As some of you may know, recently Reddit started using some sort of bot or LLM called Anti-Evil Operations (AEO) to start rummaging through comments and ban users unilaterally. You’ve probably noticed it when you’ve gone through a post and found a long list of removals saying “[ Removed by Reddit ]”. That’s the AEO bot. My own personal experience with that bot is that the ban reasons can be rather assinine.
Case in point, earlier this year I got 1-week Reddit ban. This was in /r/ShittyLifeProTips where there was a post proposing a silly method for dealing with drivers who park in handicapped spots. My comment was very short and simply said to make a piss disc (the usual SLPT joke answer) and drop it through the car window. That was the entire comment. This got me a Reddit-wide ban for Rule 1: promoting violence. My appeal was declined. I get it, it’s a dumb joke, but that’s just what they do there.
I am now on another 1-week ban for a similar kind of silly joke that AEO took too seriously. I’m not even going to bother appealing because it’s clear they’ve taken humans out of the loop and just have LLMs processing the user side of things.
Oddly enough I don’t have any problems with individual subreddits or moderators. Most of them, except for a handful of power tripping individuals on the big subreddits, do a rather thankless job keeping their communities running. Reddit’s AEO bots are where the problem is.
Just Googling around it appears this has come up among some of the moderators: 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.
Reddit is not only getting aggressive in deleting legitimate users (as per the other posts people have made) but are also trying to completely automate sitewide moderation. It appears they’re willing to take a tremendous amount of collateral damage to do this. LLM based tools don’t maintain understandings of a community’s evolving culture and are unable to gauge intent and tone. Friendly joking “trash talk” between gets flagged as toxicity, satirical content mocking bigotry gets flagged, ironically, as bigotry, and so forth. They’ll definitely get rid of the toxic content like they want, but at the expense of killing communities and driving off old timers.
Hopefully this is a case study for Lemmy to not start rolling out those tools here. For the time being I’m going to look around and use my ban period to get more familiar with Lemmy. I was surprised that my Lemmy front page had a lot more fresh content than I remember last time… that’s a good sign, and it makes me wonder if a slow exodus is already underway. Reddit’s overaggressive moderation seems to be helping it along.
I wonder if anyone else has stories about ridiculous reasons for getting flagged by the AEO bot.
You actually could solve this with correct placement of a piss disc…
I had an account permanently banned a while ago for “Inciting Violence”
Someone was saying that Ukraine should just surrender to Russia and I replied “bad bot”
Permanent ban, upheld on appeal
Mine said ‘glorifying violence’ last week for saying replying to a comment and saying that spain declaring war on israel was probably out of the question, because they had nukes.
It’s a joke
If their bans weren’t so easy to work around they’d have no users at all
it appears they have been 50% bots on the site for quite a number of years, i think thier ban/purges are a little to effective that its catching people who are neccesarily not botting/spamming or violating TOS, now its Just assuming people are botting by your "account acitivity. as you know new accounts and old inactive ones are very susceptible to shadowbans right off the bat.
AI can’t tell a nazi that wants to kill everyone on the planet that isn’t part of their religion from an atheist that wants to educate religious people that have been lied to, conned, defrauded, and hurt by religious nazis.
Bluesky, too. Zero freedom for atheists trying to make the world a better place.
“Be aware that priests rape children at a much higher rate than any group in society”
BAN!
“Churches usually only pay 2% of their income back to the community, while anything less than 50% from a similar non-profit is considered an illegal obvious scam”
BAN!
Fuck religion and the religious that censor everything and everyone that points out the clearly illegal and harmful things that they do every single day.
Some perspective from the mod side
The ‘Removed by Anti-Evil’ isn’t a new thing. It used to be the admin side spam/site wide rule breaking content remover.
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It acted like Lemmy’s purge function. When something is removed on Reddit, it’s still visible to mods. Sometimes after something extra awful had been removed, anti-evil would come along and clean it up.
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It would be an indication that something is against site wide rules. If the mods don’t take care of reported content that’s clearly against sitewide rules, and anti-evil has to step in, then it’s a sign that the subreddit might need to be doing more
Recently though it’s been coming along and removing comments before any of the mods can see what the comment was. That makes it hard to take any further action since the mods can’t know what the problem was. So far when that’s happened, the thread had nothing controversial and the user’s history was normal and tame, so I have to assume that the new version of anti-evil has a few screws loose. It’s not even that they’ve raised the threshold for what’s appropriate, since awful content still gets through about equally as often.
The only reason why Reddit’s moderation tooling is considered better than the threadiverse is the standard regex based automod rules. The other reddit tools continue to be hot garbage
they seemed to have turned it up several notches, of what they detect, of course now they arnt even telling the mods what they are detecting or how. plus they already have the other site-wide overly sensitive “bot detection/spamming going on too”
Yup, and meanwhile a lot of the spam we manually remove after users report it, should be obvious to detect with automated tools. For example, when a “user” is posting the same link in every comment, or posting the same length comment in many unrelated subs 24/7 every few minutes, etc.
it’s annoying
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That site has been done for a while but the facade still remains for a little bit
I made a pretty innocuous comment a few days ago and it was deleted with an admin warning. I don’t remember what exactly I wrote and can’t see my own comment anymore.
They way they implemented that definitely suggests they have no trust or respect for their users, especially for cases were content was mistakenly flagged. Many users make hundreds of posts a day and honestly don’t remember what was in a post.
I used to administer a large vBulletin forum about 15 years ago, and when I had to suspend a user I definitely included the content of what they posted so they understood what was not tolerated. I mean that’s basic common sense 101… assuming they’re not getting the message, you have to show them why if you’re allowing them to continue participating.
before my last acct was shadowban, comment removed from a post made someone posting it ask a joke or meme.
I was banned out of the blue, even though I just posted in tech and fandom subs, and never in 10 years had an encounter with a mod. So there’s definitely something wrong with the tool they’re using.
And I’ve seen those comment threads you mention. It’ll be a normal, friendly conversation with a random “[ removed by reddit ]” in the middle. I started joking to myself whenever I see one of those, that there was someone saying something really awful in that comment despite the rest of the conversation flowing completely peacefully (sometimes including replies like “I totally agree!”).
I’ve even found posts in tech subs after doing a web search, where the cached result looks like an issue I’m having, but when I load the post it’s “[removed by reddit]” and there’s no drama or anything to indicate that the removal made any sense.
once THE BOT ARBITRARLY bans you, there almost no hope for an appeal, and i bet admins they ignore appeal from bans from the AI moderation anyways. oh and they are upping thier aggressive detection methods on the users who are evading using various paid means. they have slowly introducing new sensitvities to their filters for a while. i think they Purged too much early in the year, and saw how many “users got removed” that would provited datamining to thier AI, so they went with stealthy background filtering banning now. ban lifts by admins seems extremely rare too, and not follow any pattern. im betting they are using AI to screen out serial (account holders that have had bans , that were part of the arbitrary purges).
reddit’s filter seems to freak on accounts that arnt using a number things they are familar with, any attempt to hide your IP, a browser that is not common, some time zone issue, or suddenly posting after acct creation is enough to trigger a shadowban.
i think some people already speculated that when reddit went public, they are planning to sanitize the site, to make it sellable to a purchaser, reddit has value to propaganda arms, much like xitter, youtube does.
Here on lemmy some instances could use a big fat ai to moderate the way reddit does but users could relativly easy switch to another instance (and if needed even software, like going from lemmy to piefed)
If you want to look for it (i think if was at the bottom on the defauld webfrontend) there is a modlog
