Back in the day, if I saw some braindead karma farming post on Reddit, I took a look at their post history and quite a few times it was a brand new account. I would simply reply “Welcome to Reddit! How has your first [week/day/hour] been?”. I think precisely twice it turned out to be a new human user, the rest of the time they would just delete the comment (or possibly even the account).

I got banned years ago from r/funny because I was browsing on “new” (like I do here), responded to a post with a lame joke within minutes after it posted, then the powers that be decided the poster was a spammer, and banned me too. I asked them why they banned me, but got absolutely nothing in response. It turns out, though, that being banned from there made absolutely no difference to my Reddit experience.

Now that Reddit is a public company, and courting income from paid official subreddits, it’s only a matter of time before there is a huge class-action lawsuit over their uneven moderation policies. Especially if companies start steering a good portion of their customer interaction there. It is super unfair to be cut off from legitimate customer service because of a power-tripping mod in a totally different part of Reddit.

Besides, I hit on the best way to ensure I never get banned from Reddit: I don’t go there anymore.

I think OPs point is that if Indy was burrowing a hole in the desert, and some random started talking to him, Indy probably wouldn’t respond by punching his way out of the hole.

The problem, though, is when so many companies are outsourcing their customer service to social media like Reddit. And communities, like OP’s school, which have nothing to do with the current situation on other subreddits. “Ban evasion” is nothing but a power trip if the ban was bullshit to begin with.

If all Reddit had was pictures of cats and porn, then getting banned would not be as big a deal. Now that it is public, being used for legit reasons, and has “money”, I am waiting for a bunch of people who are being banned for arbitrary reasons to file a class-action lawsuit. I might even join, even though I haven’t been back since the APIcalypse. I was banned from /r/funny years ago and to this day I don’t really know why. (In fairness, though, that might have improved my life…)