Yet another Reddit refugee
Well, it may be a “tale as old as time” but here I am… 8 year Reddit veteran with 660K karma as of last week. I had a hella shock a couple of mornings ago when I refreshed the home page only to see a big red banner saying “this account has been permanently banned from Reddit, see your inbox.”
I check my inbox, and there is nothing there. Great.
OK, I’ve had some experience with weird Reddit moderation over the years. I’ve appealed sub bans and been reinstated, or not bothered. I’ve been permabanned from at least one group for saying sarcastic and critical things about Israel (not about Jewish people per se, about Israel the nation state under its current regime). I’ve waited out a week ban without complaining because I did use intemperate language late one evening, or carelessly broke a rule like “all top comments must include a link to a published paper”.
But a permaban from the entire platform?? That came as a real shock. And there was no explanation. I could see that one of my comments from the evening before had been deleted, but I have no memory of the content of that particular comment; I think I was saying something angry or critical about the US/Israel attack on Iran, but I don’t recall it being particularly fiery or profane.
A day or so later the message finally landed, telling me that my account had been banned because of “repeated violations of policy by other accounts that you own.” (Emphasis mine). This was really baffling — I have never had any other Reddit accounts, just the one I’ve been using these 8 years. I tried an appeal, explaining that I was bewildered and had no alt accounts. The appeal was flatly denied w/in 24 hours. So that was that. No other recourse. I have been excommunicated.
This raises all the usual questions about Reddit governance. It feels very arbitrary and opaque. There is no due process, no jury of one’s peers, and evidence is destroyed (comments deleted rather than just hidden from everyone other than mods and the original commenter). There is no proper explanation of what caused the ban, no debrief. It’s a bit like the cops arresting you because of something they say they found in your car, but they’ve removed and destroyed the thing they claim to have found :-). And you can’t remember every single bit of junk you kept in your car so you have no idea what it was that triggered the arrest.
Anyway, kissing g’bye to 8 years of content — and karma that I earned the hard way, 5 and 10 and 100 upvotes at a time, not by karma farming — is hard, like losing a carefully crafted RPG character after putting in hundreds of hours of campaign. I have enjoyed Reddit over the years and it’s oddly saddening to be thrown out so abruptly and with no explanation.
If anyone’s still reading at this point :-) I’d like to know whether other people have had this same experience. If you have not been posting racist/misogynist/homophobic drivel, threats, obscenities, scams etc — and yet you suddenly got axed for no clear and explicit reason, then we’re in the same boat. Are there any theories about why/how this happens? Is this the malice of specific humans, or some kind of automodding gone badly wrong?
I’m kinda done with Reddit at this point because of this incident. I don’t see the point in creating a new account (which I guess is technically a rule violation in and of itself) only to have to walk on eggshells wondering at what point some random statement of my opinions is going to get me exiled to Siberia again. Hence I’m giving Lemmy a try. The community is much smaller but several of my interests are represented and … perhaps… it’s a more transparent and sensible moderation model?
Lemmy moderation is heavily instance-dependent. Some are more strict than reddit, and others less. You are on Lemmy.world which is moderated with a pretty light touch, so you'll probably be happy :)
I actually don’t mind fairly strict moderation, as I’m not a big fan of insults, rudeness, racial/sexual slurs, etc and am quite happy to live without them. But I don’t like mysterious bans with nonsensical “explanations” such as I just experienced. If I’m gonna get a ban I want to see my own words quoted back at me, with an explanation of how they violated policy. It’s a fair cop if I did in fact break the rules for the sub or the site. But telling me my “other account(s)” are breaking rules, when I have no fkn other accounts, is just infuriating.
Well, you might get that, you might not. Point is if you get treated poorly just hop to a new instance
Or make your own. We are pretty flexable.
Yeah, I'm thinking they've done an 'upgrade' to the modbots, and they've gone alittle HAL9000. I've gone 3 years without a 'hate speech' ding - then got two in two consecutive days, from different subs. I think I've figured out one of them, but the other...
I'm not sure about that. Maybe the admins on world are legit but I was critical of some Democrat policies and got comments removed with no explanation of a rule I broke, they just told me I was wrong then I assume muted me.
tankies, political are the heavily moderated, otherwise is light which has its own problems like with Politc memes, which is taken over by tankies.
Welcome to the Fediverse!
I will say, just like Reddit, we have our share of insane mods, but nobody can get banned platform-wide b/c they can just join a federated instance if their instance owner kicks them out (this is both a positive and a negative; community mods are under a lot more pressure to prevent illegal stuff on a per-comm basis than on Reddit).
Modlogs are public, so you'll never really not know why something got removed and by whom, even if you disagree with their decision.
I left Reddit when they killed 3rd-party apps, so I never got to experience the wonderful censorship of today's Reddit experience. Having been here now a couple years, this place feels a lot more human to me, despite (or maybe due to?) it being a lot smaller. I like it here better tbh and I hope you will too. The more the merrier!
I recommend checking out ![email protected] if you're looking for active communities, since they can be a bit harder to find than on Reddit. Also, don't forget to block the .ml instances, they're filled with tankies (unless you want that on your feed ig lol).
Welcome.
You're going to go through a bit of a withdrawal, but you can still lurk there. I quit cold turkey, didn't lurk so I would be tempted, and wasn't banned yet. I'm sure I would have been.
I recommend that if your all page gets light or seems inactive, play with the settings. I keep it on hot and then check active, top 6 hours, and scaled in that order. Active is really about how active the comment is, so it stays pretty consistent.
This is a much better place if you're not conservative. We do have some bots and trolls, but they're not a ton. They tend to do weekends. If you feel like someone is picking on you, that's them. Just leave one comment at most, downvote and move on. Just like on reddit.
Left Reddit after the API debacle a few years back. Still lurk occasionally for niche things, but overall pretty satisfied with Lemmy as a replacement. It's a lot more human, I feel. Similar to old Reddit, before it went to shit.
There's a lot of leftist infighting around here - I would personally recommend you not get too involved. The big one seems to be lemmy.world vs. lemmy.ml
Sign of a healthy leftist community if there's enough of us around to have infighting.
I wouldn't call the apologists for Russia and China "leftist" though. The only thing "left' about them is that they hate the United States. That isn't enough to qualify, imo.
Welcome and I hope you feel the freedom of not caring about those fake internet points anymore.
Yeah, Reddit was getting pretty bad for attempted gamification — “congratulations, you’re on a 13 day posting streak! Keep it up!” And so on. Very insulting to the intelligence.
I did rather like awards until they were taken away. It was nice to be able to give something (even of only virtual value) to someone whose post or comment I really appreciated. And it was nice to get that kind of appreciation in return if I wrote something that was helpful or enlightening to someone else.
But the whole karma score thing… very leaderboardish.
You forgot to put /s in the end. Without it your comment looks kinda like a ragebait.
its clearly sarcasm regardless of a missing /s
Points aren’t tallied here. Someone can have an absolutely shit take that doesn’t haunt them indefinitely.
Don’t get attached to the numbers.
Depends on the platform - some federated instances (e.g. mine, Mbin) keep a tally of a user's total upvotes minus downvotes as an overall "reputation" score
Unfortunately downvote is the standard response to 'i disagree to this insightful comment'. They really should just track total votes as a 'this is how important others feel your coment is'. There is value in downvote for 'not bad enough for a reasonable mod to delete but still bad'. (.ml is not a reasonable mod - they delete anything)
Welcome to the Fediverse!
Good to see you found your interests here! One of the most common complaints is the lack of whatever niche someone is looking for. So it sounds like you got lucky!
I'm another that fled when they killed 3rd party apps, and.lied about devs to demonize them in the process. Never swappedoff of old reddit on my PC, Had been spending half of my reddit time on mobile, refused to install their shitty adware app on my phone.
Spent less and less time on it on PC, eventually accidentally did something on my browser that disabled the 'reply' button even on old reddit, took it as a sign.
Old account, same Karma style. No farming, just decent wordsmithing while writing my comments. Enough to know my general comments would be positive, without sacrificing what I wanted to say. (And to know when to go all-out on something unpopular enough that no careful words would stop the downvotes)
You will find a different culture here. I've certainly gotten dome comments upvoted that I was SURE would go negative. If you notice posts/people that bother you are primarily from one instance, you can block that whole instance from your feed. We even have a lil community specificly for complaining about power-tripping mods at ![email protected] if you feel any here could use some name 'n shame!
I purposely nuked my account after the API fiasco by hugely shit talking a particularly awful moderator, which was fucking awesome. Same story though, got banned, no message, but I was unable to appeal. Never looked back. I was never attached to my points because what the fuck does that matter anyhow. Lemmy is way better after you get used to it. Have fun. Fuck Reddit.
on the shadowban sub, chances of a lifting a ban seems very rare, and only when they "admit their mistake" everyone else is either appealing everyday, some for months on end.
You don't happen to use a VPN service, do you?
I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of accounts have been using the same exit node as you, and since you all have the same IP address, you must all clearly be the same person running multiple accounts.
Alternatively, you're on an ISP with a non-fixed IP address and during the various rotations you've at some point had an IP address that was - previously or subsequently - leased by someone who did something against Reddit TOS. Again, clearly, there is absolutely no way you could possibly be different people and so all of those accounts must be banned.
Alternatively, alternatively, someone took exception to what you said, went on a power trip, booted you and, when asked for an explanation, pulled the first excuse off the pile, valid or not.
Annnyway. Welcome to the Fediverse.
I do not use VPN. I am a subscriber to CityWest fibre optic net in BC, and I don’t know for sure if my contract includes a distinct IP address. Your theory about randomly getting an IP address that has been used previously for naughty stuff on Reddit seems plausible. I have no idea how I would verify it.
It seems odd that any top-level, site-wide mod would take personal offence at one particular post from one particular user out of however many million on Reddit. You would think they would have bigger fish to fry and fires to put out, if you’ll forgive an unfortunately mixed metaphor.
If I understand correctly, a lot of their top-level modding is now done by automation. They seem pretty sensitive about conspicuous left-wing posters, for example those who would critique the current USA admin. And Reddit almost certainly has an internal social media profile / score for all users, similar to what can be extracted from these tools:
https://reddit-user-analyser.netlify.app/
https://snoosnoop.com/
vpns dont really work with REDDIT, the site seems to be able to detect it eventually and ban you.
I think shadowbanning works on cross referencing, not IP addresses.
If you have a similar pattern of behaviour as another person in the same location, their account is tied to yours.
Oh you sweet bairn
Welcome. Also got permabanned from Reddit somewhat recently after 10+ years, seemingly just for talking shit about Trump and the AI bullshit, so I can relate. 😂 They seem very ban-heavy these days and they even go out of their way to prevent you from making a new account. It's wild.
But overall it's pretty great here and Reddit did me a favor by breaking my last addiction to corporate social media.
The interesting thing of course is that if this thing is systematic — if Reddit is doing sitewide permabans on users who talk sh*t about the present US regime, because Spez is running scared like the other techbros — it’s unlikely to become a news story because none of those people will be able to come back to a Reddit group to discuss what happened to them. I do seem to detect a bit of a pattern in the responses thus far to my maiden post (and subsequent comments on other ban stories), a pattern that would be newsworthy if it is real :-). but since Reddit is one of the prime aggregators of internet news and trends, it’s unlikely to get any attention since we are all banned from Reddit. Bluesky is not topic oriented, afaik — it’s person-oriented. I have not yet checked out piefed.
they use AI to ban people, thats why some bans are so quick and dont make sense sometimes. i assume the more and more they ban with AI, the sloppy it will get.
Me too, although I was more of a jerk than you.
Once I was barraged with "He Gets Us" ads and constant daily Indian sub recommendations I became surly and started talking back to mods, too sassy. Banned for life.
I survived almost as long as you, with just a few thousand karma. They didn't think I was very funny or clever. Thank God.
Here's a site to help you find communities https://lemmyverse.net/
FYI if you're on lemmy.world and you want to subscribe to ![email protected] then you put in https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
thanks a lot!
Certainly more transparent with the modlog though, depending on the domain etc you might come across some interesting moderation (.ml is hilarious for this stuff.)
Regardless, welcome to the fediverse, hope it tickles your fancy!
I've been arguing with them a fair bit from an anarchist perspective. And while they have some very bad and braindead takes on things, I haven't gotten anything worse from them than downvotes. Rather pleasantly surprised, really, that none of their communities have tried to ban me.
reddit is too aggressive with thier banning methods: AI usage, detecting ISPs, vpns,,,,etc. this time they look at old accts that you deleted with banned subs in, even if it was lifted they will ban the NEW accounts too.
only way around is new IP, DEVICE, and browsers. or if you are somehow advertising "illicitly" more paid methods. plus avoid the same posting and writing patterns that you got caught in.
browser fingerprinting, Scrolling behaviour, is another.
Ban spez for r/jailbait imo
Sounds like my reddit story. I was banned for a week for inciting violence. It was a joke about hurrting people who abuse animals, it was a traditional internet joke, so that was a bit fo a surprise, but sure I get the rationale.
I got perma banned, also, for inciting violence. What was this violence you might ask? I said that I was worried that the Trump regime was going to start going after gay people.
So fuck reddit. I migrated to Piefed and Discuit. Between the two of them I'm satisfied.
I “promoted violence” when someone asked if a prisoner has served their life sentence after being resuscitated, by answering “you have to be irrevocably dead”
i think thier LLM picks up on inneundos or implicaitons of violence and bans you right off the bat, even if isnt correct.
not as POsposterous as "over-reporting" whatever that means.
The surprise is, there's lots of people here. It's not as big as Reddit yeah, but regularly top posts on the front page of lemmy.world exceed 1K rep.
I didn't get banned or anything, but I've walked away from Reddit and for the most part haven't looked back. Google still does this thing where they'll put Reddit links near the top of search results, and sometimes it's inescapable, but I will scroll down the page to find an alternate link with the information.
And hey, Lemmy's much bigger than Digg's reboot currently is.
The basic explanation with Google is that it puts more trusted resources first in order. Thus, Reddit exists for more than a decade and cooperates with Google and the US government, thus making it a very liable source. Lemmy, on the other hand, is not only made from dozens different servers with their own addresses, but also is not being properly controlled by any government. Thus, I was only being able to find Google results for Lemmy.world instance. I suppose, it simply because this instance is big and old enough to be indexed by Google now.
Google indexes Reddit so highly because of bias, full stop. Reddit never had to put up with getting aggressively de-prioritized for bullshit reasons like Ask Metafilter did by the Panda update 15 or so years ago.
It was Google itself that made the commitment to try to index the Web roughly in real-time. I remember people being shocked when new web pages would show up in the index mere hours after they went live. Evidently they've fallen behind on that ambition in the time since.
Especially now that Digg's died once again.
That blows. I also have a 14-year Reddit account that I'd be upset to lose, but honestly, it's not a huge loss. If there were any niche communities on Reddit you followed, then that sucks, since there might not be an analogue here. But for the general reddit-ness of browsing popular, it's much better here. Welcome!
Going through your post, it occurs to me that you, like many others - myself included - are being banned after a set amount of content is generated. This ALL seems a bit as if we are used to create conversational content which they are training AI with and then they get to a point with what we have said and have posted and it's "hup-ho.. time to go.." and we get banned for utter baloney reasons with zero recourse.
The oddest thing for me, is I've still got my account, it's still logged in on a few of my browsers, and a few weeks ago, I got a reply to a comment I made FIVE years ago. It was in my inbox. So I just hit the context link, found the comment and deleted it.
I would have taken my 15 years of comments if they hadn't shut that ability down last year, so I'm a bit baffled by how someone found the post I made the comment on, in the first place. It's all but impossible to get at posts that are older than a year.. and the comments within.. Forget it.
Was it some AI test to check on the account? Dunno. Am not letting it go and will sail through every few weeks to see if more new replies have come in.
It's going to be my pet project, for certain.
This theory doesn't make much sense. Why the bans? Why not just let users stay there can keep farming up more and more content to train on? How do they benefit from banning a user that was giving them good training material?
They're shaping a narrative. Don't be too effective in countering it, or ...
It may be that the conversation is deemed repetitive? From what I understand it's not just about lots of conversation, it's about varied conversation.
I honestly don't know, am just spitballing ideas to work out why the site went off the rails like it did. I mean, I'm done.. definitely won't go back (no need to) but now it's into that "post mortem" phase for me.
What the heck is karma
Reddit's earlier attempt to make people more complaint and involved in their system.
It's so weird to me that everyone still has to mention the karma they had. They blocked me, i had 100k karma. I ditched reddit and had half a million karma. What is anyone to make of this? Is it just bragging?
Don't forget to place 1 star in the App stores for their app.
Reddit is bullshit nowdays.
My original account got locked out when I wouldn't provide an email to Reddit to verify after years of use.
Thankfully fuck Reddit
I'm one too https://lemmy.today/post/49597645
Yeah, same here honestly
Being critical of Israel is what got me banned as well, 11 year account at the time.
It broke my heart. I've since tried a few other accounts, some making it to multiple months, one almost two years and now I'm just done with it.
I got IP banned for abusing the report function and using sock puppet accounts. I was really late to the reddit party because I never wanted an account but eventually caved when third party apps were shining. My account had no value to me and only served as a bookmark aggregator. Communities had minimum karma thresholds and I'm not playing those stupid fucking games. How the fuck do I get enough to start participating anywhere if that's the rule everywhere? After the API thing I heard moderation tools weren't working and I wanted to make it harder for the mods when things were already difficult enough for them. They stuck around to be duke of shit mountain, didn't they?
Reporting posts for frivolous reasons was also a faster route to blocking users. Block someone and waste a mod's time? Sign me up. The API shitshow turned me in to a bad actor over there. Couldn't do a whole lot on the way out so I did what I could. They broke an app I paid for so I went out swinging.
Yep, happened to me, no clear reason given so can only speculate. I think probably they have new automod systems.
exact same experience but only a mere 60k karma
Did you use an alt and comment somewhere you were banned (unknowingly) I did the same. I did manage to make a new reddit account on a new phone different email, just can never log into my old accounts here or itll ban it.
spez wants to please his shareholders... and Musk, so trying to be "wholesome" by letting bots automatically flag "violent" commentary. Any negative and/or violent commentary towards Trump, MAGAts, Netanyahu and his Likud fandom will, of course, incur spez's hatred by dropping a banhammer.
Yes, something similar happened to me: https://maximiliankohler.blogspot.com/2023/06/reddit-is-dangerous-humanity-needs-an-alternative.html
Reddit is an atrocious website with so many disturbing problems, and it keeps getting worse and worse.
It ain't much better here sister.