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.

I used to have been on Reddit for about 10+ years. I enjoyed the platform because I was able to feel like I was part of a community. I got to vent about my work, rant about my problems, help out people by answering their problems, giving suggestions, post my opinions on things in some subreddits and contribute to others. Felt like I was a member.

Then I just noticed the atmosphere change for the worst, thanks to politics and socially charged individuals who politicize and turn every platform into an activist podium of some sorts. Everyone seemingly got argumentative, trolls became more and more prominent. It was at this point I was starting to see bans after bans. It was pissing me off so I got mutinous overtime which lead to more bans, making more alts that equaled to more bans.

It got to a point where I’ve been banned so much that I was shadow-banned on sight, regardless if I made a account on a VPN or not. The old trick of going to AskReddit to build karma up on a new or alt account wasn’t working anymore. Because Reddit was getting on to those tactics thanks to others having done it multiple times. So after these 10+ years, every and any enjoyment I’ve had on that platform was all but gone.

And I’d like to believe that because of my main IP being changed, I’m able to partake into it again recently as a couple months ago to the present now. The platform is all but unenjoyable. You see the same posts. The same questions asked hundreds of times. Moderators being trigger-happy on bans, which already I’ve gotten one from a wrestling subreddit of all places. Rules don’t matter because everywhere on every subreddit there’s a section that says ‘Moderator’s Discretion’ which means that moderators can do whatever they fucking want anyways so why have rules?

And the whole Reddit filtering shit is awfully annoying. Yeah, have fun making a post where you pour even some of your most natural feelings into it, without trying to be offensive or stepping on toes, just for that damn thing to trigger and remove it altogether. Good luck talking to moderators too, who take their sweet time getting around to even viewing the post, with a good chance they’ll remove it themselves.

It’s like Reddit has committed all of their resources, to make it an unbearable wasteland of shit. Spez did a good job at that. For every step forward he thinks he has taken of progress, he sets the platform five steps back. That’s some talent.

And Spez can absolutely go fuck himself for being the corporate dick-sucker he’s always been.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

No story, just dozens (hundreds?) of wasted hours reading slop (the human kind at first, but increasingly also the bot kind later)

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.

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