Reddit seems to have introduced sitewide AI moderation bots that are sweeping up users and outright banning them, without warning or explanation, for crimes like including links in their posts. This has started to hit some pretty well-known artists in r/comics.

It's inconsistent and unpredictable - which makes it worse, since you don't know what the rules are. As companies like Reddit give up more and more control to unaccountable machines, this kind of thing is getting more common.

Reddit has always had kind of a strange relationship with contributors and what is often called "self-promotion". On one hand, it wants Content... But it can't seem to decide where it wants the content to come from.

It's nice that we've got alternative spaces like this.

Anyway, have some links:

Reddit solicits content from a comic artist, but bans him when it discovers links in his post.

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[–] 168 points 4 months ago (17 children)

While that's horrible and should not be happening at all...

...w...why's...why's the Reddit Alien is so caked up?

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  • [–] [S] 131 points 4 months ago (10 children)
  • [–] 31 points 4 months ago (8 children)
  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    who here got a problem with butts

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago* (5 children)
  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (4 children)

    okay the part before the muppets, that looks like claymation, not computer animation, just with way too many FPS to make the animation smooth. the lip flaps are great. I LOVE IT

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    The artist did a reaction video and went through his process. It's real clay, scanned into 3d and animated in blender I think.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    i will not name the claymation studio I was cameraman for (because Shitass Ryan (who got the name for leaving me off the credits on our HBO projects, so i'm the only dude out of our group without an imdb page) who ran the studio and directed all the projects) but there's a distinct look clay has. It's in the eyes and the mouth.

    lip flaps are so fucking hard. it's the hardest part of animation. the fact that they are almost perfect in this video, i want to doxx the animator (please don't) just so i can send them a holiday fruit basket.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Here's the animator's "reaction" video. I don't know anything about the process, so it was fun to see how he did it.

    https://youtu.be/KhQSQ7JeZ1M

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    oh thank you so much. I haven't animated, like, anything in a couple decades. i was secretly hoping this was Shitass Ryan but he is a successful illustrator now. Can you believe that guy? Shits out his own ass. We worked back in the "editing means cutting 35mm with scissors. Oh cool what's this two tracks at the same time VHS/super8 machine?" era. before we got our hands on that machine we had so many camcorders and VCRs wired together if we wanted to do digital editing anyways. you know the 90s. Seeing folk with iMacs in college that could upload a 30second clip from VHS for editing in an entire day, that was mind blowing.

    the movie super8 was a love letter to us specifically. i'm so vain i think it's about me. but like, us, our generation of filmmakers.

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  • [–] 94 points 4 months ago (12 children)

    Beep must have written the bot.

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  • [–] [S] 30 points 4 months ago (11 children)

    I'm getting multiple references to "Beep"... I'm clearly out of touch. Can you explain?

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  • [–] 72 points 4 months ago (10 children)

    A lemmy user who likes to post comics and remove all references to the author/creator, I believe?

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  • [–] 61 points 4 months ago (9 children)

    A bit further than that, they went on a little crusade insisting that attribution is advertisement. They kept making meta posts requesting that the rules in the comics community be amended to not allow attribution.

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  • [–] 33 points 4 months ago* (7 children)

    And going on a one man brigading mission telling everyone who dared to post that they needed to crop the image themselves removing the artists name.

    Going so far out of their way to remove the name/website/anything off the image themselves and reposting it in the same community.

    Is beep still alive active? They're my one and only blocked member

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  • [–] 19 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Is beep stillΒ aliveΒ active? They're my one and only blocked member

    AFAIK, yes, and they've given up on their weird crusade.

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  • [–] 79 points 4 months ago* (44 children)

    I was there 14 years and never had a ban. Not even a warning. In the last 6 months I was banned 4 times for comments ranging from β€œice gonna mess with someone exercising their 2A and find out” to pointing out a mod’s contradiction when he said Harris both was anti-gun AND admitted she said in an interview she carried a Glock. He kept messaging me in DMs via modmail (which you can’t block) even after I asked them to block me.

    My final, site wide ban for every account linked to my device was for saying Don chomo’s seizing of immigrant bank accounts was akin to Jews having their property taken by nazis.

    On appeal they actually replied that the permanent ban stays because I was β€œtargeting a group of people”. I didn’t even know what to say.

    However if it wasn’t for that dumb shit it was gonna be for something else. I was a top 1% commenter too.

    Deleted all my accounts, removed the app, and won’t be back.

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  • [–] 18 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    I was there for a good while too but got baited by someone who started spamming me with messages repeating the same questions on the same comments when I stopped responding. I eventually told them to fuck off and got shadow banned. I appealed, gave it a week and then deleted the account and the app. I’m done with them. They won’t even stand by their own decisions and explain what rule I violated. They basically brick your account without even telling you, it’s such a weird policy.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    shadowban is the brick, its pretty much being abused by reddit now because it keeps the reason thier banning people more up to discussion, rather than a sitewide ban they gives you the reason for the ban. since mostly done by AI now it gives them the more reason to shadowban people.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    What’s their end goal though? It’s just going to be bots arguing with each other if they keep it up. I feel comforted seeing other similar experiences here, I’m in good company it seems.

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I had a similar experience. Years of use with no issue then suddenly an admin crackdown on anti-fascist comments.

    Give it a few more years and I expect the site to be mostly bots talking to bots, subtly mentioning products and services in their comments.

    Anyway, it's time for me to drink a Mnt Dew and eat some Cool Ranch Doritos as I play the new 007 First Light on my Xbox Series X.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago*

    Musk did recently asked SPEZ to take down any pictures of doing the nazi salute, making him look like a fat walrus, when he was balding and had bad teeth.

    you dont need a few more years, currently its 50-70% bots right now. worst of all its AI posting and reposting too. reddit is trying to obfuscate the actual numbers, by having bots "making interactions with each other" and of course opening the floodgates for the political discussions in many subs to be astroturfed.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Basically the same thing happened to me...

    Reddit user for 10 years, 10,000+ karma, active in a lot of niche communities and even started a couple myself. All the sudden got banned multiple times in the span of a few months in 2025 for talking shit about Trump, ICE, China, and generative AI companies... And then I was perma-banned across all accounts and devices with any new account banned within a couple of hours of creation. Their loss.

    I'm ashamed to admit that I was a too addicted to browsing and commenting Reddit multiple times a day. Like most social media, that's by design, as the algorithm is tailor-made to draw you in and keep you engaged.

    It's much better for me, and for the internet at large, to just spend more time on the fediverse where I can be part of an actual community instead of a cog in some corporate data harvesting machine. I'm actually glad that Reddit requires an app these days to browse on mobile, because sometimes i find myself browsing reddit for a few minutes before the pop-up blocks me from continuing and then I remember to check the fediverse instead.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    26,978 Karma just checked my recently banned account that I've had for 5 years. I got banned for breaking rule one which is bullying, harassment or violence against a marginalized group for asking reddit something like: Why don't we castrate all billionaires if we don't want generational wealth? and all my accounts linked and I can't comment or like. ..... I missed it for a little bit for the reason of not being able to correct people as well lmfao but I don't miss it now that I've found something better.

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Laughing at the idea of billionaires being a "marginalized group".

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    You and me both. I was like that's not possible when I got banned for that. That's a valid question too. To be honest and I know filters don't think logically but thinking logically, wouldn't someone be more inclined to take their money and leave them for dead than go through the trouble of cutting off their genitals and knowing someone or having the surgical knowledge to do such?

    Like castration of billionaires is way more time consuming than just finding better legal wording to get them to get them to redistribute their wealth back into society. I don't think generational wealth is as big of a problem as tax breaks are.

    Think of it: they donate a building or build for example a hospital wing and that humanizes them to the public and the media and they look like less of a rat bastard while they're doing it for tax cuts and writeofffs. I bet if they also didn't need to spend money to be fiscally sound they wouldn't do it too.

    If people who made 500k$ upwards got taxed by 3% more than the people who made 100k$..... Life would be significantly better.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago*

    thats thier AI moderation in action, it just probably detecting alot of things you said that wernt initially ban worthy and just decided to ban you, because you said random things over different accounts, and it assumes you are ban evading or botting. they have other wierd metrics to ban people to. like your brwoser fingerpint looks suspicious, or your writing style, or you made too new of an account.

    sounds like you were shadowbannd too.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    15 + year old account with nearly 10mil karma, and I was known for silvering entire threads, and I got banned for saying "Fuck trump and Obama." At least you got a reply to your appeal. They couldn't even be bothered to.

    I actually gave them real life money, and they couldn't have been bothered to even review my appeal.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    yeah i was kind of asking for mine, posting twerking weegees the way i did. no other bans, but they claim i was inciting violence. suuuuuure automod, suuuuuure.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Whoever animated this spent way too much time getting it right. or maybe just enough?

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  • [–] 23 points 4 months ago (21 children)

    11+ year old account here. πŸ–οΈ

    I deleted my only account before I could get any sort of ban. Fβ€”k that whole site, bro. I don't miss it.

    The only thing that irks me is when people link me to a Reddit post. Then I see some comment that makes an incorrect statement (there's one in each post), and I'm unable to reply and correct them. πŸ™ˆ

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  • [–] 18 points 4 months ago (15 children)
  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (9 children)

    Grownups can also choose not to.

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  • [–] 18 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Then pick a different word. Don't censor the one you obviously are half using anyway.

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    then choose a word you don't have to censor.

    censoring the word means you want what you said to have the weight of "fuck" but you're too cowardly to fully type it out.

    if you wish to diminish its power by censoring it, then don't use it at all. there's tons of four letter words that can be used in its place.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

    I know. I'm an adult.

    I choose to censor it. People always tell me I can say fuck when I censor it like this. Sometimes I say the actual word. Usually with the -ing suffix.

    I just find that sometimes when it's "bleeped", it makes more of an impact (for me) than it would have otherwise. πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    If it makes you feel any better, a lot of the time those posts aren't even made by real people. They're made by bots who are designed to post something completely wrong or wildly contrary for the sole purpose of pissing you off so that you'll engage and add to the post count.

    Or sometimes they're more malicious like the shit-disturber bots that BlueSky was (or maybe still is) plagued with that inject what-about-isms and negativity into otherwise healthy and productive conversations just to poison the discourse and inject conservative bullshit into leftist spaces. Not that BlueSky is particularly leftist, but you'd see the bots appear more frequently in threads where people were talking positively about leftist ideas, or where the conversation was otherwise becoming too "woke."

    So you might not actually be missing out on anything except arguing with a clanker who only cares about its prompt.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    It's not usually posts that are completely wrong though. Usually subtly wrong or have some small detail incorrect. The ones I'm talking about don't seem like bot accounts or bait. They seem like they're well-intentioned but just have some small misconception about what they're talking about. πŸ™‚ Those are the ones I care about correcting because those are the ones that seems like they actually want to spread truth.

    But, alas. It's Reddit, so I will not interact. It is forever dead to me.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I wish I at least got that much of an explanation. I lost my account there the other day for "multiple content violations on connected accounts" when I only had one account. I tried appealing and asking what the violations or other accounts actually were, and just got a reply saying the ban would be upheld without any answers

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago*

    i had that same thing last year. multiple accounts got hit by that AI message without saying what it is.

    They likely reotractively banned you too, looked at your current one that said that thing that got you banned and then looked at your dormant accounts to see if they said a similar thing or it was banned before, and shadowban your IP/DEVICE. they never did this up until early last year.

    for a while reddit allow some time to lapse for sub banned accounts to comment again, or you can use another account to comment. but after the changes they dint allow it anymore.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I was on Reddit since 2009, registered in 2011... Had the occasional 3-7 days bans, usually when I called out power tripping subreddit mods over modmail, who've tended to respond with the "help this user is harassing me" button (and even a decade ago Reddit was leaning towards trusting subreddit moderators over average users).

    Recently got banned for "ban evasion" - got banned from a tankie subreddit, someone else replied a "πŸ˜‚" to the power tripping mod, who must've reported it as ban evasion because a few hours later permanent banhammer struck my main account, my tech account, my porn account, my politics account.. the list goes on.

    So yeah, fuck Reddit. They had so many chances to be better, and chose to be greedy at every single one of them.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    I got permanently banned for describing Minecraft features, like cheekily describing the parallels between the villagers and antisemitic stereotypes. I was permanently banned for that, appealed the ban, and before the appeal was able to go through I was banned again on every account for... whatever the fuck, they didn't tell me. I assume ban evasion, but I didn't even post on any of my alts.

    I appealed that ban as well, but decided it wasn't worth it and deleted the app from my phone and the bookmark from my browser before I could find out if it went through.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    they are definitely astroturfing anti- MUSK, P47 comments. given how many times spez already capitualated to musk asking for sitewide takedown and bans. people shouldnt forget musk is chronically online unlike most other billionaires, because hes on ketamine all the time.

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  • [–] 49 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Reddit can entirely go fuck itself.

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  • [–] 48 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Reddit crappy automoderation had been known in the Spanish speaking communities for years.

    "Negro" in Spanish means black as the colour, but the AEO may interpret it as that some countries who do not usually speak Spanish may use it as a racial slur.

    This is no joke, once they auto-ban me for talking about how a black coloured wall would hide the grime better.

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    [–] 43 points 4 months ago

    This is so ironic, considering that linking to other websites used to be reddit's entire point.

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  • [–] 34 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Good.

    Reddit is shit and it deserves to die at the hands of its own stupidity.

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  • [–] 24 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    meanwhile they cosy up to advertisers and introduced hiding post history so no sane person can tell whether somone is a bot from their history.

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  • [+] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    and which one are propaganda bots from israel, russia, palintir , and then you have actual human ones using bots to drive traffic to thier own site/OF, theres a forum for that its easier to gauge this one then the propaganda ones.

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  • [–] 22 points 4 months ago

    I was banned for comparing israel to the nazis even though the whole fucking world agrees.

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  • [+] 21 points 4 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Yup. Same. The first one I had actually indicated I was legitimately worried that the situation would lead to violence. Instead it flagged me as advocating for violence. The exact opposite of what I'd said.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago*

    Seems like they feel that they are too big to fail and are just trying to clean up its userbase before it goes public.

    that is thier end goal, except it kinda backfired a little now AI is so pervasive and theres very little interaction on that site.

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