Re:A Reddit Bot Drove Me Insane
by 93po on Sunday April 13, 2025 @11:47AM
(#43673630)
part of the echo chamber is also instant shadow bans on many of the major subs, and especially political ones, unless you consistently comment (shadow banned) comments and eventually get whitelisted by a mod or bot who's determined you to be the "right" sort of commenter. and again an instant shadow ban again the second you trigger any "bad" keywords
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That's presumably an anti-bot/astroturfing measure. As bad as that is, I'm not sure what the alternative should be. Allowing anyone to post with a 1 minute old account? Implement real name verification?
I can't speak to every local subreddit but I can tell you for sure that while it may have started as an anti-bot measure, on /r/newzealand it is absolutely used as a way to gatekeep the wrong opinions from being present on the subreddit.
Normal people signup to post not to hang around and scroll and like until the account is warmed
This seems untrue, especially for reddit?
Using the 1/9/90 split [0] for creators/commenters/readers, it seems farfetched to suggest that reddit accounts (which benefits readers making an account to curate subreddit subscriptions) can't follow this pattern where many legitimate human users do not comment often.
[0] "The 1% Rule", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
Plenty of people don't comment often, but the impetus to sign up for an account is often to comment, which subs then either disallow or delete because they don't want new accounts commenting.
they don't care about bots, they have endless bots posting pro-whatever on the subs, and directly work with campaigns to facilitate this