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

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

#241

Post by JohnHaugeland »

hedora wrote: post #216
fluidcruft wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think that's basically what the FBI agent they interviewed said. There's nothing for him to do and it would be entirely up to prosecutors to do anything. Part of the wrench is that kik can show that they do some sort of things that possibly qualify as "moderation" under the law. Things like auto-banning bots. So in court has apparently successfully kik has made the claim that they do moderate based on things…

This would be easy to prosecute, assuming the allegations are true. They don’t have a working DMCA contact, so they lose safe harbor. They could have the lawyer testify that her client’s underage nudes and related dmca takedowns were never removed, despite court order to take them down. That’s obviously not a special case, so they could spot check a few dozen prior cases, and show non-compliance for those too. Of cou…

one mild problem is that kik is from canada

the fbi's real world response would be "let us introduce you to some canadian officers, and we're going to help, but it's actually up to them"

still, as the former owner of an ISP, i've had to do this, and they're actually quite professional and reasonable about it

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

#242

Post by ipaddr »

fluidcruft wrote: post #162
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…

Shadowbans are different from permanent bans or suspensions the OP has gotten. You at least you know you are banned when you're permabanned/suspended. Reddit claimed at one large incident of outrage over shadowbans that shadowbans were only intended for bots and that no actual humans should ever be shadowbanned and that they would rectify it after messaging admin. My account randomly got shadowbanned a few months ago…

If your account gets shadow banned and you don't notice does it really matter? You are still getting something out or you wouldn't keep posting. Sometimes just posting to yourself is enough.

Say you do notice, you just start a new account for free. Bonus points for moving identities and breaking existing tracking history.

Getting banned can be a win/win

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

#243

Post by tootahe45 »

Fnoord wrote: post #114
tootahe45 wrote: post #28

It can be even worse than suspending you, as early as 2018 i noticed they were shadow banning you based on VPN (PIA also). Meaning you could still post but not be seen, or have the ability to notify people you replied to. I've never since bothered to have an account there. Reddit's CEO, like Jack Dorsey, denies 'shadow banning', even though you can test it by getting -100 karma and watching your comments reach nobody…

> Reddit's CEO, like Jack Dorsey, denies 'shadow banning', even though you can test it by getting -100 karma and watching your comments reach nobody Jack Dorsey was the CEO of Twitter, not Reddit. Edit: Fair, I stand corrected. Leaving comment as-is.

Twitter did a similar thing to combat misinformation IIRC, that's why i mentioned Jack.

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

#245

Post by scim-knox-twox »

jve wrote: post #174
dgellow wrote: post #11

Small tip for people reading comments: if you want to read Reddit anonymously you can replace the domain of any reddit URL with teddit.net. It's an open source, lightweight, web UI for Reddit focused on privacy: https://teddit.net/ . Git repo available here: https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit .

What a stupid domain choice. WARNING: It is not sufficient to replace first char in domain. You must also TLD.

So? I have Privacy Redirect for that…

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

#246

Post by waste_monk »

fluidcruft wrote: post #188
JohnHaugeland wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is astonishingly illegal. What needs to happen is for someone who has a report to make to contact the state attorney general and say "because this company is profiting from child pornography with no reporting mechanism, they have lost their safe harbor protection, and are complicit." Companies like this need to be taught at the metaphorical end of a rifle.

Yeah, I think that's basically what the FBI agent they interviewed said. There's nothing for him to do and it would be entirely up to prosecutors to do anything. Part of the wrench is that kik can show that they do some sort of things that possibly qualify as "moderation" under the law. Things like auto-banning bots. So in court has apparently successfully kik has made the claim that they do moderate based on things…

Makes you wonder if it's deliberately kept up to allow easy transmission of that kind of material... giving CSAM traffickers ample rope to hang themselves, as it were.

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

#247

Post by Talanes »

asdadsdad wrote: post #233
rsync wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No … Instagram is a .com domain so you don’t need to head-shoe (at least, not in the US …)

wait... does any domain registrar ask that user's prove themselves with the shoe on head method?

I believe it's just a reference to 4chan, where asking someone to post a shoe-on-head for verification was a meme, being a .org domain.

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

#248

Post by d1sxeyes »

krono wrote: post #220
boringg wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

> 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.

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.

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

#249

Post by Gareth321 »

StellarTabi wrote: post #208
Gareth321 wrote: post #167

Admins and mods are banning untold users every day for any and no reason at all. It is a really terrible place for discussion now, even if you somehow manage to find a small subreddit which permits nuanced discussion. It will inevitably be banned or the mods replaced with Reddit-approved mods and all nuanced discussion banned. I hope to see a Digg-like exodus soon.

> I hope to see a Digg-like exodus soon. Small problem with this. What enabled the Digg-to-reddit exodus was a strong competitor lying in the shadows. Nobody lying in the shadows behind reddit could handle an exodus. Most lemmy instances regularly go down anytime reddit so much as sneezes. I remember an exodus attempt to Voat took Voat down for at least a week, and in fact Voat never got back online until the entire…

To be honest, I think there are strong alternatives now, but obviously none of them have the infrastructure necessary to sustain the entire Reddit community migrating overnight. Reddit's servers were flaky for years after the exodus, but we just lived with it because Digg sucked more. These days we have Kubernetes and commoditised hosting, so the infrastructure piece is largely solved. The question mark is around funding. Thankfully I'm seeing a lot more interest in funding for social platforms these days. VCs smell blood since Facebook signalled they're in decline. Twitter has decided any right leaning political views will be banned, so they're actively purging double digits from their user base. Alternative news and discussion channels like Substack are flourishing. This is the first real opportunity social has had for competition in at least a decade.

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

#250

Post by quenix »

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…

Doesn’t reflect my experience. Created new reddit account once and noticed its content was getting 0 engagement anywhere, ever. Contacted support, and in two weeks or so, they replied apologising because the account “mistakenly tripped their spam filters”. Account is now unshadowbanned
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