I was recently banned for the first time ever from a subreddit, and it was on a sub about reddit alternatives. The funny thing is, the thing that got me banned was something I already said earlier in the same sub. I was saying that all reddit alternatives suffer from the inertia problem: that even the most popular alternatives are basically ghost towns compared to reddit.

The first time I posted that idea, I actually got some upvotes. I can only guess that someone reported me the second time I said it and the ban followed. The mod who banned me accused me of actually trying to trick people to stay on reddit. I wasn't. I was on the sub hoping to see a reddit alternative gain real traction like bluesky did as a twitter alternative, but also was realistic about the current state of reddit alternatives. The second funny thing is, this ban was the incentive to actually start using piefed more seriously and wean myself off reddit.

So while this is a "reddit sucks because mods are up their own ass" story, I actually thank that mod for banning me because now I'm actually using this account more lol.

I run and grew /r/piracy for over 10 years. I took part in the api protests and also urged people to migrate to lemmy publicly. One of my mods went behind my back and asked the admins to demod me and rearrange mods so that they're on top, and the admins complied. Then the sub went back to business as usual.

Deleted?

There's a blocked user cap of 1000.

It's not enough.

I remember the days of it having a plethora of subs with shitty graphics that were decicated to abusing women including 2 literally named 'beatwomen' subs and a sub where they would post pictures of women crying for dudes who got hard for that stuff.

it was all defended as 'free speech' and guys who called this 'blowing off steam'

cp subs were plenty. and defended with the same defenses mentioned above. pedo apologists as far as the eye could see.

I've hated it since it's conception.

reminds me of how bitcoin was invented by pedos to disguise their transactions: the worst inspiration for successful tech.

we as a species really need to be inspired by something better than this violence trope.

voat was started because they removed the jailbait sub. it was never good.

The day Apollo died I stopped using Reddit altogether (which was probably a good thing).

I scroll reddit and see >50% bots. You'll see bots easily because they have hidden profiles and make strange / political comments on posts

In the case of demons they usually have a "roll to disobey" clause. If someone wants to summon a room full of demons go for it, everyone will probably end up dead.

Plus if someone really abused it you can have some demon lord hunt them down and cause even more problems.

Besides all the normal stuff that have been raised here, for me it was the insane, pedantic rules on almost every sub.

Your title isn't an exact match for the rules? Post deleted

You didn't include a date stamped picture that you were wearing green socks when posting - because it's Wednesday? Post deleted, banned for a week

You posted on some other sub - once - three years ago, and the mod of the current sub happens to have some petty, childish beef with that sub so... Lifetime ban for daring to post on their sub.

I don't post much here but it's already 50x more than I ever did on Reddit, simply because I'm not constantly needing to tip-toe past power-hungry gate-keepers with small person syndrome.

I was banned multiple times, ranging from saying Putin should be dealt with, to saying that the country club feature where they were verifying skin color was racist and likely illegal.

It got boring. Everyone was repeating the same opinions and questioning any of if got you banned. Lemmy is heading in the same direction but thanks to federation it's still not as bad.

This reminds me of something I heard many years ago, "people love to hear good things about their bad habits." It unfortunately doesn't surprise me that red pill won out. Those who don't want to do and self work are prime targets. Those who are overwhelmed by the work but still are willing to do it, can still get sucked in. Humans are fascinating. Even if that fascination isn't all good.

I don't like reddit, because there is such a moderation, that any of your posts may not pass moderation, although the post complies with the rules of the community, so I ended up here, but the problem is that almost all the questions on the site are answered here, but this also applies to youtube🫤

Thanks for your work there.

I didn’t use it for like a year following the api lockdown that killed 3rd party apps. After going back, it felt like Reddit took on a lot of the Twitter users that left when they changed the name to X and the various other issues on that platform. Most communities didn’t have the same character as before, but Lemmy felt very similar to old Reddit which is why I stayed on here.

Just how I got banned, really. I forget what the topic even was about. Someone who abused a child and got off light. Like they got probation or jail time served or something. I said people who harm children should face longer sentences, like a decade or more. I'm not sure if it was my wording or what, but I got banned for inciting violence against a protected class. I wasn't sure if it was an AI thing (automated, like automod) or what, but I appealed and they upheld it... so I didn't go back. I figure if that's their position, I don't want to be there anyway.

"The API stuff" is so glossed over by people who either weren't there or forgot or, I dunno, don't want Reddit to look as bad as they were? They tried to accuse a third-party developer of extortion, but he recorded the conversation and provided the raw recording as well as a transcript. I think Reddit mostly just wanted Apollo in particular to go away and tried some underhanded tactics to make that happen, but they didn't expect the developer would record the conversation and embarrass them.

I spoke out against transphobia on a meme sub, which was met with a rape threat, a racist slur, dog piling and the cherry on top was that I got banned from that sub as well.

Did any of the people blatantly breaking the Reddit TOS get banned?

.

Nope. :P

Psst... Lemmy has it, too. Unless you mean Reddit had it automated.

I was given a temporary ban by a person who runs a bunch of AI subs for posting in the "Fuck AI" comm. Then either the ban expired or the person overturned it. I never appealed it or contacted the person or posted in YPTB or anything like that. I just saw I was banned from a bunch of comms I wasn't subbed to, then about a week later I started seeing them again. Never interacted with the user who banned me.

Sam Altman partially owns it. Reddit is selling every user's comments directly to OpenAI with no way for them to opt out of AI training. 'Nuff said.

I was active on a particular sub and got worried that I might have accidentally posted personal info that could make me easier to track down. I asked the mods to delete all of my content from their sub, and they did. they removed everything using the "purge-user" bot.

Suddenly, my account was security-locked, and I was asked to update my email address and password! The problem was that when the security lock was applied, the system replaced the email I had been using with an old, deleted Tutanota email that I no longer used! I had to pay for a Tutanota subscription to recover that email and receive emails from Reddit.

After doing all that and finally updating my email and password, my account was still locked. I submitted appeals several times, but nothing worked.

It was not. r/GenX.

Your second paragraph is why I'm here. That pissed me off so badly I didn't go back for years except for modding. I still don't spend any real time there unless it's for the Heinlein Society.

Oof. Banned from politics for saying trans people should learn gun safety. Banned from piercing for citing the rules to a poster that pictures should be zoomed in on the piercing and not a full body selfy for a septum ring. Banned from offmychest despite never having posted there.

Banned from instagramreality because... A friend of mine posted her own very poorly photoshopped boudoir photo (she was the model, not the photographer/editor), which did violate the letter (but not spirit) of the rule on self-posts. She was instantly permabanned. But it was a hilariously bad edit, so I offered to post it since we're different people with different accounts that post in different region-specific subs and, believe it or not, also banned.

Shout out to the r/anime mods for blacking out their subreddit (yay) and still using the daily episode threads for themselves (boo). Spineless bootlickers. Announcing an end-date for the API protests was one is the most stupid lib-brained things I've ever encountered.

Boring story. Rarely used the account, got banned for no obvious reason. Byeee

Started receiving temp bans from the more reputable news subs for not letting obvious MAGAts get away with awful language without throwing it back at them. One shouldn't be punished for fighting the very enemy of free speech and human rights.

API stuff. I stopped contributing and started deleting my old comments when they made it clear that third party apps were done. I had been using Stealth to continue following my local regional sub until they locked down old.reddit more recently. Nowadays, when friends try to send me reddit links, I either ignore them or tell them it won't let me see the content.

Banned for pushing back against the claim that "from the river to the sea" is genocidal. I didn't push back especially strongly (because I suspect that sometimes it does have genocidal intent) nor did I say it in my own voice (I only quoted it - because I think that, even though it's usually not genocidal, it is nevertheless maximalist and aggressive and therefore unhelpful). This was in the immediate aftermath of October 7 and got me banned from two of the big subs I frequented the most.

It actually left a big hole in my life and I felt very down every time I thought about it. On one sub I'd left thousands of comments over years, and I knew that the mods who'd taken that away didn't have a second thought for that. I'd already tried Lemmy once due to API/app nonsense but this was what pushed me off.

The really annoying thing was that the ban message says you should message the mods if you have questions. In neither case was it really clear, actually, what the reason was - one quoted a rule, but not what they thought broke it, and the other quoted a sentence, but not what rule they thought it broke. I suspect that I never broke any identifiable rule because in those early days there was very little support for Palestinians and I was trying to talk to people where they were, not where I wished they were.

...it started as as annon reddit clone then got popular for the reason above. But I'll agree it was horrid.

No RIF, no reddit, bye Felicia...

So do I. I used to be quite active in /r/Conspiratard, /r/TopMindsOfReddit and other such subs where we laughed at the silly people of /r/conspiracy etc. axolotl was featured regularly there. I kind of missed what happened to him, did people finally get enough of his antics? Nervous breakdown? Banned? Anyone know?

Months before the API shit, I and like 90% of the users in a comment thread on a post of a woman wearing a shirt that said something like "perform your civic duty: punch a nazi" praising the shirt's message were banned with dubious reasons. I appealed multiple times until it was reversed, but in that appeal process it became clear that the admin team itself had a huge nazi problem. I jumped onto Lemmy as soon as I heard about it after that.

You posted on some other sub - once - three years ago, and the mod of the current sub happens to have some petty, childish beef with that sub so... Lifetime ban for daring to post on their sub.

This happens here as well

Ah, thats nice to know. Not a big surprise.

Made a joke with a Garfield quote and the automod latched on to me like plague. Got several comments removed and my account banned by stuff human reviewers said was ok. I appealed the ban and the automod banned ne again as soon as I logged in back again. I just couldn't be bothered with it anymore so I came back to Lemmy.

Same.

Exactly!

I'm honestly just not very informed on the israel/palestein conflict. But isn't the whole "river to the sea" thing about expanding Israel by displacing palesteins?

Is your position just that displacement is not the same as genocide?

Everyone coincidentally has the same opinion as the mods. It's very weird how that happens on every subreddit.

You can generally fool them by just changing one or two variables like GPU acceleration.

Or, change browsers.

The context was a Palestinian slogan ("From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"). The claim was that this was about reclaiming the entire former territory of Palestine, and that this would involve pushing all the Jews out.

I joined reddit in 2011 or 2012. Was quickly made a mod of a support subreddit for a medical condition I had. I filled up the sidebar with resources and posted every day trying to help people. Even sent money to people who couldn't afford physical therapy.

I built up a mod team of wonderful people. We traveled to meet each other IRL a few times and even went to Washington D.C. together to advocate for more research funding for our condition.

We took over abandoned related subreddits and even created new ones where we saw a need.

All this to say I really put effort into bettering Reddit, building communities, and making it a cozy place with helpful resources.

The API shit happened. I never lost RiF because I just used the cracked versions of it, but what got me was how the Admins were threatening their mods. Up until this point the subreddit you built was yours. Entirely yours. You could do whatever you wanted on it because you're the one who built it. Mods could run rampant and ban everyone and the admins wouldn't do anything. It sucked when it happened to you, but that was the tradeoff of Reddit. At least your subreddit was yours. The admins that day showed that wasn't true.

If the subreddit wasn't yours then what was the point of doing all that effort? You were just an unpaid employee now.

I stepped back a bit but didn't leave. My subreddit still needed me. I still had Rif working. But I stopped curating the sidebar and wiki.

Then Reddit allowed people to start hiding their post history and made decisions that caused my mod toolbox to stop working without replacing those tools natively on anything except their shitty app.

Without my tools I can't moderate efficiently so I stopped. Without seeing post history I refused to rely to people. Bots destroyed a subreddit I enjoyed despite like 50 reports from me alone. So I stopped going on Reddit. Only one mod remains active of our subreddit and she's on the verge of quitting too.

I'm focused on here, bluesky, and discord now. I still have to use Reddit for a niche gaming community but I just lurk now, and only go maybe once a week versus how I used to post 20 times a day.

Sync, then later the open source Slide were amazing.
Apollo on iOS was ridiculously good.

And now I'm using Voyager and Summit on Lemmy and Piefed and in some regards they might be even better. Summit especially has become so good.

A shame about the Sync version for Lemmy, hit and run the dev took the money and abandoned it. I suppose they were hoping for more growth, but still.
Although I'm no dev and probably shouldn't judge

Moderators can ban people for whatever reason they like, there isn't really a way to prevent that. An instance owner could make a rule against it, but you couldn't enforce it on other instances of course. The remedy to bad moderation is to make a different community.

The FuckAI thing does kinda make sense, though. If I wanted to make a community that focused on [thing], I would not really want input from people who avidly post on the Fuck[thing] community. That lacks precision of course, so I'd be open to appeals from people who posted in Fuck[thing] but don't actually hate [thing].

For me, it’s the API stuff. I used the Reddit app for a long time until I started seeing the He Gets Us ad everywhere. I hated it because it’s from an anti-equality organization. I blocked the account and I stopped seeing it for a while. Then it started popping up again after I blocked the account, so I started using Apollo to avoid it. Once the API thing happened and Apollo stopped working, I said fuck it, deleted my account, and moved on to Mastodon, BlueSky, and (after a time) here.

If they let me block that stupid fucking ad, I would probably still be there, at least if not for all the other dumb decisions they have also made.

Permanently banned from reddit for threatening to kill reddit staff. my post triggering the ban:

talking about how pedophiles and rapists should be executed (death penalty).

kinda telling don't you think?

Got a lifetime ban for "antisemitism" in a major sub for criticising Israel politics.

Quality just kept falling. It was so obvious when post upvotes and down votes were sold and or promoted. For me it went to shit somewhere around ~2016~2017