Reddit's block function now lets strangers control your account : reddit

this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025

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Reddit's block function now lets strangers control your account (www.androidpolice.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

58 comments fedilink hide all child comments

If you ask investors, Reddit is doing great. Its current market cap sits at nearly $22 billion, three times what it debuted at during its March 2024 IPO. Once a little-known successor to Fark and Digg, and a great place to engage in down-to-earth communication and meet interesting people, it's now one of the most well-known social (or anti-social) media platforms in the world.

From a user perspective, though, the site is less friendly than ever. The latest change — made with zero fanfare, as usual — now allows complete strangers to reduce your account's functionality for any reason they see fit. Now, if someone blocks you, you're no longer able to edit, delete, or even view your own comments, with exactly zero recourse for you, the person who originally posted them.

...

Reddit's block function has prevented users from further participating in comment chains for quite some time, which already opened up the potential for abusing control over certain discussions. The latest update to blocking not only stops a user's ability to comment further, it makes it look like they never commented at all — but only to the blocked user. Others can still see and reply to the original comment, despite its invisibility to the apparent owner.

While Reddit never announced the change, it's seemingly been in place for some users — but not all — for varying lengths of time. Mentions of the change can be found as far back as June 2024, but got little widespread attention. Now, according to Android Police's and others' experience, the update appears to be rolling out even more widely.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

so reddit just added shadow-banning to its arsenal of tools that hurt users and do absolutely nothing for moderators.

just in case anyone was wondering why i'm here now..

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 weeks ago (10 children)

I'm here because I was perma-banned for no reason 🤔 then the whole ban evasion policy. Forget that site

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

digg is gonna relaunch soon and kill it. it'll become like facebook. pure poetic justice. i was on reddit back in 2008. it isn't even fair now to say it's just a shell of what it used to be. btw old.lemmy.world is a thing i like. and it (kinda) works with RES, too!

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Seems like it would be pretty trivial to make a botnet that just went around blocking users from every new top comment/post. Even better if you just manually do it with that old, organic account you never got around to deleting. That would very easily cause a huge disruption for Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago

Everyone block spez!

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[–] [email protected] 90 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (6 children)

Yeah this policy in practice makes no fucking sense.

I definitely experienced this last month. I had a weirdo block me randomly because I happen to not be a fan of historical figure, Aaron Burr. They apparently really really like Aaron Burr—so they blocked me. Whatever.

I didn’t get a notification or anything. It just looked like they’d deleted their account and never existed on my side. Ok. I shrugged and thought it was a weird UI thing and moved on.

That was until I started talking to other people and the Blocker kept unblocking me to leave me more messages only to immediately Reblock me.

I knew this was happening because I would get an email alert that I had a comment. But when I went to see the comment on Reddit, it was gone.

I don’t even know or understand what the Blocker wanted from me (except maybe falling in love with Aaron Burr-which isn’t on the table —he’s not my type).

In practice, this new policy ended up having the Blocker spam the person they’re Blocking and removing their ability to prevent being spammed.

Dude I’ve never blocked anyone or had any real trouble on any site or forum. The only time I’ve had trouble is on Reddit and only over the last 3-months. Good riddance.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I’m descendant of Aaron Burr’s grandfather and I don’t even like him. He was a cunt and a swindler if not with purpose (not to mention that other thing he did), why someone would choose that hill to die on I have no idea.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

reddit is desperate for more engagement, so its basically FB. i block people all the time, but my comment chain is still continued to be abused by people, and even some have the audacity to make a new account to evade the block. this is a known issue since more than a year though. i blocked people but they still commented regardless of it being blocked.

it may block the original person you blocked, but it wont stop others from commenting, nor would you notice if the blocked person creates another account to harass you.

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