This is my third account in the piefed/lemmy universe and the experience feels a lot like the years immediately after Digg imploded but before the incident with the first censorship revolt (I forget what that was even about). That's when the first big change to the "Hot" algorithm was made that made it easier to moderate but also made the site more stale.

Thinking about what that website was like then vs now is more than a bit depressing actually. I knew a handful of the original reddit dev's at a professional level after meeting them at a couple PyCon's. Still have a couple of the Reddit stickers they would randomly hand out to people. I don't think I ever met Aaron in person but I talked shop with him a lot about the python framework he had made. Bleh.

The astonishing part is how they manage to both be overly heavy-handed on moderation and STILL keep floating a fuckton of racism and other bigotry to the top.

I kept getting shadow banned constantly. My comments ending up with 1 view no up or down votes. For completely arbitrary reasons as well.

Same. Pretty sure it's because I was using a VPN. Gave up on it a while ago; haven't looked back.

accidentally using extremist terminology

That's similar to how I learned about Reddit's stance on punching Nazis.