Well, it may be a “tale as old as time” but here I am… 8 year Reddit veteran with 660K karma as of last week. I had a hella shock a couple of mornings ago when I refreshed the home page only to see a big red banner saying “this account has been permanently banned from Reddit, see your inbox.”
I check my inbox, and there is nothing there. Great.
OK, I’ve had some experience with weird Reddit moderation over the years. I’ve appealed sub bans and been reinstated, or not bothered. I’ve been permabanned from at least one group for saying sarcastic and critical things about Israel (not about Jewish people per se, about Israel the nation state under its current regime). I’ve waited out a week ban without complaining because I did use intemperate language late one evening, or carelessly broke a rule like “all top comments must include a link to a published paper”.
But a permaban from the entire platform?? That came as a real shock. And there was no explanation. I could see that one of my comments from the evening before had been deleted, but I have no memory of the content of that particular comment; I think I was saying something angry or critical about the US/Israel attack on Iran, but I don’t recall it being particularly fiery or profane.
A day or so later the message finally landed, telling me that my account had been banned because of “repeated violations of policy by other accounts that you own.” (Emphasis mine). This was really baffling — I have never had any other Reddit accounts, just the one I’ve been using these 8 years. I tried an appeal, explaining that I was bewildered and had no alt accounts. The appeal was flatly denied w/in 24 hours. So that was that. No other recourse. I have been excommunicated.
This raises all the usual questions about Reddit governance. It feels very arbitrary and opaque. There is no due process, no jury of one’s peers, and evidence is destroyed (comments deleted rather than just hidden from everyone other than mods and the original commenter). There is no proper explanation of what caused the ban, no debrief. It’s a bit like the cops arresting you because of something they say they found in your car, but they’ve removed and destroyed the thing they claim to have found :-). And you can’t remember every single bit of junk you kept in your car so you have no idea what it was that triggered the arrest.
Anyway, kissing g’bye to 8 years of content — and karma that I earned the hard way, 5 and 10 and 100 upvotes at a time, not by karma farming — is hard, like losing a carefully crafted RPG character after putting in hundreds of hours of campaign. I have enjoyed Reddit over the years and it’s oddly saddening to be thrown out so abruptly and with no explanation.
If anyone’s still reading at this point :-) I’d like to know whether other people have had this same experience. If you have not been posting racist/misogynist/homophobic drivel, threats, obscenities, scams etc — and yet you suddenly got axed for no clear and explicit reason, then we’re in the same boat. Are there any theories about why/how this happens? Is this the malice of specific humans, or some kind of automodding gone badly wrong?
I’m kinda done with Reddit at this point because of this incident. I don’t see the point in creating a new account (which I guess is technically a rule violation in and of itself) only to have to walk on eggshells wondering at what point some random statement of my opinions is going to get me exiled to Siberia again. Hence I’m giving Lemmy a try. The community is much smaller but several of my interests are represented and … perhaps… it’s a more transparent and sensible moderation model?
What the heck is karma
Don’t worry, all of that content you produced for free will still be monetized. All hail capitalism!
Yes, something similar happened to me: https://maximiliankohler.blogspot.com/2023/06/reddit-is-dangerous-humanity-needs-an-alternative.html
Reddit is an atrocious website with so many disturbing problems, and it keeps getting worse and worse.
reddit is too aggressive with thier banning methods: AI usage, detecting ISPs, vpns,etc. this time they look at old accts that you deleted with banned subs in, even if it was lifted they will ban the NEW accounts too.
only way around is new IP, DEVICE, and browsers. or if you are somehow advertising “illicitly” more paid methods. plus avoid the same posting and writing patterns that you got caught in.
browser fingerprinting, Scrolling behaviour, is another.
The surprise is, there’s lots of people here. It’s not as big as Reddit yeah, but regularly top posts on the front page of lemmy.world exceed 1K rep.
I didn’t get banned or anything, but I’ve walked away from Reddit and for the most part haven’t looked back. Google still does this thing where they’ll put Reddit links near the top of search results, and sometimes it’s inescapable, but I will scroll down the page to find an alternate link with the information.
And hey, Lemmy’s much bigger than Digg’s reboot currently is.
Left Reddit after the API debacle a few years back. Still lurk occasionally for niche things, but overall pretty satisfied with Lemmy as a replacement. It’s a lot more human, I feel. Similar to old Reddit, before it went to shit.
There’s a lot of leftist infighting around here - I would personally recommend you not get too involved. The big one seems to be lemmy.world vs. lemmy.ml
There’s a lot of leftist infighting around here
Sign of a healthy leftist community if there’s enough of us around to have infighting.
I wouldn’t call the apologists for Russia and China “leftist” though. The only thing "left’ about them is that they hate the United States. That isn’t enough to qualify, imo.
I got IP banned for abusing the report function and using sock puppet accounts. I was really late to the reddit party because I never wanted an account but eventually caved when third party apps were shining. My account had no value to me and only served as a bookmark aggregator. Communities had minimum karma thresholds and I’m not playing those stupid fucking games. How the fuck do I get enough to start participating anywhere if that’s the rule everywhere? After the API thing I heard moderation tools weren’t working and I wanted to make it harder for the mods when things were already difficult enough for them. They stuck around to be duke of shit mountain, didn’t they?
Reporting posts for frivolous reasons was also a faster route to blocking users. Block someone and waste a mod’s time? Sign me up. The API shitshow turned me in to a bad actor over there. Couldn’t do a whole lot on the way out so I did what I could. They broke an app I paid for so I went out swinging.
I purposely nuked my account after the API fiasco by hugely shit talking a particularly awful moderator, which was fucking awesome. Same story though, got banned, no message, but I was unable to appeal. Never looked back. I was never attached to my points because what the fuck does that matter anyhow. Lemmy is way better after you get used to it. Have fun. Fuck Reddit.
on the shadowban sub, chances of a lifting a ban seems very rare, and only when they “admit their mistake” everyone else is either appealing everyday, some for months on end.
Lemmy moderation is heavily instance-dependent. Some are more strict than reddit, and others less. You are on Lemmy.world which is moderated with a pretty light touch, so you’ll probably be happy :)
tankies, political are the heavily moderated, otherwise is light which has its own problems like with Politc memes, which is taken over by tankies.
I actually don’t mind fairly strict moderation, as I’m not a big fan of insults, rudeness, racial/sexual slurs, etc and am quite happy to live without them. But I don’t like mysterious bans with nonsensical “explanations” such as I just experienced. If I’m gonna get a ban I want to see my own words quoted back at me, with an explanation of how they violated policy. It’s a fair cop if I did in fact break the rules for the sub or the site. But telling me my “other account(s)” are breaking rules, when I have no fkn other accounts, is just infuriating.
Well, you might get that, you might not. Point is if you get treated poorly just hop to a new instance
Or make your own. We are pretty flexable.
I’m not sure about that. Maybe the admins on world are legit but I was critical of some Democrat policies and got comments removed with no explanation of a rule I broke, they just told me I was wrong then I assume muted me.
Welcome to the Fediverse!
I will say, just like Reddit, we have our share of insane mods, but nobody can get banned platform-wide b/c they can just join a federated instance if their instance owner kicks them out (this is both a positive and a negative; community mods are under a lot more pressure to prevent illegal stuff on a per-comm basis than on Reddit).
Modlogs are public, so you’ll never really not know why something got removed and by whom, even if you disagree with their decision.
I left Reddit when they killed 3rd-party apps, so I never got to experience the wonderful censorship of today’s Reddit experience. Having been here now a couple years, this place feels a lot more human to me, despite (or maybe due to?) it being a lot smaller. I like it here better tbh and I hope you will too. The more the merrier!
I recommend checking out !trendingcommunities@lemmy.cafe if you’re looking for active communities, since they can be a bit harder to find than on Reddit. Also, don’t forget to block the .ml instances, they’re filled with tankies (unless you want that on your feed ig lol).
Welcome.
You’re going to go through a bit of a withdrawal, but you can still lurk there. I quit cold turkey, didn’t lurk so I would be tempted, and wasn’t banned yet. I’m sure I would have been.
I recommend that if your all page gets light or seems inactive, play with the settings. I keep it on hot and then check active, top 6 hours, and scaled in that order. Active is really about how active the comment is, so it stays pretty consistent.
This is a much better place if you’re not conservative. We do have some bots and trolls, but they’re not a ton. They tend to do weekends. If you feel like someone is picking on you, that’s them. Just leave one comment at most, downvote and move on. Just like on reddit.
Welcome and I hope you feel the freedom of not caring about those fake internet points anymore.
Yeah, Reddit was getting pretty bad for attempted gamification — “congratulations, you’re on a 13 day posting streak! Keep it up!” And so on. Very insulting to the intelligence.
I did rather like awards until they were taken away. It was nice to be able to give something (even of only virtual value) to someone whose post or comment I really appreciated. And it was nice to get that kind of appreciation in return if I wrote something that was helpful or enlightening to someone else.
But the whole karma score thing… very leaderboardish.
Welcome to the Fediverse!
Good to see you found your interests here! One of the most common complaints is the lack of whatever niche someone is looking for. So it sounds like you got lucky!
I’m another that fled when they killed 3rd party apps, and.lied about devs to demonize them in the process. Never swappedoff of old reddit on my PC, Had been spending half of my reddit time on mobile, refused to install their shitty adware app on my phone.
Spent less and less time on it on PC, eventually accidentally did something on my browser that disabled the ‘reply’ button even on old reddit, took it as a sign.
Old account, same Karma style. No farming, just decent wordsmithing while writing my comments. Enough to know my general comments would be positive, without sacrificing what I wanted to say. (And to know when to go all-out on something unpopular enough that no careful words would stop the downvotes)
You will find a different culture here. I’ve certainly gotten dome comments upvoted that I was SURE would go negative. If you notice posts/people that bother you are primarily from one instance, you can block that whole instance from your feed. We even have a lil community specificly for complaining about power-tripping mods at !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com if you feel any here could use some name 'n shame!
You don’t happen to use a VPN service, do you?
I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of accounts have been using the same exit node as you, and since you all have the same IP address, you must all clearly be the same person running multiple accounts.
Alternatively, you’re on an ISP with a non-fixed IP address and during the various rotations you’ve at some point had an IP address that was - previously or subsequently - leased by someone who did something against Reddit TOS. Again, clearly, there is absolutely no way you could possibly be different people and so all of those accounts must be banned.
Alternatively, alternatively, someone took exception to what you said, went on a power trip, booted you and, when asked for an explanation, pulled the first excuse off the pile, valid or not.
Annnyway. Welcome to the Fediverse.
vpns dont really work with REDDIT, the site seems to be able to detect it eventually and ban you.
I do not use VPN. I am a subscriber to CityWest fibre optic net in BC, and I don’t know for sure if my contract includes a distinct IP address. Your theory about randomly getting an IP address that has been used previously for naughty stuff on Reddit seems plausible. I have no idea how I would verify it.
It seems odd that any top-level, site-wide mod would take personal offence at one particular post from one particular user out of however many million on Reddit. You would think they would have bigger fish to fry and fires to put out, if you’ll forgive an unfortunately mixed metaphor.
Points aren’t tallied here. Someone can have an absolutely shit take that doesn’t haunt them indefinitely.
Don’t get attached to the numbers.
Depends on the platform - some federated instances (e.g. mine, Mbin) keep a tally of a user’s total upvotes minus downvotes as an overall “reputation” score
Unfortunately downvote is the standard response to ‘i disagree to this insightful comment’. They really should just track total votes as a ‘this is how important others feel your coment is’. There is value in downvote for ‘not bad enough for a reasonable mod to delete but still bad’. (.ml is not a reasonable mod - they delete anything)
