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.
…
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.
Last night, I kept getting “Empty response from endpoint” on and off. This morning, it was all I got, replying to any thread anywhere, including forums I never visit. Tried the website, “Failed to create comment.”
No indication as to why. No message stating I’d been banned or otherwise had my account restricted. No email either. Just cryptic error messages.
I wasn’t going around making trouble, either. Just posting stuff that didn’t break any rules. I’m careful about that.
You do something they don’t like on Twitter, they specifically tell you you’re limited and for how long. I guess Reddit thinks communicating with users about changes to their accounts is totally unimportant?
So I deleted my account and came here.
have you tried from differen devices, turning VPN, or a diff location. it usually tells if you’re banned, but unable to create acct could be something on thier side of the issue?
Update: Created a new account (there are two subs I still want to follow… obviously any others are a lost cause) and the account is half-broken. It can apparently comment, but the profile and my avatar won’t load.
I’ll leave it for a few days and see if it improves, but I’m not hopeful. I don’t think I’ll bother trying to use Reddit for general purposes unless they get a better CEO. By that time, my guess is that Lemmy and the new Digg will have vacuumed away enough sane users that Reddit will never recover.
I deleted my account, so there’s nothing to test.
I’m assuming this is some shit AI moderation experiment, or some mechanical response to being blocked or reported that lets them off the hook for human review.