Reddit has decided that I am a robot, and robots can't play on Reddit, so my account has been banned. That has consequences for this site, because I had various links to Reddit posts scattered throughout my blog. So to fix those links, I had to dust off my Nikola-based blog machinery and update the links to use archive.org versions instead. While I was at it, I figured I might as well write a post about the experience.

The tl;dr; version is something we all should know: when we pay nothing to participate in a service run by a major tech company that achieves its scale mostly through automation, it's not only the case that we are the product being sold to advertisers, but also that we lack any meaningful power in the relationship. For as long as things keep working, everything is fine, but at any moment, you can find yourself left wondering what just happened as an online identity winks out of existence without warning or recourse. Thinking the posts you made on Reddit are something permanent you can link to is a mistake when the company feels and has no obligation to you. In the rest of this post, I'll say a little more about what I've been up to lately, and how I came to be classified as a bot by Reddit.

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