What is your "Reddit sucks" story?
Probably 1/2 of the users on this platform are here as a protest against Reddit. Either the API stuff, or the admins nuking your account, or the mods being... goofy. Or the users, or who knows what.
What's your story?
170 replies
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.
Thanks for your work there.
The internet makes picketing impossible, UK union miners used to throw stones at any scabs.
I used to have an iPad, and watching an entire movie on the Netflix app drained the battery by 2-4%. The Reddit app took 15-20% of the battery over breakfast, so I switched to Apollo. Then, I could get through breakfast with the battery still at, say, 95%. Clearly, the official app did something else in the background; since they didn't disclose what, it was probably nefarious. One day, Apollo stopped working, and that was that.
Personally I would assume bad design over compute vampirism. But I could be wrong.
Nah, the app is pushed so hard because browsers sandbox the site and only provide minimal context about the user. But an app can request whatever permissions it wants. And the Reddit app wants a lot of invasive permissions. It is 100% a tracking and data collection thing.
Full list of trackers/permissions listed here: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.reddit.frontpage/latest/#trackers
The day Apollo died I stopped using Reddit altogether (which was probably a good thing).
I was one of the people who they actually unbanned because the bot wrongfully banned it. But because I used a second account during the wrongful ban, again cannot underemphasize so wrong that they admitted it was wrong, it perma banned all of my accounts.
I have a similar story. I was banned, then "unbanned" (as in I got a notification apologizing + stating I was unbanned) but then they never actually lifted the ban
that was pretty common last year. thats how whole swaths of people got eliminated and are now lurking. because multiple accounts have each generate thier own content
I moderated a large sub that participated in the blackout. Our mod team was threatened by the admins into reopening, and that's when I knew I was done with the platform.
Can you give more details?
They basically told us that if we don't reopen they'll simply remove us as moderators of the sub and reopen it themselves.
reddit wants AI mods to replace the human ones now.
No RIF, no reddit, bye Felicia...
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
Same.
It was really fun a long time ago; getting gifts/exchanging gifts. Secret Santa. Making artwork and just trading it for stuff, lots of subs. And overtime all of that was gone. It became a hateful festering pile of shit. Once reddit became "old" it was done and it showed. It really became a hardcore data mining trash bin. Getting multiple down votes for things I disagreed with was it for me; not that I care about the down votes, it's just there was no comments no interaction. Reddit maybe has a few more years left in my opinion, with new users only joining because it was indirectly advertised by the people that made it what it is. It's like Regr'etsy, wasn't too bad on launch to hey allibaba or temu is in the house!
The mod for r/AdultChildrenofNarcissists disappeared, and replacement essentially admitted that they were running an experiment and couldn't give more details because it would ruin the experiment. They also said they were going to try to remove the anti-parent bias in the subreddit. So much for that support group.
So anyway, r/AdultKidsofNarcissists was created, but there's no reason to think that same sort of thing didn't happen to a bunch of other subreddits. They will eventually sell the comment database to someone who'll run a poorly thought out LLM and find red flags by cross referencing a support group subreddit with other subreddits and cause real world consequences. It isn't enough to stop using reddit now; they already have the posts and will have them forever.
something tells me that is r/adultchildrenofnarcassist new mods are right wingers, trying to say parents are not at fault for causing children to hate him, are unemployed, unable to move out of the house, or refusing to house the parents when they retire. it sounds convoluted but alot of stories like this, have a very boomer center to it. why is the 30-40yo woman not having a job, or moving out, or whatever(usually its the sibling complaining)
It used to be a place to see that other people had similar issues with their parents and had links to other resources for people doing research. So of course someone found out the children were talking bad about their parents and brought the parents to come supervise. The perfectly manicured, sharpened fingernail at the tip of the slap to the face was that the new mod removed some of the helpful links, like this one: https://issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing-reasons/ that distills the issue down to such a condensed form that I wouldn't have thought it possible. You'd might as well stand outside an AA meeting and offer free airplane bottles to people walking in as pull that kind of maneuver.
I'm not trying to draw equivalencies between people's trauma, or elevate one or dismiss others, but if a group of people found a spot to sit and talk quietly about shared experiences, then it's better to let them alone. $RDDT couldn't have drawn up a mission statement that more clearly stated that they weren't there to help, and any help derived from their platform was accidental and subject to their "adjustment" at any times.
And just in case anyone missed it, the link that the mod removed from a subreddit by and for Adult Children of Narcissists was this one: https://issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing-reasons/
EDIT: added a piece to a sentence to make a thought more fully formed.
This happened years ago before most of the big reddit controversies popped off and before words like incel and red pill were coined. There used to be a medium sized community called /r/foreveralone. It was mostly a community for people who were romantically alone and provided support and semi-edgy memes about it. Mostly though it was a support group by the time I found it. It was a decent community then full of lonely people who mostly encouraged each other and tried to help each other overcome those mental blocks we all set up that keep us from what we want.
Over time though new users started to migrate into the sub offering a different kind of support. They would claim that women were to blame for their lonely state and their rhetoric became increasingly aggrieved and violent. Around this same time /r/redpill was coming into it's prime and sucking many users down a very dark path. The /r/foreveralone community fractured and a schism created two groups within the community, those that wanted it to remain mutual support and chuds that wanted more red pilled content. Unfortunately the chuds won.
Despite many efforts my members of the community and mods to combat the problem nothing worked. I know many users also reached out to the reddit admins for help, but they chose to do nothing. After unmasking who knows how many chuds posting for support only to try to manipulate the community I left and moved on with my life. But it wasn't until months or years later (I can't remember the exact timeline) that the reddit admins squashed /r/redpill and helped the /r/foreveralone community recover their subreddit, but even now it's still fairly poisonous.
Like Facebook and X after them, reddit had a choice to keep the community free of knuckle dragging chuds, but chose not to for some vaguely defined, free speech ideal. That's why reddit sucks.
I wouldn't call it vaguely defined free speech ideal.
Reddit wants more users. It wants them to look more active. Loud mouth chuds give them that. Infact I feel this is why reddit is pushing algorithms hard. It wants more users, and best way to get more users is to trap more and more of them in echo chambers.
Right wing ideologies were very rare to come by on reddit 2-3 years ago. They were small conservative islands. Today reddit's right wing communities are growing fast, and are larger and more numerous than they've ever been. That's what algorithmic recommendations allow you to do. Also destroyed the reddit Hivemind, though I have mixed feelings on that one.
I don't disagree with you, I'd just like to point out my story happened a long time ago. This was before Ellen Pao and Gamergate and most of the reddit controversies younger people remember today. I was in my mid 20's when I was participating in /r/foreveralone and now I'm in my early 40's. Back then /u/spez, when he was still almost universally loved, posted about not banning the red pill community and it's satellites because of free speech which is what ultimately destroyed the forever alone community and allowed the alt-right pipeline to take root.
It's always bothered me how incel's are discussed when really, the group they are referencing are often sexually active but just deeply misogynistic. Meanwhile many people who are closer to the 'forever alone' crowd deserve genuine sympathy. Being lonely sucks, and being unable to 'obtain' a partner is lonely.
Beyond that - some people will just throw out 'incel' as a catch all for "took issue with any pro-woman or pro-lgbt statement".
Yeah, incel today has more angry loner vibes than anything. It was never a really good term though because involuntary celibate is not an accurate way to describe either the modern chuds or the older /r/foreveralone community members. It's got misogyny baked right in because it externalizes the cause of isolation when in most cases those folks are their own worst enemy when it comes to dating.
The /r/foreveralone community had a somewhat derogatory term to describe it, terminally special. So many of the people who would come to the community looking for help or support would receive pretty excellent and sometimes very personalized advise and do nothing but explain how their specific circumstances meant they couldn't use dating apps or join a group around a hobby or whatever. They preferred to remain isolated rather than leave their comfort zone and where experts at making excuses.
Those folks are one of the reasons the red pill message was so successful in the community. It didn't require them to change anything about how they were approaching dating. It's picky women or alpha males or whatever and never themselves.
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.
before they were called incel, it was the "nice guy"
unfortunately those "forever' alone get draw into the incel manosphere and become mysogynist themselves. its in games too, where people get talk to other characthers, yucky incel talks.
admins are complicit, they know you were likely fighting against TROLLS/propaganda even, reddit has no interest in dealing with these. currently they are now given AI tools themselves.
only the small niche subs remain pretty quiet, the ones that inundated with posts every few hours.
I'm just not buying across millions of users, there exists a combination of ethical pattern matching (e.g. subs, comment patterns, online timing, etc). to reliably identify a single human behind multiple accounts. We're not that unique.
It's 100% IP and cookie based. Each of which can be circumvented without too much issue.
Browser fingerprinting however is not easy to circumvent.
You can generally fool them by just changing one or two variables like GPU acceleration.
Or, change browsers.
i used librewolf now for reddit purposes, maybe thats why my new account dint get hit yet. i also avoid any political subs. for a month brave hid my old account before it was shadowbanned last year, i stopped using that. how do you change the GPU acc? im interested.
There's a couple of extensions for that. But yeah its usually not easy.
some forks have anti-fingerprinting, but they have ways of detecting things like device components. they are pretty much catching onto anti-detect browsers, and ip switching methods(cost money) that isnt a vpn.
they have fingerprinting methods too, like your looking at your browser version, your time zone, and other things. they know people evade by changing thier IP alot, so they upgraded.
I recognize that name from this site.
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?
Ah, thats nice to know. Not a big surprise.
Is it the same one?
they use alot of fingerprinting to find your other accounts, likely used the same IP/DEVICE that recieved the other bans and they just connected the dots. i made an account after a year of shadowbanned all my old accounts. the new ones i use with a different FORK browser, (maybe there was a Ip change) thats why they arnt catching on,. reddit has unofficial unbanning after a while of getting ban, but usually it wont work if you had so many accounts banned. i think a new ID/browser/device is enough. im still using the same device, possibly ip but a different browser.
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.
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.
Left in 2023 when the API thing happened and never looked back. Nowadays I only go there through search engines when looking for a tech solution. Most of the useful stuff is either deleted or outdated. Reddit sucks.
User culture change for sure. The subversive, progressive, smarmy nerds that used to hang out there were "my people" so to speak. The shift to a 50/50 mix of bots and soccer moms made it kinda useless as a forum. Lemmy isn't quite the same, but I think it's a good thing. Much less culturally homogeneous, but 100% authentic.
Unfortunately the one place with the most engagement to solving Linux issues are still the Linux subreddits. I was hoping Linux was more prevalent on Lemmy, but it's not...
I'm not that suprised, lemmy still suffers from there being many choices of instance and their not being a convenient way to compare which ones federate with which other ones.
So much of it is people just ditching about things in their lives looking for validation.
Nothing is about anything anymore.
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.
uhg why.
move on. it ded
I said that nuclear arms race was just stupid at this point.
"I'll kill everyone"
"If you kill everyone I'll kill everyone"
"Well I can kill everyone 3 times over"
"If you kill everyone 3 times over I'll kill everyone 20 times over"
"Oh yeah? We're working on a way to kill everyone 200 times over"
Anyway that got me a 3 week ban for inciting violence. When I pressed the appeal button and said "its actually condemning violence, theres context there" it got upgraded to a permanent ban.
That was the 3rd time I got banned. The first time was from typing "genji main btw" into an overwatch post complaining about how theres no people playing support.
Made an account here on Lemmy in 2023 after the API stuff.
Then, a year later I got permbanned on reddit for being mean to Nazis, talking shit about Elon Musk, and saying Hans Kristian Graebner (the Neo-Nazi who makes the Stonetoss comics) deserved to have his name leaked on the Internet.
New account was banned a year after that for evasion.
Said fuck it, stopped using reddit and started being active here instead.
2025, was basically ban-apocalypse. definitely around time, i noticed quite alot of people being reported, and ban around eleciton time, so it happened quite alot before nov 5 too.
Reddit is owned by US American Big Tech; that’s enough reason.
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.
I was on my regional sub Reddit and it turned right-wing real quick. Heard of Lemmy, decide to check it out, after 2-3 months I saw that I was more on Lemmy than Reddit so I deleted it.
In the background the API shit and their opening in the Market was happening so it probably help me to go
I got banned from my state sub by a mod who didn't live here. Dipshit was a mod on nearly thirty subs. Turns out he/she/it was a right wing shill. That came out in the drama right before I jumped ship and came to lemmy full time.
thats like what happened to cities, states on the west coast. all were controlled by conservatives.
i heard most regional subs have been astroturfed by right wingers, i wouldnt be surprised it came from 1 source.
My account was suspended sitewide by the admins -- not just banned by some mods -- for reporting misinformation in r/conservative. Apparently stating the truth is "mod abuse" for those fascist snowflakes and the Reddit admins support them.
r/conspiracy is probably reddits cash cow for engagement on the site, thats why its on the front page alot of the times.
I miss the days when R/atheism was front page. When that got removed the site went to shit
its mostly the Dinnerdiaries, replacing AITA because people caught on to the fake stories, dinner diaries is also likely fake. and mostly India-centric subs for some reason.
Pointing out that 3/4 of the posts are old junk from karma whores or even suggesting something is AI generated gets you downvoted to oblivion and people calling you anything but nice.
it all changed around 2016-17, when russia started using bot/propaganda for the first time. it was downhill from there. at first reddit was good at "cutting the bots" off, but then realized they were removing engagement so they half assed it.
was banned when I told a Nazi they should "experience the freedom of Auschwitz" if they were true believers. and to not worry about what others have said because "the work you will do there, will set you free".
mods didn't like that and banned me. oh yeah, the Nazi just continued to post white supremacy bullshit.
No story, just dozens (hundreds?) of wasted hours reading slop (the human kind at first, but increasingly also the bot kind later)
not all was slop.
I had shared a few tifu posts that actually did really well you probably read if you frequented that board. I think one of them got around 17k upvotes and was featured on some prominent YouTube channels.
True, but the gem to rough ratio started to get too small and the discussion on good posts was still always bad
I posted to the DnD 5e subreddit about a contradiction in the rules between how elementals and demons are summoned, suggesting that someone can summon a demon who can summon their own demon and so on, forever. Rules as Written allowed it and Rules as Intended also seemed to allow it given summoning elementals explicitly restricted doing summoning lesser elementals all the way down.
Anyway I got about to about 50 downvotes because I said I would allow a player to summon a demon who could summon a demon (who could potentially summon another demon) because, well, DnD. Fuck me I guess.
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.
Fuck I miss playing DnD. Only Dm'd two small campaigns and I was far from knowledgeable about it but it was fun none the less. Had a friend who actively wanted a deck of many things so I said fuck it I'll put one in the campaign. Well he found it. Immediately drew from it. Drew the one that summons death with -4 Ac something like that. Whole party attacks it and they all get their own death to deal with. Party got wiped. But he kept trying to draw from it during the fight and crazier shit just kept happening I think at one point he had another party member draw and that player got banished from the plane
Exactly!
DND sounds kinda degenerate to play with, im guessing thats why it remains in sucha small group.
I was banned in one sub for pointing out how heavy-handed the mods were being about pedantic shit. They are basement-dwelling asshats.
Did it happen to be r/Comics?
It was not. r/GenX.
The gamification of Reddit. Stickers, awards, achievements, all for creating content and engagement, regardless of quality. Now they have actual games in Reddit where you can win awards for... Stuff... I guess. I refuse to engage with any of it.
Deep ties with NFT and crypto. The NFT side died, finally, because nobody really engaged with it. I was given an NFT avatar on Reddit for free, with a whole lot of advertising to engage in lootboxes and such. My response to that was essentially "ok. And fuck you". It's still doing cryptoshit, though, but doesn't advertise it anymore.
Are you a moderator of a loving community? Hate what Reddit has done? Wanna protest? No you can't. If reddit doesn't like your opinion, or you protest against some of their actions, they'll just remove you from the sub you created and the new owner will be some schmuck who agrees to everything.
I've been on reddit for 13 or 14 years I think, had my own subreddit dedicated to my cats, then they closed the API and I couldn't use the free and add-free app anymore to manage it.
the cat subs, are just sad posts, its always "our cat died" like 90% of the posts now.
Got into a thread that was all transphobia. Not the subtle kind, but totally messed up. I was furious nothing was done about it. Glued to my phone, I reported every single one.
Next day I was suspended for abuse of report button. Unfair, but here's the kicker: It was a report 6 months earlier in a different sub, completely different topic.
So these shithead mods let transphobia bullshit slide, then got mad at me for flooding their mod queue, report me, and someone looked through my earlier reports to find something. The reports in that transphobic threads were legit. Mods should have been punished but it was me.
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
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.
Everyone coincidentally has the same opinion as the mods. It's very weird how that happens on every subreddit.
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
201620172016,2017, when they unleashed the banhammer on many subs. because of trumps 1st term, and thats when russia realized that reddit was prime for ragebaiting, thats why the bans started then.
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.
openai and GOOGLE to be exact. but OPENAi stopped participating, which was the drop in traffic and resulted in REDDIT forcing logins now, also at the same time googles try to force you to use your phone to have a google account. they did this at the same time.
What stops them from crawling this site though?
Probably nothing, but at least the people running our instances aren’t directly involved in doing it to us. The people behind this community aren’t pretending that it’s OK to exploit other people who are just trying to connect with each other. And even if OpenAI still slurps up our data, Sam Altman and the other AI billionaires don’t make as much money off of us because they don’t own Lemmy.world and don’t profit off of any deals or ads here. These things make a big difference to me.
I cant remember which sub it was, but I posted something along the line of "If Israel doesn't stop this genocide, they're gonna find out soon."
I was perma banned by a zionist mod for inciting violence.
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.
apparently that "change yuor password" was designed by reddit to confirm thier ban for you.
I don't really think that Reddit sucks. But it's not the best option out there for me any more, which is why I'm here instead. I'd rather be using an open-source, distributed system with a variety of clients.
What? An innocent, new baby??
Sus. We're going to watch you.
/s
3 day ban for "They (here meaning men in the American southeast) hate electric vehicles almost as much as they hate black people."
It's funny because it's true!
I quit with the API bullshit but I first started realizing Reddit sucked when an admin threatened to ban me after I reported a fascist troll running a bunch of sockpuppets. The troll I guess was friends with a mod who was friends with this admin, I don't really know what the deal was but the result was they got me in trouble for abusing moderation. I kept reporting the troll and their accounts eventually got nuked by Reddit a few weeks later, I was never banned or contacted by an admin again.
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.
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?
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.
Ive been shadow banned for talking about maker stuff before. Multiple times. It trips their algorithm because it looks like hacks.
I used to use the api to recommend other subreddits based on other subreddits. That lasted for years until that day.
I contributed to better reddit back in the day.
And then the lost me. They dont care I get it. But because of that the fediverse is nipping at their heels. And I'm staying.
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.
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.
Reddit just sucks. That’s all there is to it. Bots, trolls, /hailcorporate, forced ads, forced app, bans, the API debacle, getting rid of Victoria, quarantining everything while leaving right wing trash subs brigading other subs, hivemind, karmawhoring, race to be the quip for karma no matter how serious the subject… so many reasons to avoid the place in general.
can we not be like every earlier "reddit alternative" that just talks about reddit? i remember the shitstorm that was voat.
i didn't join because of reddit, i joined because i like the threaded conversation model.
I liked voat the first month or so. Then the....banned people came to it. So eww...
voat was started because they removed the jailbait sub. it was never good.
...it started as as annon reddit clone then got popular for the reason above. But I'll agree it was horrid.
I scroll reddit and see >50% bots. You'll see bots easily because they have hidden profiles and make strange / political comments on posts
its mostly AI posts in the front pages. any politics, news, music, ask, AITA(variants), dinner diaries,,,etc. the less known niche ones of the last 2 dont really have bots, so its super quiet.
That's true. I still need some of the communities there because they are so small here. Mostly fitness ones
i visit niche communities, like ask about things in my region like that. i do visit one job related sub, which is interesting basically discussing the same thing here about tech jobs/layoffs, and other fields.
some of the fitness ones are wierd, gym will ban you for mentioning roids, because they dont like to be called out for using PEDs, or mentioning in some other form. when someone posted a meme of rob machelennys fat phase/ and his buff phase i said roids, and i was banned asap.
i saw in another sub, only lurked, how someone lost a ton of weight like form 300lbs to 190something, and he did a shortcut by using roids, i like how people were salivating over that.
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 got banned for making fun of elon. (I posted a pic of a ken dolls non-existent genitals and said, Elon post penis surgery.)
Elon is very aware of reddit posts about him, everytime he tells spez to ban people, spez triggers a ban wave,.
In therir defense, that's just body shaming and not criticism against his behavior/wrongdoings/actions.
No place to spit in a rich mans house but his face
he has an Attack on titan body features.
Permabanned for calling Ann Coulter racist. Appealed, appeal said bam was overturned, account suspension was never lifted. No way to appeal further. 15 years on the platform down the drain. You can't even look at my comment history anymore.
I just closed down the communities I moderated and nuked my entire account afterwards when the API ban was announced. I never looked back.
Permabanned for "threatening violence" because somebody asked what everyone was planning for retirement, and my answer was a sturdy rope. So I guess suicidal ideation is verboten
i assume it was only referring to yourself, and not someoneelse. i do visit a bunch of subs talking about retirement, because i was curious(one was about children not wanting to retire thier parents into thier homes)
Once, it was a shining example to the world of how cool Lisp was, and it had absolutely no inane comments. Then they rewrote it in Python.
Got a lifetime ban for "antisemitism" in a major sub for criticising Israel politics.
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.
most of the posts were just twitter retweets, reposted.
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.
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.
This happens here as well
Ah that's a shame, I must be lucky so far
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.
I saw one too many questions asking what I thought about Andrew Tate, I said that I'd murder him if I could, a couple hours later I got a notification that said I was permabanned.
I was permabanned for reporting an unironic 'kill all men' post.
So many reasons, in no particular order.
Same questions and content being repeated again and again
The environment became hostile, so many people arguing.
Intrusion of politics into everything. Particularly right wing politics.
Extremely inconsistent modding of forums and inconsistent bans etc...
Going public, changes to API, old reddit, comercialization, selling data for AI
I joined when it was a much smaller place, now there are many millions. I realise I like smaller communities. It's why I left Facebook.
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.
politics is the #1 place to get banned quite fast, followed by NEWS, and then any adjacent subs. funny thing whitepeopletwitter never banned, you had to try very hard to get banned for saying the same thing not as a conservative.
It kept throwing subs for Israeli pigs at me, for one.
That and shitty sports that I kept blocking, but it randomly decided the block list didnt exist.
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.
i heard people will try to take over subreddits by brigading mods til htey quit or get banned.
None. Never used Reddit. Never will.
Same goes for any corporate social media.
I wouldn't call it social media. Well I wouldn't have in the past.
But I would call it corporate. Which is why they are desperately trying to make it social media.
Mine's a doozy https://maximiliankohler.blogspot.com/2023/06/reddit-is-dangerous-humanity-needs-an-alternative.html.
Thanks for that, it turns out Mwmbl is my new favourite search engine 🙂
Deleted?
There's a blocked user cap of 1000.
It's not enough.
it only blocks 1000 people, but it stops muting them after. and you can still see the blocked the posts too.
I was churning accounts because I'd get preemptively banned by some subs just for posting in other subs, then I'd post in one accidentally not remembering the preemptive ban and all the accounts get permabanned for "ban evasion", it's too much work. What're ya gonna do? Make a separate email AND account for each subbreddit to prevent that?
Then they remove old reddit for everyone without an old account.
Many of the subs are gone anyway. /r/random mostly ends up on dead subs, and all the users of years ago are gone, seemingly also due to account churn.
The fact that Reddit allowed for the 'ban users if they comment in another sub' thing to exist is another sign that owners have lost their fucking minds.
It's literally just a mechanism for the mega-subs to suppress smaller subs from growing. Why on earth would Reddit go out of their way to introduce monopolies.
People started doing that shortly after the addition of user-created subreddits. At first, it was usually for participating in comically horrible subreddits which have surely been banned by now.
crosbanning is very strange, it happens on lemmy too, at least 2-3 communities have crossbanned me for barely participating in those communities, and they give any reason at all. and its the communities that have problems with. (STar trek website, 196, and dbzer
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.
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].
what i did before was create extra account and let it sit unused, incased one got hit by a temp ban, or too many sub bans. now people have to wait 1+years, if yuo arnnt a serial ban evader.
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?
I was drowning in rage bait engagement bait and just generally bait everywhere. Felt like a fish.
Lemmy feels like the open ocean in comparison. I can choose where to go and what to do. It's a lot emptier in comparison, but that's not necessarily worse than hooks everywhere trying to hack your brain.
Initially came over during the API protests. But my Reddit is Shit angry blab right now is that I can't fucking read comments anymore when just randomly searching things on my phone because there's a pop-up that you can't close that makes it impossible to read more.
I've tried clearing my cache and it seems to come back faster and faster every time. I also flip over to the desktop site instead of mobile to keep reading - but that's a pain in the arse.
So yeah. Greedy bastards are just smashing the 'get our app' banner in your face and blocking everything else. Fuck em
I use uBlock origin to remove that pop-up, 4 taps and it's gone. Just make sure to tap the upper part of the page when selecting what to block, otherwise you won't be able to scroll down.
I come from a generation where there were many societal references to younger males (let's say 12 to 16) being attracted to older women. Think of Van Halen's Hot for Teacher or the scene from the Blues Brothers where the playboy Bunny was thrown through a kid's bedroom and he says "Thank you, god!". When I was that age I would have loved the chance to have had sex with an older woman. I think it's a normal part of the sexual awakening of young straight males.
So there's a story very similar in some sub about a 14yo kid having a woman in her mid-twenties coming on to him. I don't remember if anything physically happened between them. The news about it at the time was saying the kid was traumatized and everyone was screaming it was sexual assault. I posted something along the lines of it being a dream of mine for this to have happened to me. And it would have been. Well you can imagine what happened next. Those on the Internet whose views have been hardened by group think and psychology and where there is no room for any discussion or questioning of these ideas attacked en masse. One person in particular said they were immediately reporting me to the admin of the sub, and sure enough I was banned from the sub within 30 minutes.
People on social media fall into being judge and jury at the slightest push. They're so terrified of losing their group identity that they've shut out any ability to question or consider another viewpoint. They're exactly like the villagers with pitchforks rushing to Frankenstein's castle to kill "the monster".
Logged on to my account while on VPN. They suspended my account and the only way to recover it is through email verification. I didn’t use an email when I created that account a long time ago.
Haven't used it for it to suck. Mostly lurking. Came to Lemmy to try it out.
most people currently using reddit is lurking, i do 75/25 and only niche subs. also people who got burned by reddits AI moderation only lurks now.
Pre 2014 Trump, I believe reddit was so successful in disproving Republican bullshit that they decided to just take it over because they couldn't fight the truth. It was a slow yet successful highjacking. I literally believe they had a thinktank dream it up and hired people to do it.
It's around then when you saw the influx of more right wing users but they were still getting banned by the mods because reddit was a notorious left leaning community. But I think gradually they were able to become mods of themselves.
I think I'm the only person to be banned from world news for being pro Israel and eventually saying fuck israel.
The difference between reddit then and reddit now is night and day. It has become a safe haven of the right wing.
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.
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🫤
Posting links was fucking impossible.
Post some link, and it gets shadow-eaten by the spam filter.
OK, sometimes it gets auto-snatched by some posting rule, like a karma threshold or whatever, which you will not be notified of if you use old reddit.
Or it might be eaten by automoderator for reasons that are complicated to explain.
You might get the post through if you message the moderators. 1 time out of 100, they approve it. 19 times out of 100, they go "this post doesn't seem to be cultured enough to fall under my narrow definition of what's fitting, sorry." the rest of the time, nothing. (At least I didn't get turbo banned. I hear that's what has happened to some people who messaged moderators for innocuous things.)
Meanwhile, shit from corporate shill accounts just flies through because they spend their time (and money) avoiding the landmines.
They say they want community members, not corp sock puppets. Yet, 10+ year old accounts are still considered just as suspicious as fresh users what comes to "link spam".
Boring story. Rarely used the account, got banned for no obvious reason. Byeee
I said that tech oligarchs need pain and ruination. It earned me a ban.