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What Hacker News says
- PSA: "Der Process", English "The Trial", is old enough so you can read it for free on the internet, e.g. on Project Gutenberg:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/7849
It's a really entertaining read.
And yes, it perfectly matches this situation - right in the very first sentence already.
- They use this book called "Der Process" as a manual
- I recently got a message that my Reddit account was banned, with the following message:
>Your account has been permanently banned for breaking the rules.
>This account has been permanently banned due to multiple, repeated violations of Reddit's Content Policy on your other account(s). For more information about what rules you broke and how to appeal, check your account inboxes.
>If you feel like this account was banned in error, visit our Help Center to learn more how to file an appeal.
Neither of my accounts had done this, and neither of my accounts received "information about what rules you broke and how to appeal"
When I filed an appeal stating the above: that I only have two accounts, neither has repeatedly violated the content policy, and I appear to have been lumped in with another user who uses the same wifi I do.
(I don't have a big data plan -- I usually use the wifi at coffee shops etc rather than pay for data)
I chalked it up to an algorithmic error, and figured if I just do as I was before... post in a wholesome and engaging way, and avoid logging in over Tor or VPN, it wouldn't happen again.
Today I got the same message on a brand new account: I'm banned, check my "other" account for information on how to appeal.
This is extremely troubling -- Reddit is a resource for legal, medical, and technical advice. Not being able to spin up a throwaway and ask a programming question, get insight on a dispute at work, or otherwise engage in civil society has a huge chilling effect.
Has anyone else on HN dealt with something like this?
I understand HN has a very different culture -- the admins prefer one nym forever, but on Reddit it's fairly accepted to use a nym.
IMHO it echoes the founding fathers, who published anonymously.
I may sometimes express controversial opinions, but I'm not a troll in the sense of doxing, threatening, or otherwise crossing the lines that would cause someone to nuke my accounts from orbit when they're created.
I know Reddit is a private site and can theoretically do whatever they want, but given their colored history[1] I'm surprised that someone like myself who isn't trading CSAM, expressing hatred towards women, or doing other extreme things would suddenly be targeted in this manner.
I spoke with a friend who's a journalist who said it might be an algorithm gone awry but if true... where do I go from there?
I feel like the main character in "The Trial"[2]
>The Trial (German: Der Process)[A] is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20121012213707/http://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-the-biggest-troll-on-the-web
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial#Development
- 100% agree. I think it does so much disservice to his work. But I also don't think The Trial is primarily about bureaucratic themes either. To me it is much more about K not being able to understand the society he inhabits and the rules which govern it, and that can be extended to bureaucracy, but also obviously religion and morality, and just a blanket search for meaning.
I also have read both the original German der Process and the English translation, and I feel that, even though German is my second language, the original has so much more terror and humor than the English version, which largely reads like a bureaucratic text itself. Understanding that Kafka would laugh out loud while reading his texts to his friend, I like to imagine his works to be a kind of interwar Curb Your Enthusiasm, and I love to imagine Josef K as Larry David.
- Kafka has a prose style that is relatively easy to read, because he tends to describe concrete things rather than abstractions and does not use many unusual words or idioms, but hard to translate because he exploits the relatively free word order of German to write elegantly structured long sentences that don't seem complex in German but can easily become complex in translation.
I read Der Process in German, but I have also looked at one of the English translations, probably the one by Idris Parry, and I didn't like it much: it seemed rough, old-fashioned and generally hard to read compared with the original, though it's partly a matter of personal taste. Wikipedia mentions six English translation of The Trial but presumably some of them are cheaper and more easily available than others so the probability that we both looked at the same English translation are greater than one in six!
- I like to remind people that the original German title of Kafka's The Trial is Der Process.
