Reddit seems to have introduced sitewide AI moderation bots that are sweeping up users and outright banning them, without warning or explanation, for crimes like including links in their posts. This has started to hit some pretty well-known artists in r/comics.
It’s inconsistent and unpredictable - which makes it worse, since you don’t know what the rules are. As companies like Reddit give up more and more control to unaccountable machines, this kind of thing is getting more common.
Reddit has always had kind of a strange relationship with contributors and what is often called “self-promotion”. On one hand, it wants Content… But it can’t seem to decide where it wants the content to come from.
It’s nice that we’ve got alternative spaces like this.
Anyway, have some links:
- More comics:
- Patreon
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While that’s horrible and should not be happening at all…
…w…why’s…why’s the Reddit Alien is so caked up?
Butts are funny.
Valid. Carry on.
who here got a problem with butts
Just admit it, you wanna fuck Snoo.
Beep must have written the bot.
I’m getting multiple references to “Beep”… I’m clearly out of touch. Can you explain?
A lemmy user who likes to post comics and remove all references to the author/creator, I believe?
I was there 14 years and never had a ban. Not even a warning. In the last 6 months I was banned 4 times for comments ranging from “ice gonna mess with someone exercising their 2A and find out” to pointing out a mod’s contradiction when he said Harris both was anti-gun AND admitted she said in an interview she carried a Glock. He kept messaging me in DMs via modmail (which you can’t block) even after I asked them to block me.
My final, site wide ban for every account linked to my device was for saying Don chomo’s seizing of immigrant bank accounts was akin to Jews having their property taken by nazis.
On appeal they actually replied that the permanent ban stays because I was “targeting a group of people”. I didn’t even know what to say.
However if it wasn’t for that dumb shit it was gonna be for something else. I was a top 1% commenter too.
Deleted all my accounts, removed the app, and won’t be back.
11+ year old account here. 🖐️
I deleted my only account before I could get any sort of ban. F—k that whole site, bro. I don’t miss it.
The only thing that irks me is when people link me to a Reddit post. Then I see some comment that makes an incorrect statement (there’s one in each post), and I’m unable to reply and correct them. 🙈
If it makes you feel any better, a lot of the time those posts aren’t even made by real people. They’re made by bots who are designed to post something completely wrong or wildly contrary for the sole purpose of pissing you off so that you’ll engage and add to the post count.
Or sometimes they’re more malicious like the shit-disturber bots that BlueSky was (or maybe still is) plagued with that inject what-about-isms and negativity into otherwise healthy and productive conversations just to poison the discourse and inject conservative bullshit into leftist spaces. Not that BlueSky is particularly leftist, but you’d see the bots appear more frequently in threads where people were talking positively about leftist ideas, or where the conversation was otherwise becoming too “woke.”
So you might not actually be missing out on anything except arguing with a clanker who only cares about its prompt.
It’s not usually posts that are completely wrong though. Usually subtly wrong or have some small detail incorrect. The ones I’m talking about don’t seem like bot accounts or bait. They seem like they’re well-intentioned but just have some small misconception about what they’re talking about. 🙂 Those are the ones I care about correcting because those are the ones that seems like they actually want to spread truth.
But, alas. It’s Reddit, so I will not interact. It is forever dead to me.
I have no experience with bad faith on bluesky btw. It’s all been good for me there.
I was there for a good while too but got baited by someone who started spamming me with messages repeating the same questions on the same comments when I stopped responding. I eventually told them to fuck off and got shadow banned. I appealed, gave it a week and then deleted the account and the app. I’m done with them. They won’t even stand by their own decisions and explain what rule I violated. They basically brick your account without even telling you, it’s such a weird policy.
I had a similar experience. Years of use with no issue then suddenly an admin crackdown on anti-fascist comments.
Give it a few more years and I expect the site to be mostly bots talking to bots, subtly mentioning products and services in their comments.
Anyway, it’s time for me to drink a Mnt Dew and eat some Cool Ranch Doritos as I play the new 007 First Light on my Xbox Series X.
I wish I at least got that much of an explanation. I lost my account there the other day for “multiple content violations on connected accounts” when I only had one account. I tried appealing and asking what the violations or other accounts actually were, and just got a reply saying the ban would be upheld without any answers
Good.
Reddit is shit and it deserves to die at the hands of its own stupidity.
it was fun before it became ubiquitous. now it’s a monster that’s going to be the next Pinterest (ie getting blocked from my search results)
It was good before the feds killed its founder.
Not suprised at all how things have turned out.
I was banned for comparing israel to the nazis even though the whole fucking world agrees.
meanwhile they cosy up to advertisers and introduced hiding post history so no sane person can tell whether somone is a bot from their history.
deleted by creator
I was banned for blaming the victim when I said Israel should stop genocide. Don’t know how they made that thought process.
Yup. Same. The first one I had actually indicated I was legitimately worried that the situation would lead to violence. Instead it flagged me as advocating for violence. The exact opposite of what I’d said.
I got banned for violence saying something about shooting coyotes in a post about coyotes being a problem.
I had a 14 year account I think, maybe 15 year by this point, and I ultimately deleted my account when Trump got elected, but still used the mobile site on safari. Then a month or two ago the site became unusable as it shoved the app download link front of screen and covered all the content.
Love and Hex is a great comic.
Thank you!
Wait wait wait wait wait. You’re the author???
Of course. My comics aren’t popular enough for random people to repost them for karma or whatever. (Except the occasional mass-appeal ones like the dragon language one or the modern mimics.)
beep are you a reddit ai
Beep is spez confirmed
So, honest question, if creators want to ditch Reddit, where do they go besides here? Fediverse ain’t that big yet.
For comic artists, there already seems to be a decent and growing community here. I’m a musician. There is (used to be?) a vibrant community on Reddit for songwriters, home recording enthusiasts, amateur producers…and it was a good place to network. I won’t go back to Reddit for any reason, so where do I go? Those communities here don’t have enough users to be active. I’ve tried.
I’m sharing my stuff wherever I think I can find an audience… Reddit will be included until it becomes untenable. (I exclude Xitter from that because I don’t like Nazis.)
Don’t think on a where to go permanently basis. Just go where your target people are, forget about how a specific platform gamifies their algorithm. Subscribers and followers, upvotes don’t matter in the slightest anyway. Make sure, instead, to always refer people to a place where they can engage directly with you. Either listening to your music, buying it, buying merch, or getting some interaction. But don’t put much stock on platforms, it’s there for the corpos, not for you.
Scott used to put comics up on his site VGcats. XKCD still does this. You can just make your own site.
That’s not a healthy environment for creators.
Didn’t know reddit was doing this too. Last I heard of this was twitter having moderation or algo problems with links from what I remember.
I think all these sites are blocking or hiding external links because they see people going to other websites as a threat to their dominance/profit.
Reddit’s the worst. Hopefully this is exactly the sort of pitfall that Lemmy won’t fail at.
Oh, some instances definitely will. The nice thing, though, is that others won’t.
