Recently, I saw a political post on Reddit's /r/all, so, as usual, I clicked on the link to the user's profile to go block him. There was only one problem: I couldn't access their profile. On new Reddit, it said "Something went wrong. Just don't panic." On old Reddit, it said "page not found. the page you requested does not exist" which is very weird. How does this user who amassed enough upvotes to get on the frontpage of the Internet have a profile that can't be accessed? Did he break Reddit? Did I break Reddit? If I can't access it, I can't block him (without installing a browser extension), so I'll be forced to read his political opinions, and nobody deserves such a fate!
The user in question had the username BillionairesAreGood and amassed over 40k upvotes in the subreddit /r/FluentInFinance by posting "Is this true?" with a political screenshot of Twitter from 2020 that had been on the front page of Reddit before.
After Googling his name I found a post on Reddit talking about how many posts on that subreddit appear to have suspicious activity, as one comment said:
It appears that what's happening is that the big posters on the sub are all shadowbanned accounts.
When an account is shadowbanned, clicking on the username gives a "this user could not be found" error (as opposed to a "deleted" error). However, when a shadowbanned poster tries to post something, a mod can manually approve the post. So pickle-sucker and all the rest (right now it's SweetOnionBreath, but most of the spam bots on that sub are only active for about 3 or 4 days now, so it will soon be a new account) repost high karma posts, which are initially hidden due to shadowbanning, and then a mod approves each of the posts, so they show up in the sub. Also, the votes for those posts are far higher than the votes from non-shadowbanned posters, so presumably they then have a bot swarm go in and get the ball rolling with some mass upvoting.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ActiveMeasures/comments/19do5vu/keep_your_eye_on_fluentinfinance_do_you_agree_or/li7v298/ (accessed in 2024-09-12)
Well, that's extremely disappointing, but at least it solves the mystery of inaccessible profiles on Reddit.
P.S.: if you try to access it while not logged in, it will say "This account has been suspended" on new reddit.
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