I noticed this afternoon that I’ve been silently banned from my favorite shiny-things-on-the-intertubes website, reddit.
Last night I came across something that I thought the programming.reddit.com crowd would enjoy: The Future of Vim on the Mac, a survey of the fractured state of the Mac OS X Vim port. There are lots of OS X geeks and vim geeks on Reddit, so it seemed a natural thing to post. +1 Informative.
This morning I went to check programming.reddit (to see if my article had spurred any discussion), and didn’t see it in the first couple of pages of “hot” stories. Not so hot a topic, I guess. I went to my list of links and comments to see what the score was: zero. OK, nobody cares.
On a whim I decided to dig through the list of all programming articles by date to see what other stuff came up around the same time. After all, if my story lost the popularity contest, it lost to something else, right?
It’s not there.
I skimmed back about 10 pages before satisfying myself that it was simply nowhere to be found. So I deleted the link from Reddit and re-posted it. About an hour later, its score is still at 0 (didn’t these things originally start at +1?) and it’s still not anywhere on the site. Not hot, not new, “rising” or “all.” Zilch.
As you can see, I posted a handful of other links (submitted both to programming and reddit proper) to see if I could get anything to show. The answer, friends, is no.
Any other members of the reddit silent minority out there? No? Just me?
September 29th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Reddit might be putting themselves in shaky grounds by censoring you - because it means that they implicitly assume responsibility for filtering the content on the site, and therefore could be sued for failing to filter some illegal content.
September 29th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Interesting point. “We do not filter” seems like a reasonable defense in copyright/obscenity charges, but if it turns out you do filter, well, that looks pretty bad.
September 29th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Interestingly, I can see your posts from your user page, I can up-arrow them, but when I click through to the details, it shows no points:
http://myskitch.com/rodbegbie/python_programming_language_–_official_website__reddit.com_-20070929-164753.png
Ping alexis@… and ask him what’s happened. I’d suspect bug over foul-play.
Or if you like, I can submit this blogpost to reddit ;)
September 29th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Hey, I think my comments are being blocked now, too. Does anyone see the dsandler comment beginning with “Although I’ve sold my email soul to Google…” as a child of this comment?
September 29th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
BTW, something funky happened to that URL when I posted it. It lost a hyphen! http://urltea.com/1m8q
September 29th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
No comment seen. I suspect you’ve somehow gotten hit with some sort of “Is A Spammer” flag.
September 29th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
I wonder if it’s due to my participation in the adobe.com CGI null byte exploit thread. I’m a computer security researcher, dammit!
September 29th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
@rod - stupid WordPress converted your double-hypen in to an en-dash. Best practice: use <a href>.
September 29th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Sent off an email. We’ll see what happens.
October 1st, 2007 at 11:42 pm
No word. Still banned. *sigh*
October 2nd, 2007 at 8:45 am
And just like that, my comments have begun appearing again. Stuff I wrote while “banned” is still hidden.
Weird.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
[…] Bah. Just posted a comment to this reddit thread about e-voting and noticed that my comment started at +0 instead of +1; on a hunch, I logged out and reloaded the page, and, sure enough, I’m banned from reddit again. […]
April 12th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
This happens all the time with Reddit. Rather than outright ban users, they mute them without any indication. The muting is done by IP address, but the ability to see your own comments is done by user name. Ostensibly this is to fight spam (like a honeypot), but there are indications that it can be invoked automatically with the report button — apparently the oversight on report is intermittent, and the user is frequently just muted until an admin looks into it. An associate of mine pointed otut that this has the convenient side effect of maintaining the user’s ad impressions without allowing them a voice.
May 8th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
I had the same experience. I tried putting two of my blog posts out there for discussion and they disappeared. Both dealt with political issues from a conservative view point.
June 25th, 2008 at 12:32 am
I’m having the same trouble. I noticed that I hadn’t gotten any comments on my comments for around 5 months, and after a little thinking decided to log out to see what happened. The comments aren’t there. My username is trjames. The user page shows up fine when I’m logged in, however when I log out and try to look at my user page, I get a 404.
No idea why this happened. I’ve only ever submitted 4 stories, not remotely spam. My comments usually got good reviews. I’ve just been, it seems, Stalinized from reddit.