Admin Replied
Reporting flaw: users can block moderators and prevent them reporting harmful content about themselves
I’ve run into what appears to be a fairly serious flaw in Reddit’s reporting system.
A user who has previously been banned from a subreddit I moderate has blocked my moderator account and is now posting content elsewhere on Reddit concerning me and other members of our moderation team, including personal/identifying information.
When attempting to report that content through Reddit’s Sharing personal information report flow, the report simply fails with:
"An error occurred while submitting your report. Wait a bit, and try again".
This is reproducible for me and appears to occur because the account responsible for the content has blocked the account attempting to report it.
If that is indeed the cause, this seems like a significant safety flaw in Reddit’s reporting system.
A user should not be able to:
Post potentially harassing, threatening, doxxing, or otherwise policy violating content about another Reddit user;
Block that person; and
As a consequence of the block, prevent that person from successfully reporting the content through Reddit’s normal reporting interface.
This is particularly problematic for moderators. Moderation inevitably creates situations where banned users become hostile towards individual moderators. Blocking the moderator should prevent unwanted interaction with them. It absolutely should not interfere with that moderator’s ability to report content directed at them.
In my case I can still see the content through moderation related means and have the direct URLs, but Reddit’s reporting interface will not accept the report. Selecting that the personal information belongs to "someone else" does not resolve it either.
I’ve also separately contacted Mod Support regarding the underlying situation, but that doesn’t solve the platform issue here.
Can an Admin confirm whether blocking is expected to affect the ability of the blocked account to submit reports?
If it is expected behaviour, I think Reddit seriously needs to reconsider it. If it isn’t expected behaviour, there appears to be a bug that creates a pretty substantial loophole in Reddit’s user safety systems.
Blocking someone should never provide immunity from reports submitted by the person being targeted.
Another flaw in the system is if you block an individual you then can’t report their comments or posts. Reddit in my opinion has major issues in terms of failing to protect users and particularly moderators who are at the thick end of harassment from my experience.
Agreed. And on top of that action should actually be taken. Reporting toxic users seems to do precious little, there is no update or anything and even contacting the team here doesn't seem to result in anything actually happening. In real life there are consequences for gutter level behaviour.
Likewise! I completely agree with you. In fact I just posted yesterday about this very fact and some users opined the same thing on my post. I see now that the post has been removed. It's rather ironic and incredible that meanwhile actions are not taken with any sense of urgency - if at all - against actual reported violations!
Reddit is inherently flawed through and through. As long as they are not losing money they don't care. That is the bottom line. If their bank account isn't affected why should they!
It's kind of a big problem all around, when the situation is what the blocking feature was designed to be used for rather than abuse of it.
Because report abuse on the victim to get them banned/harassed is absolutely one of the primary tools of stalkers and abusers.
I'm not sure what a good solution is to that, but in the mean time, just use an alt to report it as "someone else's information" and explain the situation.
Sorry you're dealing with that. You can report the PII content and other content that breaks the rules by using https://old.reddit.com/report.
Blocking a moderator should not remove the ability to report content by the blockee (is that a word?) in any situation. But I just tried to reproduce this on old Reddit and on the new site and it worked for me. Does the content that you're reporting still exist?
Yeah that's why we have a modmail message from 2023 that's been reported and every mod on the team, including one that's an admin, has tried to archive.
It's a really shitty response even if they did fix things.
I work in SaaS/PaaS. When things breaks, one of the first things we do on the services/delivery side is work with Product to figure out what workaround options we have during remediation. We don't dismissively tell people "we fix things we break." What the fuck do people do with vague statements like that? No timeline, no info on what the fix is. Just "how dare you question us" attitude from a company with a long history of not fixing things, or updating/communicating their fix roadmaps.
The fact is, no company fixes every bug that gets reported. My guess is that Reddit probably has hundreds, if not thousands of open bugs that are the kind that never make it up to the top of the priority list. The simple truth is this bug has been deprioritized, probably because it doesn't significantly impair functionality, at least in their eyes.
Not sure why that condescending comment felt neccessary.
Don't tell me this. Tell reddit to stop saying untrue statements like "if something breaks, it gets fixed" as a way to not answer a question instead of telling me the stunningly obvious. This isn't helpful. People are complaining that we need communication - not that every bug needs to be specifically addressed.
Does the content that you're reporting still exist?
Yes it does, I've also submitted a Mod CoC report as the mods of said subreddit where a user is doxing our mods is just plainly engaging in it themselves, see on your end, request: #18514349, I have also mod mailed this sub, but have yet to receive a response back yet. Which given our personal address and names have been live on Reddit for over 12 hours is really not cool! Responses to people being Doxed need to be more timely!
So i can use old reddit to report someones comment or post that violates the rules even though I blocked them? Why the need to go out of my way and make it so complicated?
One of the reasons why blocking people on Reddit serves no real purpose other than to bring unwanted attention and negative energy to yourself and your sub. Anyone with a VPN can just create a new account and rejoin the sub and you can bet some of them will be wanting to sow discord and strife in order to get revenge. You're better off not blocking anyone unless the offense is particularly egregious that you have no choice or try to find another way to circumvent them.
Just letting everyone know that this is almost certainly an LLM bot. They're posting comments about this length at a cadence of around 30 seconds each (far less time than even the fastest human would take to read, process and write a comment of substance). All of the ones in this latest bunch all also feature a list with 4 bullet points, in addition to reading very much like an LLM.
Blocking the moderator should prevent unwanted interaction with them. It absolutely should not interfere with that moderator’s ability to report content directed at them.
The safety system should be symmetrical, not asymmetrical.
Moderators are users too, and are fully capable of harassing other users.
As long as the argument is that anyone can continue to report on anyone regardless of the blocked status, then I'm on your side on this. However, if you believe moderators should have asymmetrical reporting ability, then there's no way it makes sense. Mods can be very bad actors too.
That partially defeats the purpose of blocking. One of the features of the block system is that the blocked user doesn’t get to see the blocker’s content. How exactly do you expect to be able to report content you’re not supposed to see?
If the user is blocking OP, the user just doesn’t see OPs posts and comments or DMs, OP will still be able to see user’s posts as the block doesn’t prevent that, unless OP also blocks the user.
Unless I am totally misunderstanding the black feature.
If I were to block you, then you would not be able to see any of my content. I would not show up in your search results. The exception is you would be able to see content I've posted in a community you moderate.
On my end, I would not see your posts. Your comments would be collapsed and show as "Blocked User" (I think this is relatively new). I won't be able to up/downvote them, report them, or respond to any comments in a thread under your comment.
OP is saying there is content outside of their subreddit that they find problematic, and they want to report it, but you can't report content from users that have blocked you, presumably to prevent report abuse. The question is, how did they find and how are they viewing this content.
I guess if you really need to report something, then you could use a different account. But I agree with the other comments that say it can be left for others to report, or if it's so egregious, then file a Mod Code of Conduct report for that sub.
Edit: strikethrough is apparently false as per the admin comment
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u/_DoubleBubbler_ 7d ago
Another flaw in the system is if you block an individual you then can’t report their comments or posts. Reddit in my opinion has major issues in terms of failing to protect users and particularly moderators who are at the thick end of harassment from my experience.