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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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It's possible - perhaps probable - that you were banned by an AI. Reddit is using LLMs to detect and automatically punish users for "violent" language. So you have to be careful quoting song lyrics, or politicians, or people you don't like, etc. In my experience they've just been warnings but if it was bad enough it might be a short ban.

Oh, I know for a fact that it was an AI. What's interesting to me is the exact nature of the AI. I can trivially imagine designing an AI moderator to actually promote community health; using strictly existing techniques, for example, you could prompt the moderator to consider previous user posts, and also to make public verdicts that can be upvoted/downvoted to influence future behavior on that user. (Like, if the moderator comments are broadly disagreed with, it self-deletes, but if the moderator "notices" it has a history of commenting specific types of well-regarded warnings to a specific user it's more likely to take action.)

But as I explained, reddit clearly isn't trying to improve community health.