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.
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