Okay, posting this here because it is literally called No Stupid Questions, but I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on this.
I got a message today on Reddit saying I was permabanned . . . I had really good karma there, never received any notification that I had done anything wrong, and never had a post deleted. The message said to check my inbox for more details . . . but there were no details in my inbox. I tried to appeal, and it was just denied in a couple of hours. No explanation.
Anyone else experience this or know what other avenues I can take? I’m going to be honest here, I had made a lot of friends there. I suppose I could make a throwaway account to let them know where else they can find me, but I’m pretty bummed out.
For context: I kind of prided myself as being a “Ted Lasso of Reddit.” I mostly just got on to give people pep talks in the beginner fitness and /toastme subreddits. I’m going to miss that a lot, and I kind of needed a community right now, even if it was an online one. But, hey, maybe that’s just my sign to check out this place instead. I’ll try to look at the bright side.
Yes. Reddit is obsessed with banning and censorship to an unhealthy and stupid degree. As someone who thinks social media should be moderated, even I think they go way too far with it.
I’ve had to create a lot of alt accounts because I kept getting banned. I’m not right-wing, I don’t troll people and I don’t use slurs or violent words. You would THINK that would be enough, but no.
Yes. Reddit is obsessed with banning and censorship to an unhealthy and stupid degree
Yup. Unfortunately Lemmy follows this example with some admins being absolute tools.
My old account was 15 years old, approaching 2 million karma, never a single warning, no posts or comments ever removed for violating Reddit TOS and a some Zionist fascist pig admin didnt like a pro Palestinian comment and permabanned me
Reported! /joke
But that sucks. 15 years? I don’t think I posted anything “political” aside from some LGBTQ stuff. I did poke some fun at some gamers who were butthurt about their game finally including girls. I don’t think anything I said was all that controversial, but maybe they reported me for that. Warhammer 40k fans aren’t above organized mass reporting from what I’ve seen on places like YouTube.
I was very political, but everything said and posted was within TOS limits. 3 of my huge subs were abandoned and are now being run by shit mods. They claimed I was inciting violence by saying Palestinians have the right to defend themselves.
Reddit has been on this trend for a long while. It might be because you posted in a sub that’s gotten scoured. It might be because you said a word or set of words that tripped their algorithm. You might have been reported by someone for some reason.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that Reddit actively does not want real users anymore. They just want lurkers and bots. You might have genuinely been banned for no reason whatsoever.
. . . [Quietly hides the fact that he is, indeed, a bot]
In all seriousness, though, thank you for that answer.
I think they want real users because they want to sell their data for LLM training, but that might mean purging accounts that are “too political” to be of use.
Yup, had this happen on 2 different accounts, both of which were in good standing. Same as you, no given explanation despite the message saying there would be, and no real recourse to appeal despite there being a provided link that simply looped on itself. Eventually, I was able to get a human via the “support team” who gave me the answer “All bans are final.”. Your options are to make a new account or stop using their shit platform. Pick your poison.
I pick bourbon. Oh . . . oh, we were talking about something else. But, yeah, I’m going with quitting the platform. I don’t see the use in trying to fight it, and even if I were to ‘win’, this will probably happen again in another month or so.
Side note: are you a raccoon that likes to debate, or is it debatable that you are a raccoon?
My skills as a raccoon are debatable
Hmm . . . sounds like something a tricky raccoon would say to get me to let my guard down and . . . damnit, my trashcans!
Hey, you know what they say. One man’s trash is another man’s F*CK YOU THIS IS MY APPLE CORE
Making a new account doesn’t work, even using VPNs doesn’t seem to get around their ban if you create a new account. It will be permabanned in like a day.
The bans are AI driven, and the appeal responses are AI driven. You won’t find an explanation for why you were banned, because there was no human behind the ban
This is what will end Reddit.
AI moderation and AI bans.
We’re pretty much all here because of it. Reddit is actively driving their users to other platforms. Oh well.
AI ban evasion detection.
They’re probably tuning the type of engagement the
stockholdersadmins demand. Anyone who doesn’t fit the bill of circlejerking the hive mind gets the boot.Even the human mods won’t tell you what rule you broke.
Reddit has been actively hostile for a while.
Here?
On one hand, it’s a smaller place, so there’s less content to browse…
On the other hand, it’s a smaller place so you can reply to an older thread and still have interaction with people.On reddit, if I replied to a thread that was 1h old, it was like sending a message in a bottle, floating in an endless sea where none would find it or shouting in the void.
Anyway, welcome home / make it your home.
PeaceOther things I like:
- The decentralized nature means you will never truly be banned from everywhere unless your behaviour is universally considered unacceptable, in which case good riddance
- There are fewer of us, so some people care about keeping individual users around. I’ve still received bans from communities for reasons I find questionable, but that’s in the nature of having people manage communities themselves.
Also the federated nature of it means that no one has enough power such that they can abuse it in a way that hides their abuse on the entire platform. With the modlog, you can see what the original message was that prompted a moderator response. And with other instances, you can make an account elsewhere and talk about it even if an admin banned you.
Here it feels like you have to really make an effort to get banned. Mods mainly stick to deleting rule breaking comments.
There’s plenty of bans to go around, but mostly spam and the odd pathetic bigot.
When I discovered lemmy… I thought it was nice just being able to browse and not be immediately assaulted by several popups to login, cookies, or the classic “download our app” bullshit.
I know people love their apps, but the web UI works. Browsers have great features already like tabs, bookmarks, adblockers, etc.One of the things I hated about reddit was how they would slip sponsored ads in made to look like user posts as closely as possible. Of course they made it impossible to block them.
That and loading children comments… but only from a single thread, load more, lpad more, show all comments or context or whatever.
The UI became garbage along the way.
I was randomly banned for no apparent reason. They gave zero fucks. Sorry that this happened to you too.
Well, I’ll just consider this being in good company, then!
Still Ted Lassoing. I love it.
Imagine you are a smoker and the addiction makes it impossible for you to quit. Then one day nobody will sell you a cigarette or let you bum one off them.
Count your blessings and move on.
Reddit Karma ain’t worth shit. Imaginary Internet points.
We would love a Ted Lasso of Lemmy. Welcome aboard!
Thanks! I’ll still try reaching out to the online friends I had made over there, but I don’t think I’ll bother with it again aside from that. I’ll plan, instead, to find fun communities here for pep talks and stuff. I like cheering people on and have been told I’m good at it.
Hey, invite your friends.
Luckily I have connected with most of them on Discord. One messaged me just now with the same problem, so she’ll probably be incoming. I only ever saw her post about gaming stuff, and nothing that seemed controversial. She’s saltier than I am, though. Oooh! Now I want to good cop/bad cop Reddit with her! I know it won’t work, but the real hostility are the friends we made along the way.
We’re still a little small so you may need to make community you wish to see.
If you can’t find them, don’t hesitate to create them! Might be challenging to find users and get them up and running, but you gotta start somewhere, and you sound like the kind of person who is up for the task.
Welcome aboard!
I got a 7 day ban for saying you haven’t served your life sentence until you are dead, they said that was promoting violence, I decided if they rejected my appeal it could only mean they don’t actually read appeals and I should just leave.
Oh . . . wow. I don’t think I did anything wrong, but I’m certain whatever I did was worse than that. I’m pretty sure I’ve said worse things to my favorite dog today (it’s okay to have favorites). Plus, that was really f*ing funny. Reminds me of when my friends and I have “stoner thoughts” competitions.
My last winning one was “Whenever you shorten ‘convenience store’ and call it a ‘c-store’, you are removing the convenience for the sake of convenience.”
I sure don’t mean to go off topic but it’s against TOS to have a favorite dog and not post a picture to back it up.
Seriously fuck Reddit, it’s gone to shit
Consider it a nudge in the right direction.
FYI you likely won’t succeed with your alt accounts as they have extensive ways of fingerprinting you outside of basic stuff like your email or IP address.
I was permabanned for “ban evasion” after initially getting banned from /r/movies for talking about piracy and then inadvertently commenting there later on an alt account. I attempted to make a new alt with a VPN active and was banned again almost immediately. This happened to coincide with the great exodus, so I wasn’t too sad to just let go of my 10 year old account and settle in here.
They also use device ID. You need a new device that has never interacted with reddit before (with a VPN and different email). They also look at the subs you subscribe to. The amount of info they collect is invasive, fuck 'em.
I had created an alt in the past where I had asked some legal questions. That was about it, but maybe that tripped things up. Eh, regardless, it seems this place is more inviting. Also, the combination of words in your name might be one of the most comfortable combination of words ever.
From my own personal experience:
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I can’t use my phone. I think they log the device ID (MAC address).
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But I’ve gone through maybe 25-30 accounts on my work computer at work. Same computer. I use Reddit in a Brave private window and I even use a browser script I found to automatically re-add all my subs. It works. I’m not shadowbanned. I post and get responses for X amount of time until some dipshit mod gets me banned from the entire site. Usually a few months.
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I got permabanned twice. One account was for using a slur. I was quoting from a movie in a post about that movie (Glengarry Glenross). It was clearly a quote but they didn’t even respond.
The second time I made comment that happened to be in a post about an Indian man on a train, something about the simple fact that every video I see with an Indian man and a train, the man will do something stupid and die. It was in no way racist but some twat complained that I was using a stereotype and I was permabanned again. Again, no reply when I chased them
Fuck Reddit to hell and back. It’s full of argumentative self-righteous tools anyway.
You can only repay them in the same currency: Never give a damn.
Never give a damn about redit karma or anything they do, or promise. Never give a damn about how mods want you to be.
Make a new account in such a way that they cannot detect it, then go on with your life as if nothing happened.
Details: Use a new nickname, new IP address, no real name/age/location, a different app (or browser), a new mailaddress, subscribe a different set of subs (at the beginning). For the future: create your next account(s) before the current one gets banned.
Please note that you cannot use the same mobile phone number ( cell phone ) as that gets automatically picked up. No need to ask how I know. VPNs only hide your data and there’s nothing one can do to hide your phone number.