I lurked Reddit for a long time before creating an account which is now over 6 years old. I was a ‘Top Contributor’ and in the rewards program. 89k karma, never promoted violence or targeted any group, but I got a 7-day ban which was followed up hours later with a permanent ban. This is because of a comment criticizing Senator Radcliffe, trump, and Musk. The comment included profanity, (I called them hypocrites and cunts), but it wasn’t directed at any user or marginalized group. Just harsh political commentary.
Reddit initially issued a 7-day ban, which I appealed. That appeal was approved, the comment was restored, and they admitted it didn’t violate the rules. But the permanent ban still stands, and my follow-up appeals on that have been ignored. No explanation. No transparency. Just gone.
It’s made me realize how fragile “free speech” is on platforms like Reddit. You can insult regular users and get away with it, say horrendously racist, misogynistic, and homophobic things, but speak too plainly about powerful people and suddenly you’re promoting “hate.”
I combed through the Reddit rules, and nothing I have ever commented or posted violates them.
That’s the reason I’m here on Lemmy now. I’m trying to read more, scroll less, and engage with platforms that aren’t actively censoring political dissent. Who else is in the same boat? Is there anything that can be done to hold Reddit accountable or make people aware of they way they are censoring speech? This is my first Lemmy post. I marked it NSFW because of the profanity.
I got banned for calling a guy a “fascist sanewasher” and refusing to post an apology when a mod messaged me to tell me to apologize.
Also here after a reddit ban. Mine was also politically motivated.
I watched admins remove a comment that was not violent, no profanity, nothing like that. The offense: the commenter described what “black-bagging” was, in reference to the immigrants being abducted around the country. Someone asked what “black-bagging” meant, he replied with one sentence just explaining the meaning of the term, comment nuked within five minutes.
I then told this story in another comment in another thread. Didn’t say shit about Musk or Trump. Just told the story of how reddit admins wouldn’t let this guy explain what black-bagging meant.
Permanent ban within one hour for “ban evasion.” Never been banned prior. It was my first and last reddit ban.
Fuck spez, fuck reddit, fuck the rest of em all.
looks like a they are quashing any anti-musk and trump sentiment on reddit, any attempts to report them can also result in a ban too. they definitely dont want what musk and trump are doing being discussed in reddit in serious manny, we can see a proportional response from reddit when trump and musk did something, and Musk also recently complained to reddit they need to censor people more.
It’s filled me with such joy (schadenfreude?) watching their stock drop the past couple months.
I upvoted a comment that was just a gif of Luigi Luigi (from Nintendo) smoking a cigarette.
“Promoting/glorifying violence”
Fuck Reddit. Fuck Spez. Fuck Elon.
I got banned for saying Andrew Tate fans are fucking retarded.
Genuinely an insult to actual mentally disabled people comparing them to tate groupies.
They hated him because he spoke the truth.
First permaban was for asking: “Any updates on Mitch McConnell? I could use some good news.” Mod appeal denied
Then on another account a year later (bc I got so many death threats from Nazis on Reddit), I forgot I had a ban on that sub and said, “We should spend money feeding our kids instead of spending it to blow up someone else’s kids.” And that was an IP ban.
Crazy, I’ve seen literal Nazis on there not even get comments removed. We live in dark times.
the first reason was ridiculous, jyust for asking that question? you know it turning right wing, when you cant even IMPLY things. i used accounts like you did, dint get ban that aggressively, maybe because i was also using multiple locations, confused reddit for a while.
Yeah I got banned for 7 days then used my alt account and got hit with a perma ban. I got banned last summer and have not really regretted it. I was part of the Digg migration so I had been there a long time. I was pissed at first then I realized it really means nothing in the end.
i came from Y’A answers and various forums, never knew digg existed. it seems alternate account seems to recieve a heavier ban than the main one, and its risky to have an extra account. when one of my main accts were temp ban in oct '23 for criticizing israel, i switched to a backup older account thinking it would be safer with an old account, i managed the whole year(although i think get many warnings an 1 sub ban) only til feb i recieve the full arsenal of bans
Spez is a spineless cuck.
Holy crap that is EXACTLY what happened to me this week. I wasn’t top contributor or anything so grand but I got a 7 ban after criticizing imperialism which after making an appeal that was rejected. I literally did nothing afterwards but woke up to a perma ban that was issued several hours after with no indication of why.
it seems they are site-wide banning people after thier 1-week temp ban? i had one before they immediately banned all my other accounts, eventhough those havnt participated in those subs i got banned recently. they are also looking for any old accounts you may have banned from, so they are retroactively applying to all your accounts.
It’s funny how we used to have this trope of the mighty censorship bureau that has to rubberstamp everything (like they do for movies) but the reality is that the sycophants will trip over themselves to censor their neighbors in order to please those above. In Reddits case you have subreddit mods banning and censoring to please the reddit mods, who are trying to please reddit management, who are trying to please people like Musk, who are trying to please Trump. Trump doesn’t have to say anything, those low level Mods are doing all the censoring for him pro bono.
mainly musk was complaining, and he was getting people banned. everytime the gop or musk complained the reddit initiate one of thier famous purges. now they are including vague responses in a ban message so it reduces thier liability, and gives them plausable excuses to ban people.
I got banned about a year ago for… checks notes repeatedly calling a genocidal army “bastards” =,D
Edit… ok maybe I called them sons of bitches and nazis.
They especially hate it when you’re correct.
Or constantly criticize Capitalism.
Who knows, maybe some of their mothers were fine women and you got banned for misinformation
Edit: Somehow I added an apostrophe. Looks like the virus is spreading to me
I know from reliable sources that the mothers of said genocidal defense forces indeed goose step and bark at the same time
Maybe Reddit required Trump-approved sources.
Same, happened to me hours ago, with no message stating why, or no recourse.
Elon whined to Spez to do something about Redditors being mean to him.
I guess it worked. Fuck both of them.
Welcome, c’mon in outta the cold. There’s a warm spot of ere
I really liked Reddit, getting a lot of value out of the content posted there by people. And I met some cool people through it.
I never got banned from it myself, but as time went on it was very clear that the company in charge of the platform was not steering things in a good direction, and was not responsible for the value I liked. They just captured the value by being the place where people posted. They really drove that point home when they locked off the API, and I completely quit Reddit at that point, migrating to Lemmy instead.
I definitely feel that Lemmy doesn’t have as much value collected on it yet compared to Reddit. There’s just not as many people posting and generating that value. But, it is free of that sort of draconian control that Reddit has. Not just temporarily free, as a favor from venture capital to draw people in. Permanently free. So, if we build up the value of Lemmy by having more people post here, we will be able to enjoy that value free from the corpo BS.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. :P
I noticed a big difference after they cut off the API. I’ve only been on Lemmy a few days, but I feel the same way about the amount of content. Hopefully more and more people will migrate here as reddit continues their nonsense. It’s a shame to see what it has become.
Been on Lemmy from Reddit for over a year. Really don’t miss it, except for a few niche communities.
I’ve been here since the third party app culling and it’s been steadily growing I think from my anecdotal feels when using it. It definitely has a long way to go to replace what reddit was, but hopefully it just keeps growing bit by bit. I see posts like yours frequently these days so you’re definitely not the only one leaving.
I’d guess a good bit of us used to almost entirely browse reddit through a third party app (me with Sync) and for various reasons didn’t capitulate, been on Lemmy since and have vastly increased my time with Linux as a result xD
I think you’ll just want Substack and/or BlueSky then. Most long form content has moved to Substack.
I was on reddit since around 2010. Had probably 500k karma in total? I was around before the apps. Still in the air of early internet vibes. It was a great place to find your community and chat.
I got my first ever temp ban a month ago for saying Luigi started a movement that our world needs. For billionaires need to be afraid of every day people.
Got a ban on r/news. Then shortly after a full ban.
I’ve been banned from plenty of right wing subs and it’s never been an issue. But one comment into their top corporate subreddit did it. So I left. Fuck em. There is no free speech there and to be honest. The quality of comments and community has dropped so heavily since 2016 that it doesn’t feel like a loss to me. Reddit community used to have standards and free speech for anyone. Now it’s no different from Facebook. Shitty joke comments on serious topics. Bots everywhere. It’s just a black hole now.
Couldn’t agree more with your assent. On one of my alts. I said we should collectively throw dog shit at Reddit HQ and they banned me. lol. It was a joke playing on the farmers that drive manure spreaders into the villages to fuck with council.
Reddit died the day they fired Victoria for… checks notes, doing her job effectively. That’s when I knew that reddit was fucking doomed. Everything since then has just been nails in the coffin.
news is one of those subs to avoid, they ban very easily much like r/politics does. they misconstrued my statement on several occasion and banned it outright.
I wish more people would travel here. We need people to build up the communities and interact with content. It’s refreshing to see comments under limited moderation, or moderation that actually targets the right kind of hate speech: the powerful punching down.
I only visit Reddit when someone here links to it, since I’m assuming the comments are relevant, or if I’m doing a Google search and the answer is in a Reddit comment.
Reddit is dying from the top down. People migrating away would show billionaires that they don’t control us.
This is my first comment to say I am also a reddit refugee!
welcome 🫂
Thanks! I’ve been on reddit for 11 years and I haven’t been active on it for a month. Things are changing and I don’t feel good about it :/
its clear reddit is allowing right wing/russian trolls to astroturf left leaning comments, any criticism is usually met with an increased sensitivity of thier “comment removal, karma, spam filters” its funny they encourage reporting, but hate responding to these reports if you do it too many times, it was instant temp ban which cascaded in banning in all accounts.
You’ll be happy to know that lemmy’s monthly active user count has grown ~20% in the last month.
I think what would help in this would be more options for apps (which there are thankfully) but also an easy to read guide on how this all works and how to sign up and get on board. It’s complexity vague in this effort. Which does weed out the certain kind of people who aren’t tech savvy. But it would help its numbers quite a bit.
I think Lemmy is not super likable or usable. It tries to be something it can’t be imo.
It would be better to just use the old style forums again, one niche topic/website style, and not a conglomerate. Or just use mass social media if that’s what you want, on a place like BlueSky or Substack with mostly consistent and understandable content moderation.
I haven’t had that experience. I barely understand how Lemmy works but this app I use makes it function like Reddit. I can’t even tell the difference, day to day, but vaguely understand that if the “country” my account is on starts to get weird, I can emigrate elsewhere.
top down, and INSIDE out, they were rottening from the core before it became top down.
When you absolutely have to visit Reddit for whatever reason, you should use an alternate frontend. The one I’m familiar with is called libreddit and functions similarly to nitter for twitter. You can do a search to find a large list of instances, but all you do is replace the “http://reddit.com/” part of the URL with the name of the instance. I usually use eddrit.com or safereddit.com
the thing is you only need to adblock them, to deny them ad revenue.
