cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/73406944

It all started when my main Reddit account was banned—simply because I posted a comment criticizing the banning of a subreddit—resulting in the immediate loss of an account I’d held for about 4 years, with 102k karma. I appealed, but I received no response—not even a reason for my ban, nor any notification that I had been banned in the first place. I’ve filed appeals repeatedly over the past few months, but today, I’m finally giving up. Fuck Spez and his pathetic, whore of a family. When I submitted my appeals, there wasn’t even any indication that they had gone through; I was just left in total silence, unable to do a thing. I started using an existing alt account for basic tasks, but today, that account was banned too—all because I recommended the non-profit, open-source "VPN Gate" project to someone who was complaining about the mandatory KYC (age verification) requirements being imposed in my country. The only reason I was still using Reddit was out of habit, and I’ve decided it’s time to change some of my habits. Ultimately, this is the inevitable fate of every centralized corporation—without exception. There’s no guarantee that some complete moron won’t end up in charge of any of them. I wish more people realized this. If four years of my effort are being sold off to AI data companies, and everything can be permanently wiped out overnight without a word of warning, then that is, quite simply, data theft. Once again, fuck you, Spez—you absolute piece of shit. If you had even an ounce of courage or integrity, you wouldn’t have imposed those damn API restrictions in 2023 and ruined Reddit. I truly regret the four years I spent here, but it’s better to cut my losses now. Goodbye, you son of a bitch Spez, and your puppet, Reddit...

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[–] 1 point 9 minutes ago*

I've been getting this for a few weeks now, no way I'm making another account. Obviously loading the home page like 3 times per day is bot behaviour!

Side note - If you save a multi reddit, it skips verification and autoloads old reddit. However if you try to load any comments it will block you.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 hour ago

    Ok. Try to not throw a huge wall of text please. I hate reddit too, but this is super boring.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 hours ago

    Did you say something mean about fElon?

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  • [–] 3 points 4 hours ago

    Same bruh. Reddit’s decline is real. In Indian feeds, I only see people posting reels from Insta, thirst trap LLM slop in fashion subReddits or sexually deprived men fantasising about content creators and bollywood actresses in celeb subReddits.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 hours ago

    Left reddit after the API fiasco. You will be fine, anyway reddit is in a very rapid decline.

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  • [–] 8 points 6 hours ago

    Alternatively reddit is done using you lol. Welcome to lemmy!

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  • [–] 1 point 4 hours ago

    The next step is to block that shithole entirely from your feed. I use UBlacklist. It’s pretty easy to set up.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 hours ago

    Pretend you're a Russian bot and you'll have platinum access

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  • [–] 10 points 8 hours ago* (3 children)

    Leaving Reddit is like leaving an abusive relationship (kinda: stick with me on this)

    1. Reddit makes the rules and tells you what you can and can't say
    2. Reddit won't allow you to speak about controversial topics that could be upsetting to it's advertisers (i.e. Israel)
    3. Reddit mods can ban you for no reason
    4. Appealing to "authorities" (Reddit, when mods go crazy) does absolutely nothing
    5. It hurts and is sad to leave
    6. It gets better once you leave
    7. You look back a while later and think, wow it is so much better now you've left.
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  • [–] 4 points 6 hours ago

    The first four of those also apply to Lemmy too though. Depending on the instance, Lemmy mods are even worse than Reddit mods. And there is no “authority” to appeal to here either. The only difference is that there aren’t advertisers that they’re trying to appease, it’s just whatever neckbeard you pissed off that will have a vendetta against you.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 hours ago*

    The other thing that makes it feel like an abusive relationship is how huge it feels. How grand it seems, and how you just can't imagine life without it. I'm still healing from when I recently got sitewide banned for some alleged ban evasion bullshit

    And... as someone who's actually been in abusive relationships, I can attest to your analogy

    Only difference is, I still hope to get back in, and am waiting on my second appeal. It's not a perfect comparison because it still has its occasional good uses, but still I agree

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  • [–] 7 points 7 hours ago

    I banned Reddit a few years ago. They broke my policy so they had to go.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 hours ago

    it took you this long?

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  • [–] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

    Cool, just an FYI when I got perma banned from Reddit a few years ago I was able to go back into my past posts and change them.

    I generated some AI gibberish slop and posted it in all of my past posts just so they couldn’t benefit from my past participation.

    If your still able to do so I highly recommend poisoning your content.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 hours ago

    My account was banned but o never saw this and was able to continue browsing but not post.

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  • [–] 19 points 12 hours ago (4 children)

    I love that it says "This account is banned" Then immediately "Jump back into explore communities" Lol

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  • [–] 13 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

    "we don't want you to participate anymore but we still want you to look at ads"

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  • [–] 5 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

    They have ads? Joking but I never saw any with firefox on ublock. So at least I screwed them back a little, but they got all my comments for free, no small thing adding up all of our contributions, worth more than the ad revenue in many ways.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 hour ago (1 child)

    That's why I deleted my posts and comments regularly. There are even scripts to do this on mass https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

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  • [–] 1 point 38 seconds ago

    I kind of wanted to leave mine up for posterity though. For the real people that may come across the stuff. But perhaps that was a mistake I've been turning that over, wondering if I should've just deleted it all.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 hours ago

    Reddit is just porn.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

    Today I stopped using Bluesky because they suspended my account for suspicious activity. I'm sure it's because I use a VPN to bypass age verification. Oh well. Mastodon and Lemmy it is.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

    If it keeps happening, search your ip on the internet blacklits, just search that and click on the site and they will do it for you, there are several dozens.

    After multiple emails and other sign ups were immediately frozen, leaving me unable to get an email even, I checked and found I was on one, all I did was read the news and comment on social media, and work stuff. I think Israel is putting people on there that piss them off.

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  • [–] 14 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

    Whenever I see people getting banned from Reddit I always revel in the fact that I left on my own terms. I never go back there voluntarily since the API Epoch. Eat my shorts, Reddit.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 hours ago

    Seriously. At least back then their Android app was basically unusable. I haven't tried it since, but suspect that because ads I'd probably hate it anyways. It was an unhealthy addiction.

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  • I left when the great conservatisation started before the API issues. When they basically wanted more conservative moderators in "liberal" places for fair and balanced approach. When people were being banned left and right for speaking out against the regime or telling LGBT people to arm up.

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    [–] 2 points 8 hours ago

    I got a bunch of temporary bans but never cared, they were always undone. Then I got permabanned so I appealed and the last ban got removed but the permanent ban stuck. I took a couple of months before I decided the internet needed my hot takes once again.

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  • [–] 11 points 13 hours ago (5 children)

    What was the likely innocuous comment that caught you a ban? I got IP banned for asking when they're going to launch Marjorie Taylor Greene into the sun. Apparently that was "promoting violence".

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

    Someone was complaining that in their country, everything requires identity verification under the guise of "age verification." I mentioned the existence of "VPN Gate"—a completely open-source, non-profit, educational VPN project that uses residential IPs rather than standard VPN IPs. My account was likely flagged as spam.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 hours ago (1 child)

    I got a violation, (never banned yet but went through maybe 10 accounts in 3 years of use,) one of the later ones was for suggesting Musk should ride his spaceships up into orbit.

    Apparently it's threatening violence. Appeal denied.

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  • [–] 29 points 16 hours ago (17 children)

    Apart from habits, what were the sub-reddits that kept you there, and stopped from transitioning completely before? We can start making similar content and bring more people here.

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  • [–] 30 points 16 hours ago (1 child)

    I went cold turkey after the third party app debacle but I really missed the home assistant subreddit. There is a home assistant community but it’s nowhere near as active.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 hours ago

    I miss getting help with all sorts of stuff, home improvement and repair and how to stuff, brewing, growing stuff, and the like. Plus they have way better animal videos, to say nothing of all the other video content not found on lemmy.

    Can't be helped, reddit is unusable, politicians and rich dickheads are leaning on them to make moderation decisions and they are trhing to bend us over for them.

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  • [–] 6 points 13 hours ago

    I've been clean cold turkey from Reddit for over 3 years now since I made my Lemmy account but I still really miss active discussions about newly released games :(

    You can make a post in one of the gaming comms here and sometimes you'll get a couple folks, but it doesn't really catch on the same. I had a grand old time reading tons of build discussion and memes when Elden Ring came out, but since Nightreign came out I effectively haven't interacted with its community at all.

    I like Lemmy specifically because it is smaller and more close knit, usually. But it misses out on some of the bigger town-square types of discussion that reddit could enable because reddit had sixty five gorillion users, especially in the gaming space.

    I expect that whatever discussion of this type doesn't exist on reddit probably exists on Discord but that also sucks for a completely separate, but similar, set of reasons. I still use Discord, as of currently, but I hate interacting in big public servers and never do it, and it misses a lot of the thread-and-comment structure that I liked so much about Reddit. (Discord does technically support threads, but they work differently and nobody uses them properly anyway.)

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  • [–] 7 points 14 hours ago

    I read reddit but no longer contribute in any way. Activity level is just way lower here, especially for niche interests. I've increased the amount of other websites I look at (here, hacker news, steam forums) overall

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  • [–] 13 points 16 hours ago (8 children)

    Not OP, but there are a lot of niche subreddits where you simply can't get information anywhere else. I quit Reddit entirely after the APIocalypse, and I know around that time people started replicating the extensive network of Sports team subreddits in various places here. But, there are simply not enough people here to make that work.

    I have not logged in (other than to manipulate the crypto out of my Reddit Vault and sell it before it crashed) since then. There are precisely four subreddits I monitor via RSS because the info simply doesn't make it here. But Reddit has already announced their RSS access is going away. When it does, I guess I'll just have get that info somewhere else.

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    [–] 2 points 9 hours ago

    Happened to me four times. Fuck reddit

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  • [–] 9 points 14 hours ago*

    Similar thing happened to me. It was a near 20 year old account. Somehow it got hacked and banned. for my history I felt a sense of loss because I realized I wanted to be able to look back and see my old posts and comments. I appealed with no answer, it's like appealing into the void.

    I still had the addiction to seeing content and reading comments, seeing something always new. But I slowly started coming around to fediverse. Not all at once, I created a new reddit account just to see the content. It pissed me off they gated the content to people logged in, pissed me off they keep trying to push you to use the app, but I eventually gave in because of my content addiction to seeing that new dopamine drip feed.

    The final straw was when I started noticing a more hostile commenting environment. I would comment something innocuous, but then I would get people arguing with me on fairly un controversial comments. I would notice they would be accounts with private histories less than a year old. Some would have only fans- like ads in their profile.

    I also noticed a vast uptick in rightwing trolling and right leaning comments. These accounts all seemed suspect. Reddit had always been a left wing space. I really think a lot of the money being funneled into these midterms is being used for troll farms and bot farms to astroturf narratives on social media platforms. That was the last straw. I was arguing with people who were probably bots on reddit, giving reddit the engagement they want and I had enough.

    It really is an addiction, I had to cut it off but I still try to pull up reddit sometimes when i'm bored. But I think fediverse is really going to be the future and we have to keep getting people to gradually come here.

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