Banned from Reddit.
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?
21 responses
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.
comment posted at 1:44 pm on 29 Sep 2007
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.
comment posted at 2:47 pm on 29 Sep 2007
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 ;)
comment posted at 2:51 pm on 29 Sep 2007
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?
comment posted at 2:52 pm on 29 Sep 2007
BTW, something funky happened to that URL when I posted it. It lost a hyphen! http://urltea.com/1m8q
comment posted at 2:53 pm on 29 Sep 2007
No comment seen. I suspect you’ve somehow gotten hit with some sort of “Is A Spammer” flag.
comment posted at 2:57 pm on 29 Sep 2007
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!
comment posted at 3:38 pm on 29 Sep 2007
@rod - stupid WordPress converted your double-hypen in to an en-dash. Best practice: use <a href>.
comment posted at 3:39 pm on 29 Sep 2007
Sent off an email. We’ll see what happens.
comment posted at 3:44 pm on 29 Sep 2007
No word. Still banned. *sigh*
comment posted at 11:42 pm on 01 Oct 2007
And just like that, my comments have begun appearing again. Stuff I wrote while “banned” is still hidden.
Weird.
comment posted at 8:45 am on 02 Oct 2007
[...] 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. [...]
comment posted at 11:45 pm on 05 Oct 2007
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.
comment posted at 4:26 pm on 12 Apr 2008
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.
comment posted at 12:37 pm on 08 May 2008
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.
comment posted at 12:32 am on 25 Jun 2008
got banned like a motherfucker too - I wasn’t even submitting my own stuff - jeez
comment posted at 1:46 pm on 02 Nov 2008
I totally understand you guys. I’ve seen a lot of unfairness in different web sites, not only reddit, so me and my friends thought that it would be very interesting to create a content sharing web site as a social experiment where all content is managed by users. No more heavy-handed administrators and over-zealous moderators. Will users be able to control content in a sensible way by themselves? Please check it out and see what you think. We appreciate any comment.
comment posted at 12:55 pm on 06 Feb 2009
I’ve recently found that I no longer can post comments, reply to comments, or post links on reddit. After it became apparent that I was being prevented from posting. I created a new account and I can post to that account, for the time being. I definitely feel like I have been censored. I do not see any easy way to contact reddit to attempt to get my previous account functional again.
Anyone have any suggestions on how to contact reddit support?
comment posted at 10:58 pm on 13 Feb 2009
http://www.reddit.com/feedback/
comment posted at 11:01 pm on 13 Feb 2009
Sorry I should have been more clear that the4 feedback form will not work from the account. When I go there the captcha section no longer appears. From the new account, it does not accept the captcha and just reloads the page with a new captcha. Strange.
comment posted at 5:21 pm on 14 Feb 2009
Anything that the Crowd doesn’t like gets voted down or reported at Reddit.
The admins… god help them trying to watch herd on that bunch of monkeys.
I have not been banned yet to my knowledge, but I post a lot of news stories, most of which have no political bias that I can detect.
I also post stuff from my blog, which is third front realist, and that offends many from both right and left.
In general, it seems to me that Reddit is a good place to meet folks goofing off at their underpaid, underimportant jobs, and they have raging ego compensation problems to boot.
I recommend Y Combinator instead.
comment posted at 2:32 pm on 03 Apr 2009