Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 254 posts

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

#101

Post by vorejdajo »

beckman466 wrote: post #92
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #39

It's how the Reddit spam filter works. Once your account is flagged as spam by the system, it would be global shadowbanned automacially. At this stage, your account is essentially finished, it's basically impossible to talk to someone and get your account unblocked. Eventually the account would be deleted, all the post you've ever made would also be gone in the worst-case scenario, just like my previous account. My R…

> Recently it almost happened again with my current account (Reddit allows the creation of multiple usernames using the same email address,) were your two different accounts that were (1) permanently banned and (2) temporarily banned using the same email address?

Just a PSA: Email is entirely optional. You can create multiple accounts without email.

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

#102

Post by __void »

staticelf wrote: post #5

Doesn't surprise me the slightest, Reddit is not like it used to be. It used to be the underdog where free speech flourished and today it's a chineese-owned propaganda machine. A few users controls the biggest subreddits and most deviating views get themselves either banned or restricted.

the day reddit will end up like digg is always a day too late

now they have in sight the IPO so they are doing great cleaning, even of the past, they are rewriting it to be more attractive to sponsors and investors; a monstrous number of posts and subs are deleted every hour every day with the excuse that they apply [new] rules not specified anywhere and even often contrary to the well-established customs

they have gone from total administrative absenteeism to be a Kafkaesque nightmare, primarily for moderators (volunteers)

as a European I did not understand the concept of the word "cancel culture" but now that I'm seeing it with my own eyes I hope reddit fail very soon because now has become a spite to everything that Aaron wanted

so no, they have not become chinese/russian/"destiny manifest" propaganda machines, they are just a horrible horrible horrible place (with 10mb of javascript per connection as cherry on top)

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

#103

Post by zozbot234 »

__void wrote: post #102
staticelf wrote: post #5

Doesn't surprise me the slightest, Reddit is not like it used to be. It used to be the underdog where free speech flourished and today it's a chineese-owned propaganda machine. A few users controls the biggest subreddits and most deviating views get themselves either banned or restricted.

the day reddit will end up like digg is always a day too late now they have in sight the IPO so they are doing great cleaning, even of the past, they are rewriting it to be more attractive to sponsors and investors; a monstrous number of posts and subs are deleted every hour every day with the excuse that they apply [new] rules not specified anywhere and even often contrary to the well-established customs they have g…

> the day reddit will end up like digg is always a day too late

Many people ITT are saying that they're even worse than that right now. At least the Digg big redesign was halfway usable.

On the flip side, there's now a decent chance that the next "big" discussion platform might be a properly federated system, allowing for some longer-term resilience against this sort of deterioration. Much like E-mail/Usenet vs. centralized Compuserve or AOL.

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

#104

Post by ja27 »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #31

All is not lost if your account is mistakenly suspended due to VPN usage. They still allow you to: * Communicate with reddit admins via /r/reddit.com modmail * Appeal your suspension via https://www.reddit.com/appeals with a permanently suspended account. See https://reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045734911-My-acc...

I was permanently banned last year, for no reason I could find. I do somewhat rarely run a PIA VPN at times so maybe that flagged me.

I appealed the suspension, which sounded hopeless, but about 10 days later my account was restored.

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

#105

Post by mns »

core-utility wrote: post #75
bryans wrote: post #73

Both Reddit's admins and their future-employee mods are completely out of control, in a way that makes Facebook's intentional topic manipulation seem tame by comparison. These people go out of their way to ban people for no reason -- constantly, every single day -- in a way that can only be described as intentionally abusive. They appear to get some kind of sadistic pleasure in reading ban appeals and denying them, k…

I'm utterly amazed at how ban-wild some communities can be. I occasionally see stories of people being banned from communities they've never posted to (reading/lurking only) simply because they also subscribe to another community that is "opposite" of the first. Take /r/novavax_vaccine_talk for example. There was recently a member [1] there who was banned from /r/coronavirus simply for being a member. These people ar…

Ha, it happened to me on Sunday, I posted a message like "We got our booster 1 month ago and didn't have any side-effects" in lockdownskepticism (which is not even an extreme or anti something sub) and started getting messages from pics/netflix/showerthoughts and so on that now I am automatically banned from subs that I never even posted in for posting in a sub that promotes medical misinformation. I send a message showing the message that I posted and one of the mods from one of the subs just blocked me from contacting them again. Basically my 14 year old account is useless now, because a message in a sub (regardless of content) triggered an automatic ban on most of the subs I subscribed to.

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

#106

Post by johndill »

I've gotten a 7 day ban just for being a member of a group. Never posted, never up or down voted. Just a member. Banned for 7 days. I'm Reddit user 2,200 or so, never had even a warning about anything. I'm lucky they didn't permanently ban my account

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

#107

Post by archerx »

bryans wrote: post #73

Both Reddit's admins and their future-employee mods are completely out of control, in a way that makes Facebook's intentional topic manipulation seem tame by comparison. These people go out of their way to ban people for no reason -- constantly, every single day -- in a way that can only be described as intentionally abusive. They appear to get some kind of sadistic pleasure in reading ban appeals and denying them, k…

This is very true and it is already having an effect. The amount of posts in the development sub reddit has declined so much it is borderline dead. For example the front page of r/javascript is mostly days old posts which means I can visit it once a week and not really miss anything and it has 1,873,376 subscribers! It seems people have recognized that the post quality was garbage and moved on to greener pastures. It truly is the end of an era. I got banned from r/webdev because some said "using PHP is stupid" and I replied "that is ignorant and that the comment itself was stupid" and I got banned for that and I never looked back.

Good riddance reddit.

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

#108

Post by ziml77 »

grumple wrote: post #50
sparkling wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Most likely it is just a correlation, not the real cause. We have been using https://focsec.com/ for detecting trial abuse in our products. People using VPNs (+ new free email accounts) to "restart" trial periods is something that is quite common, we found.

How resource intensive / business focused is your product? Lots of people use vpns for work or privacy, I think that method would have a lot of false positives. In cases where trial account usage costs you very little or nothing I'd err on the side of not blocking users.

People don’t use public VPNs for work. The tunnel terminates in the same network that the physical office is on. And using a public VPN from a work machine for privacy is a very bad idea. That’s grounds for termination if they catch you and possibly an even worse issue if the company ends up under investigation for any reason. They’re going to take a very close look at anything of yours they can get access to since it won’t have ended up in normal audit logs.

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

#109

Post by shitlord »

bryans wrote: post #73

Both Reddit's admins and their future-employee mods are completely out of control, in a way that makes Facebook's intentional topic manipulation seem tame by comparison. These people go out of their way to ban people for no reason -- constantly, every single day -- in a way that can only be described as intentionally abusive. They appear to get some kind of sadistic pleasure in reading ban appeals and denying them, k…

My account was permanently suspended for "threatening violence" when I said that the reddit admins are enabling pedophiles. Aimee Challenor used to be an employee of reddit, hired without any background check or scrutiny. I wonder how many others like that are still in employ.

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

#110

Post by ridgered4 »

hassanahmad wrote: post #27

I don't think reddit accounts get banned by using VPN but it is more about what you are posting using your accounts.

I've definitely created a new account recently over VPN, posted a single question in a linux forum and then found the account was shadow banned.
Post reply on HN