If you ask investors, Reddit is doing great. Its current market cap sits at nearly $22 billion, three times what it debuted at during its March 2024 IPO. Once a little-known successor to Fark and Digg, and a great place to engage in down-to-earth communication and meet interesting people, it’s now one of the most well-known social (or anti-social) media platforms in the world.
From a user perspective, though, the site is less friendly than ever. The latest change — made with zero fanfare, as usual — now allows complete strangers to reduce your account’s functionality for any reason they see fit. Now, if someone blocks you, you’re no longer able to edit, delete, or even view your own comments, with exactly zero recourse for you, the person who originally posted them.
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Reddit’s block function has prevented users from further participating in comment chains for quite some time, which already opened up the potential for abusing control over certain discussions. The latest update to blocking not only stops a user’s ability to comment further, it makes it look like they never commented at all — but only to the blocked user. Others can still see and reply to the original comment, despite its invisibility to the apparent owner.
While Reddit never announced the change, it’s seemingly been in place for some users — but not all — for varying lengths of time. Mentions of the change can be found as far back as June 2024, but got little widespread attention. Now, according to Android Police’s and others’ experience, the update appears to be rolling out even more widely.
Yeah this policy in practice makes no fucking sense.
I definitely experienced this last month. I had a weirdo block me randomly because I happen to not be a fan of historical figure, Aaron Burr. They apparently really really like Aaron Burr—so they blocked me. Whatever.
I didn’t get a notification or anything. It just looked like they’d deleted their account and never existed on my side. Ok. I shrugged and thought it was a weird UI thing and moved on.
That was until I started talking to other people and the Blocker kept unblocking me to leave me more messages only to immediately Reblock me.
I knew this was happening because I would get an email alert that I had a comment. But when I went to see the comment on Reddit, it was gone.
I don’t even know or understand what the Blocker wanted from me (except maybe falling in love with Aaron Burr-which isn’t on the table —he’s not my type).
In practice, this new policy ended up having the Blocker spam the person they’re Blocking and removing their ability to prevent being spammed.
Dude I’ve never blocked anyone or had any real trouble on any site or forum. The only time I’ve had trouble is on Reddit and only over the last 3-months. Good riddance.
reddit is desperate for more engagement, so its basically FB. i block people all the time, but my comment chain is still continued to be abused by people, and even some have the audacity to make a new account to evade the block. this is a known issue since more than a year though. i blocked people but they still commented regardless of it being blocked.
it may block the original person you blocked, but it wont stop others from commenting, nor would you notice if the blocked person creates another account to harass you.
Yeah I could still comment normally to the chain itself and my comments. Other people in the thread were talking to me directly and normally. They were responding to my comments. I didn’t switch accounts to evade the block though. That’s so ridiculous I’m sorry someone bothered you like that.
I’ve never blocked anyone in the 12 years I was on Reddit. I’ll mock obvious bigoted trolls if they’re being actively terrible to people in my community. But that’s the limit for me engaging in an unhelpful back and forth. Usually they get bored within an hour or so when I stop giving them energy.
I’m sorry about the negative experience you’ve had on the other side of it. I think it’s pretty clear that the ability to block someone and not interact with them is important but the way it’s implemented is a crappy experience for everyone. Not to mention it seems easily exploitable.
I’ve upvoted you a lot on Lemmy so please don’t block me haha
I’m descendant of Aaron Burr’s grandfather and I don’t even like him. He was a cunt and a swindler if not with purpose (not to mention that other thing he did), why someone would choose that hill to die on I have no idea.
/Jerk: Excuse me the other thing? Wow amazing amazing you fell for Jefferson and Hamilton propaganda 🥲🤣🤣🤣 I can’t believe you fell for a CONSPIRACY THEORY the truth is that Aaron Burr was a normal person who loved his family and was the VICTIM for decades because of Jefferson and Hamilton targeted harassment campaign against this wonderful man! You are Aaron Burr’s descendent and FAMILY and the lies about him were so successful that even his descendants fell for them. Innocent until proven guilty and Burr was DECLARED innocent!!!😇 Why are you so mad and upset and obsessed with Arron Burr what is wrong with you? You are so unhinged for Aaron Burr (blocks unblocks sends another version of the above reblocks, repeat)
/Unjerk: I actually said something way kinder about Burr than you did initially. I said something general like “To be fair, Burr wasn’t that great of a guy. And there’s the whole criminal conspiracy with the bribing Generals thing and trying to recruit soldiers while Vice President thing too.” I didn’t even get into the duel.
Whatever we can be obsessed losers together. Spending every second of every day seething against the memory of precious spineless baby angle Aaron Burr (a man I never think about)
Wow. How empty some people’s lives are. How mentally deranged do you have to be to do this
Maybe you just need to wait for it.
My Blocker writes me a comment every day
I can’t read it cuz the shadowban at play
Huh, last time I tried blocking someone I accidentally unblocked them right after then I couldn’t block them again for 24 hours, so I had to keep getting notifications about their bullshit trolling, glad to see they removed this feature so block spamming can be used to it’s full effect