Reddit seems to have introduced sitewide AI moderation bots that are sweeping up users and outright banning them, without warning or explanation, for crimes like including links in their posts. This has started to hit some pretty well-known artists in r/comics.
It’s inconsistent and unpredictable - which makes it worse, since you don’t know what the rules are. As companies like Reddit give up more and more control to unaccountable machines, this kind of thing is getting more common.
Reddit has always had kind of a strange relationship with contributors and what is often called “self-promotion”. On one hand, it wants Content… But it can’t seem to decide where it wants the content to come from.
It’s nice that we’ve got alternative spaces like this.
Anyway, have some links:
- More comics:
- Patreon
Yep, they deliberately cropped out anything they deemed self-promotion because “nobody wants to see that” and argue endlessly with people about it. One lesser side effect was that it made a lot of comics look like shit because the layout was designed with attribution in mind.
Are they still around?
Yeah they just have an emoji at the beginning of the username. However the changes they made comics do actually benefited us all. Sometimes collective discuss can make good things happen :)