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It could be anything that makes it worth paying money for the accounts in the first place.

Unfortunately, looking from the outside, it’s difficult to tell if an account has been bought, hacked, or if the original owner just decided to become a scumbag out of nowhere.

For example, have a look at https://www.reddit.com/user/fakerht, a 4 years old account that, just 30 minutes ago, decided to promote a scam site that attempts to steal crypto by luring them with the promise of an airdrop.

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That mirrors the tension many reddit mods struggled with recently… It’s difficult to push back against Reddit without also punishing its active users in some real way.

The folks using Reddit are still real human beings. But I get that not everybody is going to draw the line in the same spot.

To push back on that a bit, many Reddit “aged accounts” are used to push scams to the great unwashed masses.

I’m not sure it’s morally okay to turn a blind eye from who’s buying those accounts or why.

That’s odd. Their own sidebar points to a Want to reform work? Start or join a union where you work. post, so your ban was perhaps not tied to your use of the U-word.

On that note, maybe it would have been more constructive to post your actual question here rather than a “I got banned” post.

That sounds like an improbable attempt to leverage the notion that minors can’t enter into a legally binding contract into a loophole to get anything for free by simply having your kid order it.

I have a small userscript/style tweak to remove all input fields from reddit, so I’m still allowing myself to browse reddit in read-only mode on desktop, with no mobile access.

It’s a gentle way to wean myself off. I’m still waiting for my GDPR data dump anyway, so I need to check reddit fairly regularly to be able to grab it when/if it arrives.

There have been efforts to build reputation systems that don’t rely on central servers, like early day bitcoin’s Web of Trust, which allowed folks to rate other folks with public key crypto, thus ensuring an accurate and fair trust rating for participants, without the possibility of a middle-man putting their thumb on the scale.

One problem with it is that it was still perfectly practical for bad actors to accumulate good ratings, then cash out their hard-earned reputation into large scams, such as the “Bitcoin Savings & Trust” (for $40 million in that particular case), which quite possibly made it measurably worse than not having a system that induced participants into making faulty judgments in the first place.

I think the main practical value of something like reddit’s karma is an indication of age and account activity, both of which can probably be measured in other, if less gamified ways.