Because people started to report again. If you hide a post, it disappears just that post. To you. Mute someone, and all their posts disappear. If enough people mute you, you get globally muted Report someone and the post is hidden, and the mods immediately notified. They check to see if the report is legit, and then they pull the trigger for a banning. The bans are now automatically set on the type of report you got, how many of them, and how often you have been banned before in the past. So, to get banned, you gotta piss the community off enough to get the report button clicked.