Reddit

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.

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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.