UPDATE: 2025/03/25 7:04 EST BY CHRIS THOMAS
Reddit PR reached out with clarifications
According to the PR firm representing Reddit:
What you encountered isn’t a new feature, and we haven’t been quietly rolling out any updates concerning blocking. Specifically, on our official Android app, being blocked doesn’t prevent you from editing or interacting with content you’ve posted or commented on, even if the person who blocked you has interacted with it. Also, if you’ve been blocked and previously engaged with the blocker’s content, you can still interact with your own posts or comments via a direct link, but you won’t be able to access the blocker’s posts or comments without one.
The behavior you’re experiencing would typically only occur if Reddit had banned the content.
Contrary to this claim, however, Android Police and other users have experienced the described restriction on comments and posts that did not, by any reasonable interpretation, represent “banned” content.
Logically, if Reddit administrators had made this restrictive blocking change intentionally, they probably would have ignored any outcry and let the chips fall where they may, so to speak. So, it’s reasonable to assume the inability to interact with one’s own blocked comments was not intended. But it happened, and remains something to be aware of.
Have you experienced this restrictive blocking function? If so, feel free to share screenshots. The Reddit team has offered to investigate cases of this apparently unintended behavior.
We may revisit this in the future if it continues to be an issue.
If you ask investors, Reddit is doing great. Its current market cap sits at nearly $22 billion, three times what it debuted at during its March 2024 IPO. Once a little-known successor to Fark and Digg, and a great place to engage in down-to-earth communication and meet interesting people, it’s now one of the most well-known social (or anti-social) media platforms in the world.
From a user perspective, though, the site is less friendly than ever. The latest change — made with zero fanfare, as usual — now allows complete strangers to reduce your account’s functionality for any reason they see fit. Now, if someone blocks you, you’re no longer able to edit, delete, or even view your own comments, with exactly zero recourse for you, the person who originally posted them.
App makers are pulling up the API ladder. Will it be a bad thing for users?
At risk of losing agency, there’s still hope
UPDATE: 2025/03/24 21:21 EST BY CHRIS THOMAS
The rollout isn’t 100%
Made apparent by at least one comment in this relevant Reddit post, some users are still able to see and edit their comments after being blocked. Note this isn’t dependent on using the old.reddit.com interface vs. the “new” or beta Reddit interfaces, as during Android Police testing, blocking prohibited the viewing of one’s own comments using both old and new interfaces. In other words, Reddit’s feature set continues to change from user to user. Make of that what you will.
User-made content, corporate-friendly rules
And a general lack of transparency
The mid-2023 API restrictions caused a sharp decline in variety and amount of unique, interesting content. In charging potentially prohibitive fees for third-party apps to access its data, and entering a contract with Google for exclusive web search crawling, users of the formerly grassroots, text-based website felt betrayed, to say the least. You’ll periodically run across claims like, “Nobody really left Reddit. After all, I’m still here,” but the obvious selection bias rests on the fact that those who left the site are not, logically, around to chime in on the topic.
Reddit’s block function has prevented users from further participating in comment chains for quite some time, which already opened up the potential for abusing control over certain discussions. The latest update to blocking not only stops a user’s ability to comment further, it makes it look like they never commented at all — but only to the blocked user. Others can still see and reply to the original comment, despite its invisibility to the apparent owner.
While Reddit never announced the change, it’s seemingly been in place for some users — but not all — for varying lengths of time. Mentions of the change can be found as far back as June 2024, but got little widespread attention. Now, according to Android Police’s and others’ experience, the update appears to be rolling out even more widely.
Don’t let Reddit monetize your knowledge just so Google can train its AI
Let’s take our content back to send a message
Only the most recent anti-user policy change
If the altered functionality weren’t bad enough, the change has gone mostly unnoticed. It follows closely on the heels of Reddit temporarily banning the r/whitepeopletwitter community after it ran afoul of US executive branch special employee Elon Musk and his underlings. More recently, the website issued stern warnings against users upvoting “violent content,” but failed to explicitly lay out what is and isn’t allowed. The punishment for upvoting certain posts seems to address the rise of vaguely violence-approving comments following the December shooting of the United HealthCare CEO and vast references to certain green-wearing video game characters, but the site’s precise reasoning and specific topics targeted remain less than perfectly clear.
Once a decent place to turn for uncensored discussion and sharing of first-hand experiences, it’s harder than ever to parse what Reddit posts come from humans in good faith, and what results from LLM prompts, content-farming profiteers, or subversive propaganda campaigns. While the block function’s nonsensically Draconian changes might not affect you directly, it’s never been a better time to delete your Reddit account and stop the corporate churn from taking advantage of your clicks.
