this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025

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I am new to Lemmy after trying to use reddit and being scared away, since most of you are former reddit users can you explain why reddit is run the way it is ? (lemmy.world)

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

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Ok I know the title is weirdly said but I will explain more here. I tried using reddit but all of the subs and topics I wanted to speak on were gated by Karma, so I searched reddit for no karma sub so I just posted on ask reddit,nostupid questions and I made one post on r/advice which I cross posted to relationship advice after which my account glitched. Turned out I had been shadow banned and I have no clue how. My theory is I posted to much and copy and pasting a post tripped the alarm but the post was a bit different on relationship advice and I did it once, I saw reddit from like youtube videos and tiktok and people cross post to subs all the time why is that an issue ?

But to get to the main ponint of this, why is reddit run the way it is ? In the sense why do they ask so much of their users hurting both the user expirience and the site's ability to grow. The Karma system forces you into a position where to get to the content you want you have to interact with and post content you don't care about.So you have a ton of disengaged user's just punching their time card to get to what they actually care about. Imagine if other social media sites did this, imagine if you wanted to listen to sabrina carpenter on spotify but to do that you had to listen to 100 hours of Conway Twitty, what sense does that make ?

Reddit's karma and age gate systems resemble a mobile game and while annoying when it's done there you understand why it's designed to get you to pay to skip it, but reddit doesn't let you pay to skip it at east not directly.

Every other social media site wants to get users the content they want as easy as possible. TikTok is the best example the reason it's popular is because it's the best at getting you what you want with as little work required on your part as possible. The for you page fetches you videos your interested in, if your a creator the format of the app increases your chance of being seen and going viral.

Reddit on the other hand leaves so much of the user experience up to weather or not your post on ask reddt go gets upvotes or if you happen to know if a good sub with a karma limit since subs do not disclose their karma limit

Again for the last time, why ? Even from a selfish business standpoint this seemingly makes no sense so what am I missing

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

that is the other thing being a new user. A lot of people are blind to how oppressive the karma system is for a new user because they are grandfathered in ad used reddit when karma restrictions were lower and people tended to hand out upvotes more

I didn’t get the impression that the admins actually care about bot accounts that pretend to be people as long as they’re not too obvious from the common user’s perspective

I agree 100%, First off reddit singed a dea with open ai and google to help them train bots so they can't be that concerned, they don't block data center ips or even have captchas on post. Also most of the reddit bots are in specific places. They are in like crypto subreddits and nsfw subreddits and the people in those spaces don't mind them. That is most of reddit's bot activity.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

"grandfathered in" makes it sound like I've been using my account since 2010 or something. I made a new account every couple of years and never encountered an issue, though I always avoided the really popular subs.

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

Right but you had reddit experience most people don't have and knew of subs without karma limits

I am just not possible it's possible to use reddit organically with no regard to karma in the modern day for most people.

If none of the low karma subs interest you and you know of no subs without karma limits you are just going to post on the popular subs, again reddit doesn't make subs disclose karma limits and there is no way to search by "new user friendly"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

So I got an idea, did you ever write comments or did you go straight to making posts? I think that might make a big difference; my main reddit interaction was always writing comments, not making posts.

That doesn't necessarily refute any of your points about Reddit not being welcoming to new users, but at least it's an explanation for why I never encountered the issues you had even though I never actively tried to avoid anything.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I tried to do both and my comments got more upvotes then my post I had like 3 post karma and 20 comment karma (that is another issue them being separate means if you only want to do one you are forced to do the other).

This was before I got shadow banned but that is a story for another day I still have no idea why I was.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Fair enough, I guess that wasn't the issue. Most user's comments getting more upvotes than their posts is kind of normal, though, even if I'm not quite sure why. Lemmy has worked the same for me so far.

How did you determine that you were shadowbanned from Reddit, anyway?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

I filed a shadow ban appeal and reddit will not let you do that if you are not shadow banned.

I admit I freaked out because I was manic and wanted to use the site.

also the way you know, so you know those little reddit avatar things, if you are shadow banned in the top right corner your avatar wlll not show up it will be a generic color block silhouette

second every time you click on like anything you get a "we had a server error" warning message appear in reddit

third your post all say "removed by reddit's filterS"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Bots are all over Reddit, you likely only noticed the obvious ones. There's nonstop campaigns to manipulate people via Reddit and all sorts of groups have armies of bots posing as users.