This is a wide spread phenomenon on the platform. Sometimes its just a few comments or even dozens of comments in response to an original comment on a post being grouped together in another button saying (x number of replies) but when you open those replies its either nothing, or significantly less replies than the prompt described. Its mostly all on posts that are political in nature relating to the current fascist takeover in the USA, Luigi Magnione, amazon union busting, anti laborer’s rights legislation, loosening of child labor laws and other topics related to the wider topics regarding disappearing human rights under emboldening fascist authoritarianism. many of us have seen the news articles that mention allegations of reddit censoring comments and giving people violations for liking certain content but nothing is being said about the actual extent of this censorship. But when you can see hundreds of comments being deleted from a post such as this one here, it doesn’t bode well for the future
I commented a lot in political debate subs before I left, and one thing that I noticed is that Reddit would refuse to accept (error out) or act like it accepted and then just outright delete my comments. I don’t have hard data, but one pattern I really noticed is that any comment that included both ‘Israel’ and ‘genocide’ got errored/eaten a very high percentage of the time.
Definitely, though some subs have more of these ‘filters’ in place than others. Worldnews was particularly egregious; innocuous links would have a 50/50 chance of getting a comment shadowbanned, leading to a nosedrive in the quality of discourse as no one was willing to go through that gauntlet to provide sources (or just didn’t know their posts were getting censored).
Of course, any mention of ‘shadowban’ or related words is also an instant shadowban. SOP pretty quickly became to try to open your comment in an incog window to see if it had been turned invisible to everyone but you or not.
Similar thing happens with youtube comments, and probably on a plethora of other platforms as well. Between that and bots and other trickery, more and more of the conversations we see on the internet are manipulated and no longer truly real.
I mean these were political debate subs that presumably exist for the purpose of having these discussions so it seems weird to filter it, but… shrug Reddit be kooky sometimes.
This is not shocking at all when you look at it side by side with the current admin canceling visas for voicing support for Palestine. Big tech has become the censorship arm of fascism.
No indeed, and in fact it just came out the other day that Musk privately pressured reddit to censor shit against him and they did.
Oh, this is pretty standard behaviour on the site in general these days. It’s just a broken mess made by an incompetent company. Their front-end regularly silently disconnects from their backend all of the damn time.
For the most part it’s not censorship, it’s just a badly broken website that doesn’t give a shit about its users’ experience, because it doesn’t see anything else as real competition.
Oh I think some of it is, especially in light of how fashy they’ve become of late banning people for even just upvoting shit about Luigi Mangione.
I would generally agree, except it seemed to crop up more on longer posts in general, and especially on political posts. It even happened using old.reddit, and that’s - as far as I know - an entirely different codebase, though interacting with the same servers, so… shrug
Erroring out is just being broken, but accepting and then deleting comments is a filter that is shadow banning your comment (so that you can’t tell it’s been removed and try to re-post it by circumventing the filter).