Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I am currently (as of about a week ago) permanently banned on ALL my accounts on Reddit (despite many of them using different email addresses for anonymity purposes, etc.) because of a single admin making (quite arguably) a single error in permanently banning 1 of my logins from 1 subreddit (which was already overly punitive). Apologetic messages to mods went unheard and unheeded. Months later, I accidentally posted to that subreddit from a different account (and it was a supportive message!!) and somehow (without me intending to be a bad actor) this got escalated to identifying me across ALL my accounts (via machine learning on their end, possibly via Google cookies and similar source IP I'm guessing?) and this eventually cascaded into a total and permanent ban across EVERYTHING.

Meanwhile, I'm possibly one of the most Googleable people around (not due to fame, but due to nearly global name uniqueness) and it should be pretty plain to see that I'm a good actor (and kind of a big nerd) and that this might have all been a misunderstanding.

I'm kind of over it, but it is still hugely annoying. And it's terrifying to consider that no matter how anonymous you are on Reddit (and you might have very good reasons to be using an anonymous login), they in theory know exactly who you are.

What I'm saying is that AI could magnify a single human error in the past into an arguably massively unethical action; it could retroactively tie your anonymous actions in the past to your non-anonymous identity in the present. Where there is no escaping your past mistakes and you will always be punished for them, forever, by massive machines without any human intervention, or by systems in power that are arguably unethical and dystopian.

Sounds like you just got burned by using the same IP twice, but your point does stand. There's some interesting fingerprinting software out there, and I've personally seen compute on things like typing cadence and other more clandestine metrics too. These can of course be amplified greatly in effectiveness by AI.

Security is one area in which you can't really afford not to go down the tin foil hat rabbit hole. It's been like this for some time, where it's not really possible to know just how much capability is possessed by nation state actors, but with AI and other tools those capabilities will expand and become the baseline probably way sooner than we predict. No longer will experts be needed to do careful tracing to deanonymize, one of the true superpowers of AI will be its ability to extract the full power out of the big data we've been collecting. So the cost then of figuring something out that now might cost millions will soon cost a couple bucks.

Are you blaming "AI" for identifying you? If that's the case, first, blame reddit, second, whatever "AI" may have helped them has no relation to what's being discussed here. Identifying you would be some kind of big data pattern recognition thing. Neural networks and gradient descent might be able to solve the problem if set up appropriately, but so could lots of other things and fundamentally the issue is data collection, not anything about the state of machine learning or the liberties taken with it.

you likely got banned for ban evasion. And yes, it's ip-based (and will flag every reddit account you've ever used)

The one thing the Reddit Admin team (actual employees) takes seriously is people making new accounts to post in subreddits where they are banned.

Yes, but this unfairly penalizes people simply using different accounts NOT intending to evade any ban (I'm talking very established accounts that are years old... My oldest Reddit login dates to the first few months of Reddit's existence! And it's now also banned.) but simply to maintain anonymity.

Kill me for having a "porn" Reddit account and a "professional" Reddit account, I guess, plus one to disclose health issues I'd prefer to keep private... And deserve to. I actually enjoy anonymously helping people get through issues that for very good reasons they are also posting anonymously about (think: victims). This mentality ruins that, and I am now prevented from doing that.

Cue Martin Fowler's legendary https://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html

You can have multiple accounts on one IP. Plenty of people have throwaway accounts. Entire nations would be blocked due to CGNAT if it worked the way you suggest. They're looking at more than your IP address though (my guess is ip+useragent at the very least; the API rate-limited by useragent).

Your problem is that one of the heads of your hydra caught a ban, after which point everything you do is assumed to be malicious. Given the political nature of what you were banned for, there is no doubt in my mind this is intentional. It's not an overt act of discrimination if they just don't answer the phone after "accidentally" locking you out.

For your own sake, move on. Reddit isn't worth fighting for. It's just a bunch of schoolyard bullies squatting on the playground equipment, throwing rocks at everyone and crying victim. If you're not a member of a protected class (or pretending to be), they don't want you there.

The problem is that I do not know of sufficiently populated alternative forums for all the things I went to Reddit for, and I have a lot of interests.

Well IP bans have the significant downside that a lot of different people can appear to be on the same IP. For example a school or library.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com