Reddit Just Made It Easier to Be a Lurker With a Double Life

When you click on a profile on Reddit, you can see that person’s posts and comments. However, if there are specific comments or activities on your Reddit profile that you’d rather keep private, Reddit has announced a new feature that lets users better curate their profiles to keep them more private.

Reddit user profile curation

According to Reddit, “Starting today, we’re rolling out updates to profile settings, making it easier for redditors to manage their presence and control what appears on their Reddit profile. Via a new setting – ‘Content and activity’ – users can fine-tune what content appears on their profile on a subreddit-by-subreddit basis. This means redditors can participate in communities without sharing their full post and comment history in their profile.”

From these settings, Reddit users can curate their profile by keeping comments and posts visible to everyone. This setting is enabled by default. Alternatively, users have the option to hide all public posts and comments. They also have the option to display posts and comments from chosen communities selectively. This means that if you’re part of an NSFW Reddit community, or a community you’d rather other people not know about, this is the option for you.

However, Reddit does note that moderators can still access your entire profile when appropriate. “To continue to effectively moderate communities, moderators, in some cases, will have full access to a user’s public post and comment history for 28 days, regardless of the user’s profile content visibility settings.”

Goodbye throwaway accounts

More often than not, you’ve probably come across a post on Reddit that claims to be a throwaway account. These are basically Reddit accounts used to post something that the user does not want linked or traced back to their original account.

Giving users the option to hide select posts and comments suggests that Reddit wants to discourage the use of these types of accounts. As The Verge points out, this helps Reddit better collect engagement and interest data, especially post-IPO, and to help with AI training. 

However, as one user points out, “This seems like it’s going to lead to bad actors being able to more easily hide their behavior from the average user. Unless you’re a mod, you won’t be able to see that they’re posting inflammatory misinformation across a dozen different subs, for instance. Less transparency isn’t good.”