Discussion Why did Reddit become so anti-suicide in the last 10 years?

[diazepam23]

Reddit has existed since 2005 however it has always been pretty liberal with suicide. Hell, there used to be far worse things (and still are) like child pornorgaphy, jailbait, financial scams, white supremacists. They seem to have cleaned up in the last few years but for whatever reason, they've cracked really hard on suicide subreddits. /r/sanctionedsuicide and other communities similar were banned and that's what lead to the creation of this site. Nowadays, many subreddits will block you from posting if you even post anything about suicide and give you a RedditCare message (even if it's an abstract discussion and you have no intention of taking your life).

One of my friends said it was because of advertisements and suicide subreddits would bring liability on Reddit and the advertisers like happened with Ask.FM

 

[RadiantNumber]

I think because they were scared of public opinion, no one give a shit cause someone spreading hate, but suicide? Too much for them. They also removed /r/efilism

 

[Forveleth]

Suicide does not go well with advertisers. 90% of online censorship is driven by ad companies because that is how websites make their money.

 

[Captive_Mind515]

Some places consider themselves to be liberal and open minded... until you become too literal with your liberalness... lol. This brings out the fascist control freak in some of them. Wasn't there a promortalist subreddit too? I wasn't on reddit until very recently.

 

[ruhyytey5o86]

Reddit is in the business of making money, if not for themselves and the owners, then just the pure survival of the website.

Donations may work if there isn't that much traffic or demand to the website, but if there is a ton of demand, then there needs to be more servers to compensate. More servers=more cost.

They tried to basically advertise those reactions you can buy a couple years back (I'm assuming that failed)

There's also a possible AI approach to it, I know around 2020 they shut off the robot.txt to pretty much everything outright after some success of openai scraping their data. Now companies have to personally reach out to Reddit to buy their data instead of scraping it. "Poisoned" data isn't optimal for training LLMs so maybe that's part of their censorship

 

[Crumblin'Castles]

Well actually it feels like every site here and there nowdays streghten censorship as well as the laws of previously liberal countries... Ad companies yeah, but it's also authorities trying to make the net more polished and take it under their control. One of the reasons I want to exit this world btw

 

[Fadenself00_]

Reddit is in the business of making money, if not for themselves and the owners, then just the pure survival of the website.

Donations may work if there isn't that much traffic or demand to the website, but if there is a ton of demand, then there needs to be more servers to compensate. More servers=more cost.

They tried to basically advertise those reactions you can buy a couple years back (I'm assuming that failed)

There's also a possible AI approach to it, I know around 2020 they shut off the robot.txt to pretty much everything outright after some success of openai scraping their data. Now companies have to personally reach out to Reddit to buy their data instead of scraping it. "Poisoned" data isn't optimal for training LLMs so maybe that's part of their censorship

Hasn't Reddit even gone public? Then it's also to support and make investors happy

 

[buriedinmyhead]

I had a comment removed after making a suicide joke in r/depressionmemes, it's ridiculous, especially since the meme posted referenced suicide

 

[here_for_now]

Suicide does not go well with advertisers. 90% of online censorship is driven by ad companies because that is how websites make their money.

Exactly and if the subforum is TOO open minded BLAM subreddit is in ban nirvana

 

[caotic_realm]

I've noticed that there are concerns regarding their public image. On Facebook, for instance, in depression forums, a post where you genuinely express suicidal thoughts—without being graphic—might get deleted; this happens not just because of conservative views, but because the group itself could be shut down or reported for hosting posts that incite suicide. I imagine the same thing happens on Reddit.

Personally, I haven't used Reddit in years. I think the last time I did was to talk about my situation (back when I wasn't quite as suicidal yet), and I still ran into issues; I believe my posts were deleted, or else people simply looked down on me in their replies because of my ideas—acting as if they were all geniuses.

 

[TAW122]

Yeah, I've noticed that Reddit has gone to shit in the last 7-8 years even, because prior to the founding of SaSu there were SaSu subreddits, both SaSu and TrueSaSu, which were around for a few years but in 2018, Reddit removed/banned them from existence, hence the founding and creation of this platform. Then of course, with another subreddit at the time which was "TimeToGo" (TTG for short), it was later quarantined and made obsolete. There was also, as others mentioned, more crackdown on suicide related content or discussion, and further additional overreach and intrusiveness via the RedditCares messages and even bad actors (trolls as well as forced-lifers and similar people) who abuse the function just to annoy, irritate, and/or harass users that they did not get along with.

Of course, in general, the Reddit community has become enshittified as well over the years, but that's another topic altogether...