My magnora7 account just got IPbanned by reddit

submitted by magnora7 from self.MeanwhileOnReddit

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[–]Ideal 22 insightful - 2 fun22 insightful - 1 fun23 insightful - 2 fun -  (11 children)

Interesting. Not so much the ban, but more the way you described the forum takeovers in your last post. "The appearance of them being the popular majority" describes reddit fairly well, as well as the way consensus is manufactured there. I don't think many people understand (including myself) how sophisticated the attacks are, but I can see the results over the last 10+ years of using Reddit. It just slowly degraded into increasing amounts of propaganda, and there's no way it was organic. At this point I think a decent portion of these attacks and posts are done using AI, and it may be that the solution is an equally sophisticated AI.

[–]magnora7[S] 10 insightful - 3 fun10 insightful - 2 fun11 insightful - 3 fun -  (7 children)

I don't think many people understand (including myself) how sophisticated the attacks are, but I can see the results over the last 10+ years of using Reddit. It just slowly degraded into increasing amounts of propaganda, and there's no way it was organic.

When I became saidit admin, it showed me how much of this there is... for how bad it appears as a user, just keep in mind you're not seeing 95% of the things which are deleted. Yet I see every single one of those things. It shows you a lot.

I think you're right a lot of the attacks are AI, I've removed a bot that keeps re-creating itself to post propaganda. The text is always copied from text snippets on pastebin.com text files which show up in google searches. This is just one type of bot of many. And that's not even mentioning any paid shill human beings, which has become more popular as corporations and governments have realized what a cheap form of PR it is to brigade forums.

AI may be the solution and maybe that's what I ran in to today on reddit. It would make sense that when they first roll out the AI it would be faulty and thus be double-checked afterward by humans. Which is probably why I got unbanned 40 minutes after I was IP banned.

[–]SaidOverRed 4 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 3 fun -  (6 children)

I appreciate your practical discussion you linked in OP. If the attackers & pedos upvote each other, wouldn't that help track/ban them faster? Like, sure a regular user my accidentally upvote the wrong thing, but if it happens to different posts on different threads then that's a good indication to check/ban that user too. Obviously it could be circumvented (which offers only temporary respite) or abused (causing frustrations similar to what you linked. But I figured it was promising enough to mention.

[–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (5 children)

If the attackers & pedos upvote each other, wouldn't that help track/ban them faster?

I actually mentioned this in the original post. They know about this and upvote other things to make this sort of detection more difficult. It's typical they will "age" the accounts by pretending to be a normal user for a week or two, and then switching over to propaganda promotion mode, which makes it harder to detect, and they know that which is why they do it. It's an arms race in a way, and some of these people are quite skilled at destroying forums

[–]SaidOverRed 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (4 children)

I'm ignorant of the whole game, but it does seem like it forces strong measures. I don't like zero tolerance stuff, but I suppose a 1 strike and you're out would be fine with hidden, randomized 'aging' before removing the strike. Thus an accident won't result in a ban, but doing it repeatedly would. And they wouldn't know when they get to misbehave again. It wouldn't solve the problem -- rotating accounts would work -- but it does stifle it and drag out the process to where it can hopefully be drowned out unless there are truly huge number of accounts being made. Just my two cents.

[–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

unless there are truly huge number of accounts being made

Yeah we're talking about individuals making hundreds or thousands of accounts singlehandedly, so yes that's part of the territory

[–]SaidOverRed 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Oh wow... I assume there are methods to detect that. There can't be enough VPN'd IPs to manage that consistently, although I admit that finding them after the fact would be no easy task. I assume human-checking has to be a necessary part of the equation at that point. I hope saidit has someone doing that. Not that I would want to be the one poor guy who's job is to figure out what they are up to.

[–]magnora7[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

There can't be enough VPN'd IPs to manage that consistently

That is unfortunately incorrect.

We have algorithms, but it's a real battle tbh

[–]SaidOverRed 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Well that shows how much I bother to ban evade. I figure if someone doesn't want me around, then I don't need to be there. Even if I get banned for arbitrary or stupid reasons that are out of your control (as has happened on both subsaidits and subreddits), I still figure they aren't worth my engagement at that point.

I don't have much else to add but I will point out that the "context" button when replying in the unread area does a really poor job of actually providing context. And also, you might want to do a short AMA. Saidit is small enough, I would hope you're unlikely to be trolled too hard during it. But that could be my optimism talking.

[–]5Nco2VME7FpWVbuS 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

A friend of mine went to a talk by one of the founders of Reddit a while back (5 years maybe) and they talked about how Reddit was initially mostly bots so that they could make it seem more active than it really is. If there were bots that could do that years ago I wouldn't be surprised if they could do much worse things now.

[–]mongre 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

May I suggest an alternative?