OK, so I'm obviously really late for this - sorry.

They are being applied to people who do not appear to be spammers. And whether they know it or not is irrelevant, because both the ban and people's reactions to it happened in the same thread.

I agree. We've gotta fix it. Right now there's just one hammer and we need better ways to curb and educate about bad behavior and shadowbanning fails there. I know the team is working on a version of this.

From what it looks like, it's been deployed in a number of cases against people who did nothing but smacktalk either the admins, or the interim CEO. Neither of these things are against reddit's rules, and they certainly don't deserve the spammer treatment.

That's certainly not something I want to see happen. I can't say for sure if it is, but I'll make sure the community team knows that people are not to be punished with shadowbans for that. Granted, there's most likely some instances of people being hit with it for evading other bans, which is breaking a reddit rule. edit: confirmed w u/5days: "This is absolutely not what happens.

Now, that may or may not be the case, but the radio silence when anyone is asked about this matter (either by modmail to /r/reddit.com or similar) naturally leads people to assume that something not entirely above board is going on.

I understand that.

FWIW, I actually do think something untoward is going on, and I think it's something along the lines of sanitization for possible upcoming suitors.

Definitely not that.

Recent behavior on the site matches up a bit too closely with what a corporation would "like", yknow what I mean?

I can assure you it's not that.

If that's the case, just come out and say it already. If that's NOT the case, then it really, really shouldn't require this level of outrage to get an honest answer.

You're right. It's been bad. We've gotta do better. I hope this is helping.

You know what would be really cool and go a very long way to placating people? A group admin IamA. With people like you, /u/krispykrackers, /u/ekjp, and the lot. Perhaps even make it a regular thing?

Yes. Obviously, this has come up after this weekend, too.

Which communities? I'm referring to /r/news - the rule says "no politics", okay fine, but for some reason, the TPP is considered politics, while supreme court decisions and things like SOPA are not? We've come from the entire site rallying against SOPA to a law which has the potential to cause more damage being actively flattened from one of the most visible places on the site? Here's the all time top submissions on that subreddit. A good chunk of them are blatantly political.

I'd like to give communities the chance to dictate their own rules. The bigger issue here imho is that they're a default, so their decision has more weight. If we built a better system, if enough people thought one sub was moderating too poorly, they could just go to another sub fluidly, but defaults + poor subreddit discovery breaks that. We need to fix those things and if we do I think we'll go a long way toward solving that problem you describe.

I'd feel a lot better if default subreddits had to hew to higher standards than /r/joes_news_shack, yknow? I get that the idea is or was that subreddits are their own communities, but a hell of a lot of power comes with being a default (not the least of which: they're the face of the site!), and you know what they say about power.

Yep, gotta figure out a better solution than defaults which are a hangover from when we didn't have enough active communities to just tell people "hey what are you into? subscribe to these places..." which we can do now.

+1 to that idea of getting rid of the concept anyways. It's kind of telling that the consensus on the internet appears to be reddit gets better when you unsubscribe from them.

Yep!

This, what you did right here? Do more of it, in highly visible places. People think something bad is happening because the staff is generally ignoring their questions - so what just happened here? Make that happen more.

Yeah, I needed to have re-read this over this weekend. I've been on pretty much nonstop since Thursday talking to users, but the vast majority of comments have been in mod-only communities, or slack, or email, or PM, and the few publicly visible comments I made were stupid.

Are places like /r/kotakuinaction on the verge of being banned or not? How can they avoid that fate?

I don't believe so. If they're not breaking the harassment policy, then they shouldn't be.

Speaking of /r/kotakuinaction, why are they disallowed from organizing email campaigns to corporations? (Famously, being told that posting a PR person's company contact info at Volkswagen is not allowed) - and what rule of reddit does this violate?

We definitely need to re-think this rule. Adding to the list. Organizing an email campaign to target a PR person's public corporate email seems like it should be reasonable. There are a few of rules we need to clarify.

What is the actual definition of "brigading", and how does it differ from regular comment/post interaction on the site?

Whatever it is right now it's too vague + complex. There was a good thread about this over the weekend -- here's my thoughts from a comment that should help:

"np is not the answer. It's a terrible new user experience, too -- most folks have no idea (nor should they) how it works and that's a problem. New system should make np unnecessary. It should be a that gives mods control over this. If you as a mod don't want your community to be affected by bestof post, then we should make that easy enough to enforce with a few clicks. And I'd like a definition of brigading that comes out of it that's very transparent and concise with the definition (and again give as much authority and tools to mods to enforce as possible)."

What measures are in place to assure that fake/abusive reports do not lead to removal of people or communities?

The community team can break this down better than me, but it really comes down to the rule: "Systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around them."