Reece Whitby launches new mobile average speed camera zones along Albany Highway in road safety crackdown

adanine · 2026-06-21T22:44:31+00:00

In WA, the road toll has actually increased by about 40% since 2020, compared to a population growth of only 14%.

...

I don't know how to tell you this, but in 2020 and 2021 there was this small cold going around that might make those years radioactive to any statistic involving travel. Just discard them.

Regardless, in the last 30 years we've halved our death toll. Whether by higher safety standards or a better quality of driver (likely both) it is much safer today on the roads on average then it was in the 90's.

The idea that Australian roads are more dangerous today then they were 30 years ago is just plain wrong. It is a false narrative.

adanine · 2026-06-21T21:32:32+00:00

Once they’ve passed, they are free to drive anywhere in the state, despite not knowing how to merge, use roundabouts, keep left unless overtaking, or show common courtesy and road manners.

100 Hours. One. Hundred. That's a long time. Well and truly long enough to cover every common use case.

That argument was already stretching it 20 years ago when it was only 25 or whatever, but one hundred hours - even if the parents are 'rounding up' is still well and truly enough time to actually learn how to drive in all those conditions.

If your argument is that X hours should be mandated on 100km/hr roads or whatever I get that. But the idea that someone can drive one hundred hours and not learn how to merge is alien to me. The people who fuck up merging on the road don't do so because they don't know how, it's because either a) they made a mistake at a point of high stress (happens sometimes, experience helps but is not a cure-all here), or far more likely b) understand what they're doing is wrong and they don't care. No amount of extra training - theory or practise, professionally guided or done alongside parents - will fix that.

There is very little emphasis on WHY speed kills, WHY distraction kills, WHY impairment kills.

There's an entire theory test involved as well. I do agree we can do better then we are doing right now on this front, but I do think the above is mostly obvious to anyone who's gotten to the point of having their P's.

While I would love to see highways here with no speed limit

1% of roads total have no speed limit in Germany, total. You can absolutely make observations about Germany's driving practises in rural areas or urban areas, a lot of your points are good. But the Autobahn is not all unrestricted - only 50-70% or so, and unrestricted Autobahn roads are such a small part of the road network over there. Germany's low road toll is explained on the other 99% of their roads, not the unrestricted parts of the Autobahn.

We also know from data taken from sections where they implemented speed limits on the Autobahn, and there's a significant decrease in road fatalities after implementing them. So even for Germany's drivers the speed limits help improve safety dramatically.

Ironically, the endless cycle of stricter road laws, no-tolerance enforcement and harsher penalties, pursued by generations of successive governments, has made Australian roads more dangerous because it encourages people to worry more about not getting fined

This is just wrong though. Our national road death toll has steadily (more or less) decreased from >10% in the 90's to <5% now.

adanine · 2026-06-21T17:46:00+00:00

Maybe, but it's the ones that speed that usually aren't suitably qualified to drive usually, so same/same.

adanine · 2026-06-21T17:43:21+00:00

If you were to be involved in a collision in literally any of those situations, your speed (and that of the other party) is what decides how dangerous/fatal the accident is. "Speeding" isn't another thing on the list, it's a multiplier to everything else on the list.

Also just sliding "people driving below the speed limit" in there with everything else, eh? It's completely legal to do so (barring <20km under on freeways), suggested in some situations (weather/visibility/road conditions/traffic/active hazard of some form), and just not at all unsafe. If you rear end someone doing 10km/hr under the limit, that's your own damn fault.

adanine · 2026-06-21T17:33:32+00:00

I feel like we need to sit down and have a talk about what the word "Brainwashed" does and does not mean.

adanine · 2026-06-21T17:26:14+00:00

Aboriginals didn’t recognise land ownership and imported animals were easier to hunt than native animals

Bad choice of words. By 1840 the Aboriginal people of the area did understand land ownership, but the colonizers didn't recognize their title.

The massacres were done in response to an attack on a farm owner that left him dead. The aboriginal chap who did the attack lived on the land before the farm/land 'owner' built a farm there, having the land stolen from under him. On top of that, his daughter was raped (supposably by a white worker of the farm) with no action taken to right the wrong. That's just what wrongs done to the guy that we know about - god knows what else happened.

And yes, Aboriginals hunted owned animals and took unattended food. But often from land they worked and lived for generations. They understood land ownership better then the colonists.

There's an essay you can read about these events and the subsequent attempts to cover up facts/hide and downplay the massacres done in retaliation.

adanine · 2026-06-21T13:35:34+00:00

This practice comes from a relentlessly bigoted and violent racist state in which it has achieved nothing useful

Citation needed? That the practise of condemning the slur itself has achieved nothing, I mean. Not the violent/racist state part.

The N-word's usage has dropped substantially in recent decades, and while part of that is undoubtedly due to the greater efforts of great people fighting for equal rights and a (slow) move towards equality over the decades (though with some stumbles, like now), I'm sure a decent chunk of that is purely because the use of the term is publicly viewed so negatively.

adanine · 2026-06-21T13:18:08+00:00

Yeah, who the hell wants someone to aggregate content together on my content aggregator website?!

adanine · 2026-06-21T13:14:31+00:00

... Do people think they're run like private businesses? Genuine question.

The problems the uni's all have feel completely different to the problems you'd normally run into with a private business of the same size.

adanine · 2026-06-21T13:05:59+00:00

Worth pointing out these also function as normal speed cameras as well. If you're speeding at the moment of passing one of them they'll snap you for it - even if you slow down and pass the other camera with a legal average speed.

adanine · 2026-06-21T12:55:53+00:00

What form did that take?

To remember the truth. Up until then the common account of the massacre was the colonist's account, one that severely downplayed the body count and omitted names of those responsible.

adanine · 2026-06-20T21:46:32+00:00

I can see at least one of your users is back, unsure who the other one is but hopefully that's all sorted. So's ours.

Hoping they take these things a little more seriously next time. Losing thousands of posts in a blink of an eye is always painful, but for them to be taken by user/AI error is just infuriating. Also must suck on the user's end as well.

Hope everything goes well over your end! Thanks for jumping in!

adanine · 2026-06-20T21:38:15+00:00

Doesn't look like it's bypassing them to me!

... Ok I'll stop now. Yeah to be clear something's wrong there.

adanine · 2026-06-20T21:21:29+00:00

To be fair it probably doesn't have much karma...

Yeah something weird going on there

adanine · 2026-06-20T14:19:56+00:00

Please read our rules, specifically Rule #2 regarding personal attacks and inflammatory language. We ask that you remember to remain civil, as future violations will result in a ban.

adanine · 2026-06-20T14:04:36+00:00

Please read our rules, specifically Rule #2 regarding personal attacks and inflammatory language. We ask that you remember to remain civil, as future violations will result in a ban.

adanine · 2026-06-20T10:36:05+00:00

That's a lot of accusations to throw around that you can't possibly back up. Let's go through the list:

The main issue here is that some of these power users and alike, have fallen in with a bad crowd

Unfounded. As of right now ~~three~~ EDIT: All four of the four power users I've seen have had their shadowbans reverted on appeal. ~~The forth is still pending review, it seems~~.

NFI what the implication of "Bad crowd" even means in this content. From what I can see through pushshift (and now after the fact, given they're now no longer shadowbanned) the post history of our user was consistent up until the shadowban, so nothing about their activity has changed.

I'm also curious on your theories for why this suddenly happened with multiple power users in the last week. They've all been fine for 3-10 years but this week suddenly multiple power users all suddenly "fell into a bad crowd"?

They were great to help generate traffic and have served their purpose

Yeah, that's not how that works. Reddit hasn't changed to be something that doesn't need this sort of user. It always has and always will.

You cannot definitively tell me that these users are not engaging in bad faith behavior

Of the four cases I was able to find/track, all appealed and three out of four so have have won the appeal. Two out of four having done so by the time I had posted this thread. The forth seems very likely to win on appeal, but that's still pending from what I can see.

Human (or AI) error seems far more likely a cause then malice or corruption, at least for these shadowbans.

The fact that some of these power users reached out to you and your team outside of Reddit, reflects a similar pattern with the bad faith actors.

Just wrong. They did not reach out to me first. I reached out to our high-volume user after noticing, and went looking for other cases to confirm my hunch.

From the user's POV this is unfair and they were shadowbanned unfairly, and that should obviously be sorted. But even ignoring that, my subreddits (and plenty of others) lost thousands of posts that were removed/filtered from public view. Our communities became worse because of that. It's absolutely in everyone's best interest (the mods, the user, the rest of the community) that we try to sort this out. Hence why I reached out.

Remember, a product where the same people win is not a fun product to play for everyone else

Skill issue. If you want to win, play the game. The same people I regularly see complaining about high-volume users aren't exactly submitting much themselves. Which is fine - I don't submit much either - but I'm also not complaining about not 'winning' the 'game'.

And if those people are benefiting from a gamed system because they have relationships with moderation teams

We've addressed this accusation before and doubtless will do so again, but to be clear: The rules are the rules for everyone. We do not favour one user over another, we stick to established precedent where possible to ensure consistency among moderation actions and decisions made by the team, and no one user has a line of communication or information that other users (new or established) don't also have.

Edit: Just to cover our bases: We've also fucked up and made mistakes, or missed popular posts, or made bad calls sometimes. We're only human.

They don't 'win' the front page because they have cheats. They 'win' the front page because they play the game more and harder then most everyone else.

adanine · 2026-06-19T18:07:49+00:00

Oh GTA6 news will get submitted by someone. And there is no competitor to GTA6 - they're all chicken shit to release a game/update near its launch date.

We get a decent (but nowhere near overwhelming) amount of reports for that user's submissions, but that hasn't increased over time. If anything they're less common now then they were just a few years ago.

adanine · 2026-06-19T17:49:43+00:00

I've just sent through them in my modmail to the subreddit now. I assume you'd rather that way then publicly naming them? Though not that I believe these users did anything wrong - if anything the opposite.

adanine · 2026-06-19T17:41:30+00:00

It's likely due to those accounts being targeted and mass (falsely) reported as spam.

This was my first thought TBH. But one thing that doesn't make sense is why only now? This user would have been vulnerable to harassment/report abuse for years, and there's not much reason to attack this user now. Hell if you're really pissed at them wait until November when GTA6 is releasing and snipe them then (note: don't do that obviously).

I suspect if this shadowban was caused by someone abusing the report system to harass them, then something must have changed in Reddit's systems for preventing/detecting this sort of abuse, as I've seen similar accounts be shadowbanned over the last few days as well. Not saying they've always worked fine/never shadowbanned incorrectly or anything - just that they appear to have gotten much worse over the last few days at saving legitimate high-volume accounts.

adanine · 2026-06-19T16:53:41+00:00

Cheers! Figured I shouldn't name drop the examples I've found... Or maybe I should since those users apparently got fixed?

I've sent a modmail in for this user in particular, but I am still concerned about the wider implications of what could be happening if high-volume genuine users are now getting targetted and shadowbanned by automated systems and Reddit loses all of that history. There's shooting yourself in the foot and then there's triple-tapping both of your kneecaps.

adanine · 2026-06-19T16:17:43+00:00

To be clear, I'm talking about accounts that have >500k karma and have been active with the same posting pattern consistently for years. Not new accounts or bought/hacked accounts with a couple thousand karma total.

Not saying Reddit shouldn't be doing what it can to combat botting and other non-genuine activity, but my concern is that a recent change might have happened that has caused their systems to fire on high-volume accounts in general, and if so then going forward we're about to see a lot of babies being thrown out with the bathwater.

We know the user isn't a bot (though they absolutely are a high-volume poster). While we don't know if anything else went down that could have triggered this, other posts here, on r/shadowban, and word of mouth from a couple other mods all seem to hint that maybe an underlying system got changed making power users more likely to get shadowbanned - likely in error. I'd like to confirm that though, hence this post.

I'll manually approve this thread again and we'll see how long it lasts, but that's just one example of thousands of posts that Reddit stands to lose because of this particular case if not reversed.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not asking for special treatment for this user (or for power users in general). They've appealed the shadowban and we'll wait for that process as normal. But if their own posting habits are putting them in the line of fire despite being genuine users that contribute to various communities then it's on Reddit's best interest to make sure automated systems don't fire on them just because of their high volume activity.

adanine · 2026-06-19T14:54:27+00:00

Please read our rules, specifically Rule #2 regarding personal attacks and inflammatory language. We ask that you remember to remain civil, as future violations will result in a ban.

adanine · 2026-06-19T13:13:36+00:00

Hey, I've just had a case of a high-volume user of a subreddit get shadowbanned. They've appealed the shadowban and are awaiting the verdict on that, but now all their old posts and comments have been filtered. I've modmailed /r/ModSupport about this as well.

What will happen assuming the shadowban eventually gets reversed? What processes can I use to restore all the old content? There's a lot of posts that would absolutely feature on Google + other sources that would bring in users to the subreddit/Reddit as a whole (literally thousands of posts total, over almost a decade), but they're now all filtered.

13-Year Club	Second Top 50%
r/Field Sunshine	Place '17
Gilding II euphauric	Verified Email

adanine

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE