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
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.
I have no experience with bad faith on bluesky btw. It’s all been good for me there.
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.