I have been supporting Lemmy recently a lot and made posts about Lemmy that got big reach. Today, sadly the reddit account through which, I moderated a lot of subs and spent time on, comes to an end. The reason was because I spammed according to reddit, but the reality is that they have censored me because I was hurting Reddit.
Asking multiple third-party app devs consider Lemmy + Made the same post here as well
I never thought this would happen, not that I didn’t completely expect it (but maybe not this soon and sudden), after all Reddit is known for censorship, and the fact that Reddit admins have absolute power over this website makes this believable. But part of me, misses that reddit account, it has been special to me, as I’ve spent countless of hours spending my personal time to moderate and improve communities that helped Reddit thrive. I moderated as many subs as over 25, many of them had atleast over 1k people, some as many as 200k if not more.
Before this happened, suspiciously, they banned r/LemmyMigration today early morning,
it remained banned for a few hours and returned back to normal (not weird at all). I thought that was a mistake, as the sub was back to normal unbanned, but it seems like the Reddit admins realized if they banned my sub, that would prove how they censor it, it can work against them. Now, it seems like they have realized that bringing my account down would be more effective, and stop me from possibly sharing how they censored my sub on other subs for example.
It’s a shame, and part of me is sad, everything I worked hard for was taken away by them all of a sudden. I wanted to bring some of my communities here, now everything is gone, and it feels more like starting from scratch (Or discuss with mods I am still in contact with, and get help to bring communities I was planning on bring here, but it certainly makes things harder, not giving up anyways, especially not after this).
BTW I have filled an appeal, but I don’t expect this to be reversed, this was planned by the Reddit admins and all they have to do is ignore my appeal, there is nothing more I can do to get my account back, and they just got rid of someone who was pinpointing some of their biggest flaws and potentially dangering their platform’s dominance in the “aggregation and discussion platforms” market.
A note to all refugees and ex-redditors here, or those who are planning to join Lemmy - See the power a centralized corporation like Reddit holds. With a decentralized alternative like Lemmy, you can host your own instance or join another one if you get censored, with lemmy, we can put more power back in the hands of the people.
I don’t have much else to say, moving on I will have to work with mods left that I do know through external platforms like Discord and try to bring some communities here. I hope this does not happen to any other moderator who have spend countless of hours helping Reddit in-directly like I did, somehow escaping such a suspension.
EDIT: There is some controversy in the comments if I actually spammed, I don’t think I spammed at all, I only made a post on r/ApolloApp, it became a hit so I cross-posted it to other third-party app subs, just so that it can hopefully reach out to the respective developers for them to possibly consider Lemmy in the wake of new reddit API changes.
I was also certainly not the only one mentioning alternatives like Lemmy on the r/Apolloapp or any other third-party app sub, in-fact many people were mentioning alternatives, though I was banned, also my community r/LemmyMigration as mentioned above was called spam (and was temporarily banned, but was weirdly brought back up just to put my account down later today afternoon) when it only had 2 posts today morning. To me, “spam” seems like it is only used as a cover up by Reddit, the real reason is that my posts, just like r/LemmyMigration, was about Lemmy, a competition to Reddit.
Also if it was really spam, as soon as I cross-posted my post from r/apolloapp to the other subs, the mods would have removed it well before they got a lot of attention, why didn’t they?
EDIT 2: A user called @danke has been spreading misinformation about me in the comments:
Just as you did on your newly created reddit alt, you’re painting this lie that you were banned for your tiny no-name subreddit and not for spamming this garbage on 11 different mobile app subreddits in quick succession. It’s truly like clockwork for sitebanned users to lie and omit these massive details.
This is a blatant lie, I mentioned about the cross-posts right IN THIS post: “Asking multiple third-party app devs consider Lemmy + Made the same post here as well”
As you can see, I made the post right here and on reddit, i never missed any details.
This is another good reason to stop using reddit. The internet used to have millions of active message boards for discussion of numerous topics. Reddit has essentially become one giant message board to rule them all. The world does not need this. Best to help decentralize the internet by promoting alternatives.
One of the reason reddit rose from these boards was persistence, boards were all over the place and no sureness if they will stay tomorrow. It seems reddit posts now have the same fate.
Delphi was pretty good. But it was also fairly persistent.
Just got banned from a meme sub for making a meme about moving to Lemmy… Even tho the sub is participating in the blackout. Go figure.
I would suspect that’s the admin’s doing, but I wouldn’t actually know
Guess Reddit admins can ban anyone even if they don’t moderate that specific subreddit.
Many mods are narrow-minded as well. Argentina subreddit was a perfect example.
Have you seen the drama over at r/sysadmin? TBH whether Reddit survives this or not (I’m assuming it will), I’d rather be over here. TBH the smaller user base is actually a plus.
Reddit permanently suspended all of my accounts because I said Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a cunt for not retiring when she had the chance. R/politics banned that account, and then a few weeks later I’d forgotten about that incident and commented in another post from a different account. That’s when reddit permabanned all of my accounts.
I’ve been on reddit since August 2008 when Randal Monroe published this xkcd about it: https://xkcd.com/477/
Bonus link: https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/71v7z/typewriter_xkcd/
15 fucking years on that site and they ban all my accounts and devices, then third party apps, porn, and who knows what else. Good riddance.
@redditrefugee @Archit bit of a rude word to call her, especially in the US if you’re not from here and your culture is a lot more relaxed on that word. So while it’s gross that they’ve banned you I’m kind of not surprised that kind of language would attract that kind of attention.
Except the mods on Reddit don’t mind at all if you insult conservatives or Republicans with much worse rhetoric. In fact. they encourage it.
If this is true, this is probably an anti competitive practice and you can report it to regulation authorities in the US and EU, you might want to consult some non profit that deals with open source and free software for legal advice.
you can report it to regulation authorities in the US
Funny you think the US cares.
Louis Rossmann’s lobbying videos have made me lose all of my trust in the integrity of the US government tbh
Things are probably not as black and white as that, The US have fined corporations before for anti competitive practices.
Sure, but the fines seem like just a business expense for most of those corps tbh, small enough that the profit easily outweighs the fine.
We can try to send an email to FSFE and though them we may be able to reach some more visibility. Also, there is a large list of journalists that already use and support the Fediverse, some of them write for big newspapers. Another thing could be directly contacting your MPs, but the communication in that case is different I guess
“Spam” reeks of weak horseshit justification for reddit’s actions here. Lots of people x-post all sorts of things all the time. They were itching for a legitimate-sounding reason to ban you and they just reached for the first thing they could find using the loosest possible definition.
It is. Have you seen any of those onlyfans girls Reddit accounts? They post the same photo over 100x per day to all different subs. If you scroll down their profile, you can scroll for a good solid 5 minutes before you reach 7 days ago.
This isn’t about spam. Spam gets caught in filters. Spammers get shadow banned.
That explicitly violates the spamming and self promotion rules.
Meanwhile, reddit admins:
___In reality, its whatever causes Reddit to look worse for their upcoming IPO.
And the real issue here is that this lying and deception is at the root of Reddit’s core values.
https://venturebeat.com/social/reddit-fake-users/
" (Cofounder) Huffman said one other strategy proved crucial to Reddit’s early success, which most people are unaware of: The team submitted a ridiculous amount of content under fake user accounts to give the appearance of popularity. Yes, you read that right. Reddit — a site that values a fair and open democratic process to determine worthy content and police itself — sleeps soundly on a bed of lies. "
Lol thank you for that article. I never knew reddit started out by astroturfing their own site. I’m sure they’d probably stopped doing that by the time I joined, but with that, various leadership/admin scandals in the time since, and now gaslighting third party app devs/users, I’m pretty much done with their shit. I might browse communities that haven’t gone another direction yet, but I don’t think I’m going to contribute anything over there anymore.
Yeah I had all my accounts permabanned last week myself, including a porn account, 2 camped accounts, and a 10y old occult account. All gone. They also shadowban all from my previous IP.
I also had a rather public blowout as well previously, about very similar issues. All it takes is a few dozen people to report you and permaban city here you come. And no, you’re not told why either.
Im done with feeding anything to reddit: including content, comments, or even basic usage/telemetry. I can surf reddiv via cached data via archive.org or google cache.
(and yes, I could defeat their IP and invasive browser/OS identification. No, I hope they die. edit: they as in reddit, not individuals)
Yeah. I’m pretty sure I saw some of OP’s posts (it’s what led me to sign up here) and they were helpful. I think the only thing considered spammy is maybe some of the crossposting of the same information, but it was useful information (for me at least).
I’m not at all surprised Reddit is doing this sort of thing. They’ve been known for this, and the timing was ripe for another one of their trademark iron fist overreaches.
All hail Lemmy. I really hope it gets the critical mass it needs after these shenanigans.
This is showing that they know about Lemmy, which to a huge corporation like that is huge. It means they’re starting to take it seriously.
Good. Let them sweat.
Sorry you had your account taken away because of it. I’ll use my throwaways now to evangelize it.
They absolutely know about us, probably from a long time ago, but especially in this past week, with lemmy getting posted everywhere.
They’ve done an amazing job at burning their community. They think 3rd party apps are only used by super nerds (or at least many of the people I’ve talked to do), but I think they forgot who provides most of the content.
Well, bots now, but good content usually came from the super nerds
Sometimes I do get a bit doomerist about it. If reddit is to be believed, they claim something like < 20% of people use old.reddit, or mobile apps. That seems incredibly low to me, but I must admit most of the people who I encounter IRL that use reddit don’t know about old reddit, RES, or other apps.
Removed by mod
You’d be surprised. For example, on r/electricvehicles, one of the subs I used to moderate, the majority of our community members were on mobile platforms, more than those on PC even though I am personally more on PC.
Which is why they’ve been waiting, I’m sure they kept the numbers updated to know what critical mass they thought they needed to be able to chop off this part of their userbase. Ignoring that this part was also the ones who are their most dedicated users, there for the longest amount of time.
I think it has more to do with timing on business/IPO decisions. They’ve decided their plan forward, and they’ve decided that they can afford to lose some users.
I think they’ve also convinced themselves that most people using 3rd party apps or old.reddit will just get in line, because they won’t want to actually leave the platform.
I wonder how that’ll work out for them.
Agree, this is certainly a calculated move.
I have a feeling that if you really crunch Reddit’s numbers, the content that provides the most engagement and revenue is NSFW content. Reddit is one of the only large social media websites that allows NSFW and the subreddit system makes it much easier to categorize and find content than Twitter, so there are a massive number of invisible users who do not use the site for anything except NSFW, which is also why it’s specifically targeted in the new API policy. Long-term, technically knowledgeable users who produce high-quality content are not nearly as financially exploitable as the mass of users who use Reddit as a NSFW directory and who have no alternative to migrate to.
Plus, the majority of active Reddit users are non-technical “normies” who joined Reddit after hearing about it from trends like the GameStop stock. Those users use the official app and have no idea what an API is, so they don’t care and will continue to use Reddit.
Reddit is so damn hypocritical here. They are successful because Digg buried itself doing shit like this. They literally got success as a result of another company doing the speedrun-your-platform-into-oblivion playbook that they are now following themselves. Look in a mirror, idiots, you’ve become exactly that which was the downfall of your competition some 13 years ago.
This is unsurprising, sadly. Reddit’s moderation is a joke, and they’re very well known for putting down oppositional posts and users. With the impending public offering this is only going to get worse.
That sucks dude. Fuck Reddit
Pretty sure Reddit can’t ban people for promoting/linking to competitors sites as there is EU regulations in place to prevent this.
This issue was raised when Twitter tried to stop people from linking to their Mastodon accounts. Twitter put the policy in place and then quietly removed it soon after.
If you really believe that you were banned for promoting Lemmy then you should mention this in your appeal but as others have mentioned it seems like the issue was spam.
And sure maybe they were waiting for any reason they could get to ban you because you were promoting Lemmy and they got you on spam, always gotta read the contract/TOS to make sure the other party doesn’t get you on a technicality
If you really believe that you were banned for promoting Lemmy then you should mention this in your appeal but as others have mentioned it seems like the issue was spam.
And that’s precisely why the issue is going to be ‘spam’, even when it isn’t. Because if you can’t get away with stating the real reason the ban went into effect, you’re going to do it under the auspice of something that has a degree of plausible deniability. I’m far less willing to give Reddit the charitable benefit of the doubt on this, seeing the shear amount of ridiculous bans that have been given out to people. But who knows, it’s entirely possible it could’ve been spam.
Cracking down on people advertising it is a sign of weakness, they’re afraid and need to limit people spreading the word. Hopefully the coordinated moderation strike that a lot of subs are doing makes a dent on their user base, I hope people really move to federated alternatives this time instead of staying on the hostile platform/just crossposting like it happened with the Twitter/Mastodon thing.
I was shadowbanned just for upvoting your posts. I’ve tried posting in many subreddits where I used to be able to post before, but I don’t see my posts from other accounts. I haven’t received any messages or warnings indicating that I have been banned.
Things are definitely starting to get weird there, my account is starting to act up, not fetching posts, just had a popup and it went away in chat for “Cannot get info on banned users”.
It’s Monday morning. Something tells me some new directives came down from on high about competitor talk.
Reddit is trash. Reddit admins are trash.
i got banned from my fav game’s sub (gta online) for saying fuck islam cus many casino features are unavailable for me, even the -free- daily casino wheel spin… their reasoning was “racism”. im an arab…
White people say the darnest things when they think they’re on the moral high ground.
That’s shitty and I’ve been in your shoes (being banned on the shittiest way*), but on a lighter side it shows that promoting Lemmy there has an effect!
I think that “we” (i.e. people who are trying to convince people to migrate) should be doing this harder. Like, mentioning that you’ve been using Lemmy and other instances in the app subreddits, encouraging people to migrate, highlight other issues that happened and will happen with Reddit, this kind of stuff. A lot of us will be banned under shitty excuses… but frankly? Consider it as a badge.
* What pissed me in that case wasn’t even the ban, but which accounts were banned. They banned all my accounts, regardless of recent activity, except the one that I used for mod duties. “We don’t want you, but we still want your free worker, you sucker” doesn’t work for me. (I don’t regret dropping the mod duties on the spot then.)
At this point I am afraid even mentioning Lemmy in a couple of subs will lead Reddit in masking you as spammer, I would have taken it easy even if one of the subs I cross-posted to removed it as spam (things were dead silent, and suddenly a full account suspension comes in, not to mention my sub being banned briefly that is also about Lemmy prior to that), so I don’t think this is because they actually look at this as spam, but a convenient way to mask me when they actually censored my and my sub that was growing.
That’s why it’s all the more worthwhile to just cut the cord already and jump ship. If you aren’t allowed to state your personal endorsement of something or offer up alternative platforms for discussion, that’s something ‘else’, masquerading as the removal of a spammer. Spamming is in the delivery of the content. Not in proposing something for other people to investigate. I don’t have a problem leaning on the side of censorship on this. Especially if your style of post is similar to what you’ve displayed here on this thread. If not though, then your bad was probably justified.
When Reddit doesn’t want you to do something, you don’t stop doing it; you do it in a smarter way.
Odds are that you triggered Reddit’s automatic detection of spam, and they potentially added “lemmy” to the “spam links”; but they have no way to detect something like “lem [remove this] my dot ml” or “that Fediverse platform starting with “l” and ending with “emmy””, or stuff like this. Also, never copy and paste text across communities, as this is rather suspicious activity.
When Reddit doesn’t want you to do something, you don’t stop doing it; you do it in a smarter way.
Lol, r/PoliticalCompassMemes was Exhibit A when it came to innovating ways to get around this.
So, this might or might not provoke the Streisand effect? At either case it’s important to post links to your alternative accounts on different platforms on your bio and put it in archive.org + archive.today for ban reasons. Anyone on any platform can get banned, it’s important to have a plan for that. Hope you can recover at least partial/full of what was banned.
