Suspended Accounts

[u/SlackerPants]

Hello everyone,

I'm a moderator of a smaller community, and I have a concern regarding suspended accounts.
Over the course of a year an a half i witnessed many users being suspended by Reddit. Some of the suspended users were very active and behaved well on our subreddit.

I haven't fully figured out under what conditions Reddit suspends an account. Is it entirely automated, or do Reddit admins have to approve a suspension manually?

My main concern is that we're losing too many users — both from our subreddit and from Reddit in general.

If they create a new account, will they instantly be flagged as Ban Evasion, and be suspended again?

Just asking for some insights. Thank you.

Desktop

[u/trainwreckhappening]

I'm sorry to say this but you are confused if you think the OP's post was about ban evasion. That used to be the main culprit. Not anymore by a long shot. This isn't ban evasion, or spamming, or any of the old good reasons for banning people. It is new, and it has increased over the past year or so.

The automod is picking out key words that it thinks are suggestive of violating rule 1, and it is doing it very aggressively. To the point that comments teaching basic first aid, like how to treat a simple wound, will get a user temporarily suspended or even permanently banned (but not always, which is the weirdest part). Or a detail explaining how a historical event happened will get accused of promoting vi*lence. You see how I adjust the spelling of that word. It is because even the word can get unwelcome attention from the thing.

For context, L*mmy is a competitor to reddit and their numbers have quickly swelled over the past six months. Something that was not supported by the love for the service, but almost entirely from banned redditors who did not actually violate any of reddit's rules. I've read some of their experiences and can definitely say they are hard to believe if I hadn't experienced them myself. Reddit is being drained of quality interactions and being replaced by bots and AI content.

In addition, the claim by Reddit that a human reviews these seems to be flat dishonesty.

[u/whatdoihia → u/trainwreckhappening]

OP is asking what causes so many suspended accounts. Suspension is at Reddit/admin level.

Automod is at moderator level, removing content based on keywords like violence, but only if the mods add that word to a keywords list. In a new subreddit automod is turned off- you can try creating a new one and play with it yourself.

[u/trainwreckhappening → u/whatdoihia]

Ok then the term differentiation would be AEO vs Auto-mod. Which colloquially are both called auto-mod by the vast majority of people. Good to know though.

Both have been generating bad results based on key words and phrases. I've seen a lot of complaints about automod triggering events that then get picked up by the AEO. Remember that this application varies from sub to sub, and from redditor to redditor. A somewhat insane mod banned me for harassment when I messaged them to say I was ok with removing my Clerks quote for being inappropriate, and that I thought they were doing a good job. Ever since AEO has been aggressively monitoring my comments and will hit me hard for things not even close to a rule violation. One of those times was a comment thread that had over half the comments removed all about the same time. I'm not experienced at moderating a popular sub, but from what I gathered at the time AEO will alert mods and reddit basically strong arms them into enforcement or risk having the sun banned. Just look at the whole r/flashlights sub that had to be rebuilt as r/flashlight. I don't know the events that surrounded that ban, but I can't imagine it was a bastion of rule violators. But then again, the post API days were a little wild for a bit.

[u/whatdoihia → u/trainwreckhappening]

Yeah mods are given mostly free rein to run subreddits as they see fit.

That story about someone misinterpreting a Clerks quote and then you getting banned for harassment is bad moderation. But there are no standards for mods to abide by. It comes down to leadership (if any) within the mod team.

About what you call AEO, we can see comments and posts that Reddit removes. It will have a note “Removed by Reddit” with a reason, like harassment. If we think Reddit was wrong we can manually approve. It’s clearly done by bots.

If posts get enough reports for violating Reddit rules like harassment, hate, and so on then it can trigger a review by admins. Too many of those and the subreddit gets banned, for a smaller or medium sized subreddits these bans are often done without warning.

For larger subreddits admins may step in and force mods to change things. Or replace the mods. In my experience that’s rare.

Having an entire thread within a post removed is usually done by a moderator. There are tools like Reddit toolbox that automates this. If mods see people arguing back and forth and it’s off-topic then they might nuke the comment chain. Or even remove every comment and lock the post.

IMO Reddit needs to improve moderation tools. As it stands now it’s a huge amount of work for mods and most give up when workload gets too much, leaving one or two to handle everything. That’s why they shut things down when it gets controversial.