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Do you have any source of this?

Not offhand, but I've heard of users getting temporary suspensions for using the word, although I don't believe there's an automated rule site-wide.

It's also completely useless

Not entirely. Sure, if you're a dedicated attacker trying to tell a specific target to kill themselves, there's not much I can do about it; you'll acquire an aged account with decent karma and find a way to do it.

If you're just a regular person going about your day and say something stupid, an automod removal with a warning that circumventing the rule will result in a permanent ban is probably sufficient to make you give up and move on with your life. And of course bots that aren't specifically designed to circumvent my subreddit's rules would be trivially blocked.



> Not offhand, but I've heard of users getting temporary suspensions for using the word, although I don't believe there's an automated rule site-wide.

Merely for using the word? this seems like a myth to me. Various subreddits would obviously ban for it if used as a direct insult, but banning any use of it side-wide seems unlikely.

> If you're just a regular person going about your day and say something stupid, an automod removal with a warning that circumventing the rule will result in a permanent ban is probably sufficient to make you give up and move on with your life. And of course bots that aren't specifically designed to circumvent my subreddit's rules would be trivially blocked.

In which case it would be just as effective to simply give a warning based on detected words that various conduct with it will not be tolerated and that a moderator will be automatically informed of the post, and to remind users to make use that their usage of the word falls within the guidelines.

This would eliminate scuntorpe false positives, and have about the same effect of stopping the intended behavior.


Reddit has an “anti Evil Operations” team that has in the past acted arbitrarily against individual users, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/fkk6en/redd...

It does seem possible they may have banned an individual user for using that word.


I have a personal friend whose account was permanently banned (from reddit, not a particular sub) for using the word "retard".




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