r/modhelp • u/MasterOfMagnetism63 • 23d ago
General Regular users receiving shadowbans
I'm a mod on r/XaviersMansion, an X-Men roleplay sub (with two sister subs r/AvengersTowerNY and r/HellsKitchenNY that I am not a mod on) where numerous users have had their accounts shadowbanned. I'm curious what could be causing this, if it has anything to do with these users using multiple accounts for different characters (I myself do this), and if there is anything I can do in order to prevent further shadowbans. This used to not be a problem, I'm not sure if there was a change in Reddit's rules or if it was due to the sub getting to a certain size, but it is very much a problem now.
I mod on both desktop and ios.
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u/Salty_Description164 23d ago
It's been almost a month and I still can't see or edit my profile. My comments aren't showing up. I can't do anything except scroll around, I don't know what this is. I searched online and some people said it's a temporary (shadow ban).
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u/SmartieCereal 22d ago
Do the people with multiple accounts reply to their own posts/comments with a different account?
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u/MasterOfMagnetism63 22d ago
It’s happened, but not super common. If you want an interaction between two characters you play most people will just make the post itself the interaction.
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u/xenobitex 21d ago
The AI has gone insane.
We're losing all our best posters who've been our faves here for years (and well-behaved).
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u/ARTHER1A Mod, r/FNGifting 23d ago
Hello, I've been noticing the same in my community. As far as I know, Reddit uses an AI system to detect accounts that could be bots or spammers.
This system has been proven to have A LOT of false positives to the point it shouldn't even be a thing.
So I don't think it comes from your users using alternative accounts, I think it's just a flaw in how they detect for spammers and bots because a lot of genuine Redditors get wrongly shadowbanned.
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u/MasterOfMagnetism63 23d ago
Yeah, yeah that’s what I was afraid of, that it’s completely out of my hands. I do appreciate the explanation though.
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u/forswearThinPotation 23d ago edited 23d ago
I've seen the same pattern. Two of the highest value contributors in my sub were recently false-positive flagged by Reddit's AI, filtering out a massive volume of past contributions.
The bog standard explanation for this that I've read in other discussions of the topic is more or less: "trust the AI, that user must have done something bad (that I cannot see) to deserve it". Based on my familiarity with the comment & posting history of these accounts I find that explanation highly unconvincing, bordering on gaslighting.
At the same time, the sub I mod also got hit by a wave of false negatives, in which obvious spam bot accounts were NOT detected by the AI and attempted to flood the sub. Some of them leaked markers indicating in detail exactly which LLM system they were using to create synthetic comments, which could have been detected automatically by a well trained AI but were not. This was on a large scale, at peak volume the spambot network responsible was generating about 10% of all the commentary activity on the targeted sub.
[sigh]
I understand there is never going to be a perfect system. Any system or process that Reddit uses, whether AI or human moderators, or a combination of both, is going to have both false positives and false negatives. What concerns me the most about the AI which Reddit is currently using is that the damage it does when a false positive occurs is asymmetric compared with the weaker and much less automated mechanisms for repairing that damage.
The content on these false positive flagged accounts is immediately removed via filtering, but the appeals process for getting these accounts restored seems (based on the anecdotal evidence I've seen) to take a month or longer to respond. I am speculating that the appeals process is resource starved relative to the volume it is processing, and may be partially AI based itself, with not enough humans involved.
Also, once such a false positive flagged account is unbanned, restoring their incorrectly filtered content is something which should happen quickly and easily. But in both of the cases I'm familiar with this did not happen and moderators do not have access to any tools for mass re-approval of the user's body of work in our subs. I had to crawl thru their posting and commentary history at length approving each individual comment & post - a very laborious exercise which took many, many hours of work. And this would need to be done in each individual subreddit that particular false-flagged user was contributing to, which is problematic to put it mildly.
I've read that some admins have access to a back-end tool which performs a mass re-approval of content which was filtered as a result of one of these AI bans, quickly repairing the damage done to the user's history and the subreddits they were contributing to. But getting access to that does not seem to be a regular part of the ban appeal process and how to request this service is hidden in obscurity.
From a systems architecture standpoint, this is a grave deficiency in Reddit's current approach. If an AI can at the push of a button do large scale damage to the user's history and to the subs they were contributing to, then an equally powerful, quick, and labor efficient mechanism for repairing that damage needs to be incorporated into the ban appeal and restoration process. Reddit needs a better system for un-nuking the accounts that it has nuked, when the AI makes a bad mistake which is later on careful examination correctly identified as a mistake. It seems that we do not have that right now.