell HN: Reddit accounts cancellation/suspension caused by VPN usage

Re:Tell HN: Reddit accounts cancellation/suspension caused b... by boringg on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @09:13AM (#30346642)

I don't disagree with you, let's play devils advocate: To be fair to the companies, the amount of work to fight off bots and bad accounts is quite complicated, costly (both financially, quality of site, reputation wise) and similar to all kinds of frauds gets increasingly more challenging as the fraudsters improve their game. Add in managing the people who are purposely incendiary and not bots.

The amount of people getting caught up in the filter is likely quite small. Should they have a better system to get accounts re-activated? Probably - would make sense that they cast a wide net and then have a relatively easy way out for real individuals who can prove identify. Is that perfect? Heck no.

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Re:Tell HN: Reddit accounts cancellation/suspension caused b... by krono on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @11:43AM (#30348909)

    > The amount of people getting caught up in the filter is likely quite small.

I don't believe that this is the case, though. Subreddit mods often seem to use it against counter-narrative type of posts - a single post could get you shaddow-banned for life on 50 subreddits that all happen to be under that mod's control. Happens often enough.

As I mentioned I'm fine with this tool being used against spam.

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Re:Tell HN: Reddit accounts cancellation/suspension caused b... by d1sxeyes on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @03:57AM (#30357730)

Off the top of my head, it seems self-evident that we can't assess the effectiveness of the filters without actual data. You may hear hundreds of complaints of 'false positives', but bots rarely complain, so those hundreds of false positives may be the collateral damage from blocking either a single bot or hundreds of millions of bots.

Although I'm not normally massively against using anecdotal data for hypothesis building, in this case, it seems as though without actual data, it'd be silly to comment further.

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Re:Tell HN: Reddit accounts cancellation/suspension caused b... by detaro on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @11:53AM (#30349053)

isn't shadow-banning only something reddit admins can do, not subreddit moderators?

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Re:Tell HN: Reddit accounts cancellation/suspension caused b... by krono on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @12:04PM (#30349206)

Subreddit mods can do it also, with a little help from the automoderator bot I believe.

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Re:Tell HN: Reddit accounts cancellation/suspension caused b... by detaro on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @01:21PM (#30350487)

ah, now I found the right thing, they set automoderator to hide every post automatically, thus getting the same result.

[ Parent | on HN ]