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this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Technology
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Nice writeup but there's one key piece of information here that's wrong in the context of reddit.
The "bot overlord" can easily tell if an account is shadowbanned. I use my trusty puppeteer or selenium script to spam my comments. After every comment (or every x interval of comments), I load up the page under a control account (or even just a fresh page with no cookies/cache, maybe even through VPN if I'm feeling fancy, different useragent, different window size.. go wild with it) and check if my comment is there.
Comment is not there after a certain threshold of checks? Guess I'm shadowbanned, take the account off the list and add another one of the hundreds I have to the active list
The fact is that no matter what you do, there will be bots and spammers. No matter what you do, there will be cheaters in online games and people trying to exploit.
It's a constant battle and it's an impossible one. But you have to try and come up with solutions but you always have to balance the costs of those solutions with the benefits.
Shadowbanning on reddit doesn't solve the problem it aims to fix. It does however have the potential for harm to individuals, especially naive ones who don't fully understand how websites work.
I don't think the ends justify the means. Just like stop and frisk may stop a certain type of crime or may not, but it definitely does damage to specific communities