Is it wrong to sell your Reddit account?
Just asking for a friend…
Just asking for a friend…
You're not selling your account so they can datamine reddit. You're selling it so that they can put ads on Reddit that look like a user commenting. Which is also a thing Reddit does.
I've been thinking about that, I could potentially get a few hundred dollars.
I don't feel like I owe reddit anything, but those accounts are bought for scamming and political influencing and spreading misinformation.
I don't want to be part of that. So I'm not selling my accounts.
There are heaps of vendors. Just google buy and sell reddit accounts. (Maybe use a better search engine like duckduckgo, I'm not sure actual google will bring you to those sites).
I think there is no way to delete Reddit PM's and chats. So the buyer would get your possibly personal correspondence plus whatever private things that other people wrote to you. That can't be good. I am pretty sure I never doxxed myself in a PM, but other people surely did. I always tried to move discussions from PM to email or self-hosted chat, but people tended to refuse. They trusted Reddit, the silly billies.
To push back on that a bit, many Reddit "aged accounts" are used to push scams to the great unwashed masses.
I'm not sure it's morally okay to turn a blind eye from who's buying those accounts or why.
It is if its on the Reddit platform. The more dmaage done before their IPO, the better. Spiteful and petty? Absolutely. But because Steve Huffman is the target? Let it burn. Actually, everyone should help pour some fuel on it.
That mirrors the tension many reddit mods struggled with recently.. It's difficult to push back against Reddit without also punishing its active users in some real way.
The folks using Reddit are still real human beings. But I get that not everybody is going to draw the line in the same spot.
Making it worse for the end users is the whole point. Protests don't work effectively if they don't cause major inconvenience to the people able to make the changes. And for Reddit admins, hemorrhaging users is a major inconvenience.
It could be anything that makes it worth paying money for the accounts in the first place.
Unfortunately, looking from the outside, it's difficult to tell if an account has been bought, hacked, or if the original owner just decided to become a scumbag out of nowhere.
For example, have a look at https://www.reddit.com/user/fakerht, a 4 years old account that, just 30 minutes ago, decided to promote a scam site that attempts to steal crypto by luring them with the promise of an airdrop.
Frankly if it weren't the same username I'd have sold my account already. Reddit shows no loyalty to those who made it the largest forum on the Internet, they deserve no loyalty back.
Personally I'd prefer not to have someone speaking for me, despite the supposed anonymity of the accounts. If you post any amount of content, it's likely the account can be linked back to you after the sale, which could prove problematic depending on what the new owner does with it.
But I'm a bit paranoid about such things after experiencing internet stalking. I don't see anything morally wrong with it, just that consequences from the sale might affect me negatively in the future.
It's probably against their TOS, so they could ban the account. It's not illegal. I would say it's pretty gray morally, since it would probably be bought by an entity that will pretend to be a real person to sell product or spread misinformation.
pretend to be a real person to sell product or spread misinformation
Fight fire with fire. That's exactly why I left reddit.
I wonder who would buy mine? I made a hobby out of getting banned in the most subreddits possible.
I don't see anything wrong with it. You made that account and built it up. I don't have a reddit account, but if I did, I assume I'd somehow get scammed during the selling process and not get any money.