So I've been running a long-standing test of Reddit, specifically to see where it's "stress points" were with respect to censorship. This has been going on for a few years now, prompted by rumblings of a mass quarantining of various subs (think r/waternigga age) and removing r/TheDonald (one of the largest subs on the site) from the front page. I had never made a reddit account before, considering it the cesspool of the internet in a way that made 4chan jealous.
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My method and goals were simple: spread amongst every "endangered" sub possible and see which realized something was up first. Would reddit ban me immediately? Which subs couldn't handle simple disagreements? My goal was to find what was pushing their censorship through prolonged testing.
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My rules were that I couldn't make it easy for them. So no botting, no excessive flaming, no obvious targeting of individual. Just normal, rational, conversation here and there to see what got me an undeserved ban first.
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But in the spirit of the test, I kept it more or less double-blind. This means I didn't post other information I knew about how reddit admins were Trans-pedophiles, etc. Yes I am aware I could have posted about their public snafu's and probably gotten an instant, undeserved ban. But that's not my goal. I wanted to figure out what would cause the normal user to get unfairly shut down.
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My hypothesis is the commonly known track from quarantining to banning of subs. For this reason I chose to join every quarantined sub I could get my hands on (besides porn ones or the truly degenerate ones I could see being removed with reason) and to see if they noticed that I was an unusual user despite being careful to never actually doing anything wrong. Notice that I said "wrong" not, against ToS. So I'd upvote posts that were amusing but something the alphabet lobby would hate. I would post that the usual soyboy needed to go with Jesus and stop worshipping the government.
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I would sometimes purposely say things I only partially agreed with just to see if people would stalk me and call me out on my contradictions. Usually I would feed a sub's narrative and see how positive a response I would get. But I would never lie. It would always be something I could think back on and say "Did I really say that?" I am aware that reddit admins have admitted to changing user posts before and I needed a quick method to make sure that wouldn't happen to me (without painstakingly logging all my own responses and using a bot to verify it).
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I'm not quite done with my experimental time on reddit, but it's finally coming to a close, although I still have not been banned site-wide yet. The reason that I'm getting a bit wary of the experiment is that I believe I've achieved one of my goals. I have the answer to the question: "which large, mainstream group (that uses reddit) is the most toxic?" or its corollary: "which common (reddit) community-driven characteristic creates the most unfair treatment of an undeserving person?" Oddly enough it's pretty similar to one of saidit's communities, but that just reinforces the validity of the answer. I'll be happy to share the reddit sub mod in question, if anyone's curious.
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But before I conclude the tests (and give my thousands of meaningless karma), I'm curious if anyone has any questions for me. Is there something else along these lines that you think I should test?
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And lastly, beware any remaining reddit users: sub mods can shadowban users in a specific sub. It's not just site-wide users that institute shadow-banning. This means you have to check a 15 minutes later in a not logged in browser to see if it is viewable to others, or use a bot's help.
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