I lurked Reddit for a long time before creating an account which is now over 6 years old. I was a ‘Top Contributor’ and in the rewards program. 89k karma, never promoted violence or targeted any group, but I got a 7-day ban which was followed up hours later with a permanent ban. This is because of a comment criticizing Senator Radcliffe, trump, and Musk. The comment included profanity, (I called them hypocrites and cunts), but it wasn’t directed at any user or marginalized group. Just harsh political commentary.
Reddit initially issued a 7-day ban, which I appealed. That appeal was approved, the comment was restored, and they admitted it didn’t violate the rules. But the permanent ban still stands, and my follow-up appeals on that have been ignored. No explanation. No transparency. Just gone.
It’s made me realize how fragile “free speech” is on platforms like Reddit. You can insult regular users and get away with it, say horrendously racist, misogynistic, and homophobic things, but speak too plainly about powerful people and suddenly you’re promoting “hate.”
I combed through the Reddit rules, and nothing I have ever commented or posted violates them.
That’s the reason I’m here on Lemmy now. I’m trying to read more, scroll less, and engage with platforms that aren’t actively censoring political dissent. Who else is in the same boat? Is there anything that can be done to hold Reddit accountable or make people aware of they way they are censoring speech? This is my first Lemmy post. I marked it NSFW because of the profanity.
Also here after a reddit ban. Mine was also politically motivated.
I watched admins remove a comment that was not violent, no profanity, nothing like that. The offense: the commenter described what “black-bagging” was, in reference to the immigrants being abducted around the country. Someone asked what “black-bagging” meant, he replied with one sentence just explaining the meaning of the term, comment nuked within five minutes.
I then told this story in another comment in another thread. Didn’t say shit about Musk or Trump. Just told the story of how reddit admins wouldn’t let this guy explain what black-bagging meant.
Permanent ban within one hour for “ban evasion.” Never been banned prior. It was my first and last reddit ban.
Fuck spez, fuck reddit, fuck the rest of em all.
looks like a they are quashing any anti-musk and trump sentiment on reddit, any attempts to report them can also result in a ban too. they definitely dont want what musk and trump are doing being discussed in reddit in serious manny, we can see a proportional response from reddit when trump and musk did something, and Musk also recently complained to reddit they need to censor people more.
It’s filled me with such joy (schadenfreude?) watching their stock drop the past couple months.
I wish more people would travel here. We need people to build up the communities and interact with content. It’s refreshing to see comments under limited moderation, or moderation that actually targets the right kind of hate speech: the powerful punching down.
I only visit Reddit when someone here links to it, since I’m assuming the comments are relevant, or if I’m doing a Google search and the answer is in a Reddit comment.
Reddit is dying from the top down. People migrating away would show billionaires that they don’t control us.
This is my first comment to say I am also a reddit refugee!
welcome 🫂
Thanks! I’ve been on reddit for 11 years and I haven’t been active on it for a month. Things are changing and I don’t feel good about it :/
its clear reddit is allowing right wing/russian trolls to astroturf left leaning comments, any criticism is usually met with an increased sensitivity of thier “comment removal, karma, spam filters” its funny they encourage reporting, but hate responding to these reports if you do it too many times, it was instant temp ban which cascaded in banning in all accounts.
You’ll be happy to know that lemmy’s monthly active user count has grown ~20% in the last month.
I think what would help in this would be more options for apps (which there are thankfully) but also an easy to read guide on how this all works and how to sign up and get on board. It’s complexity vague in this effort. Which does weed out the certain kind of people who aren’t tech savvy. But it would help its numbers quite a bit.
top down, and INSIDE out, they were rottening from the core before it became top down.
When you absolutely have to visit Reddit for whatever reason, you should use an alternate frontend. The one I’m familiar with is called libreddit and functions similarly to nitter for twitter. You can do a search to find a large list of instances, but all you do is replace the “http://reddit.com/” part of the URL with the name of the instance. I usually use eddrit.com or safereddit.com
the thing is you only need to adblock them, to deny them ad revenue.
I think Lemmy is not super likable or usable. It tries to be something it can’t be imo.
It would be better to just use the old style forums again, one niche topic/website style, and not a conglomerate. Or just use mass social media if that’s what you want, on a place like BlueSky or Substack with mostly consistent and understandable content moderation.
I haven’t had that experience. I barely understand how Lemmy works but this app I use makes it function like Reddit. I can’t even tell the difference, day to day, but vaguely understand that if the “country” my account is on starts to get weird, I can emigrate elsewhere.
I really liked Reddit, getting a lot of value out of the content posted there by people. And I met some cool people through it.
I never got banned from it myself, but as time went on it was very clear that the company in charge of the platform was not steering things in a good direction, and was not responsible for the value I liked. They just captured the value by being the place where people posted. They really drove that point home when they locked off the API, and I completely quit Reddit at that point, migrating to Lemmy instead.
I definitely feel that Lemmy doesn’t have as much value collected on it yet compared to Reddit. There’s just not as many people posting and generating that value. But, it is free of that sort of draconian control that Reddit has. Not just temporarily free, as a favor from venture capital to draw people in. Permanently free. So, if we build up the value of Lemmy by having more people post here, we will be able to enjoy that value free from the corpo BS.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. :P
I noticed a big difference after they cut off the API. I’ve only been on Lemmy a few days, but I feel the same way about the amount of content. Hopefully more and more people will migrate here as reddit continues their nonsense. It’s a shame to see what it has become.
Been on Lemmy from Reddit for over a year. Really don’t miss it, except for a few niche communities.
I’ve been here since the third party app culling and it’s been steadily growing I think from my anecdotal feels when using it. It definitely has a long way to go to replace what reddit was, but hopefully it just keeps growing bit by bit. I see posts like yours frequently these days so you’re definitely not the only one leaving.
I’d guess a good bit of us used to almost entirely browse reddit through a third party app (me with Sync) and for various reasons didn’t capitulate, been on Lemmy since and have vastly increased my time with Linux as a result xD
I think you’ll just want Substack and/or BlueSky then. Most long form content has moved to Substack.
I upvoted a comment that was just a gif of Luigi Luigi (from Nintendo) smoking a cigarette.
“Promoting/glorifying violence”
Fuck Reddit. Fuck Spez. Fuck Elon.
I was on reddit since around 2010. Had probably 500k karma in total? I was around before the apps. Still in the air of early internet vibes. It was a great place to find your community and chat.
I got my first ever temp ban a month ago for saying Luigi started a movement that our world needs. For billionaires need to be afraid of every day people.
Got a ban on r/news. Then shortly after a full ban.
I’ve been banned from plenty of right wing subs and it’s never been an issue. But one comment into their top corporate subreddit did it. So I left. Fuck em. There is no free speech there and to be honest. The quality of comments and community has dropped so heavily since 2016 that it doesn’t feel like a loss to me. Reddit community used to have standards and free speech for anyone. Now it’s no different from Facebook. Shitty joke comments on serious topics. Bots everywhere. It’s just a black hole now.
Couldn’t agree more with your assent. On one of my alts. I said we should collectively throw dog shit at Reddit HQ and they banned me. lol. It was a joke playing on the farmers that drive manure spreaders into the villages to fuck with council.
Reddit died the day they fired Victoria for… checks notes, doing her job effectively. That’s when I knew that reddit was fucking doomed. Everything since then has just been nails in the coffin.
news is one of those subs to avoid, they ban very easily much like r/politics does. they misconstrued my statement on several occasion and banned it outright.
deleted by creator
Welcome weary traveler!
As lemmy’s self-designated High Corvid of Progressivity, I extend to you the traditional Fediversal blessing of:
remember kids:
A place in heaven is reserved for those who speak truth to power
Luigi ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
I was banned for saying I should have a legal right to punch Nazis, which I don’t think was “permanent ban” territory.
This to me says that Reddit is Pro Nazi
I was issued a permanent ban that I successfully appealed when all I said was always punch Nazis
I appealed but it was pretty much instantly declined, and you know, fuck em
sounds like it was an AI/BOT, i bet they randomly dont want to deal with the insane amount appeals, so they let the ai deny a bunch of them, and the reddit admins choose which ones to unban. hence thats why there are tons of bans that cant be appealed.
Yep. That was my first ban. My last pan was saying T n E should face the gallows. I said fuck it and came here.
Funny. I commented on a picture of Indiana jones punching a Nazi which said “there’s never a wrong time to punch a Nazi” and boom! Encouraging violence/ban. 😂
That place is a fucking gong show.
One of my favorite aspects of the new Indiana Jones game is just running around one-punching nazis. It really never gets old.
I had a 12 year account, with over 900K karma. I was permabanned in Fenruary for repeating a comment I’d made nunerous times before the Inauguration without a word.
I came to Lemmy, and found lots of other 10+ year accounts that were banned as well. It seems February was a bloodbath, as they ejected lots of veteran accounts. We’ll probably never know how many, but probably in the thousands. We were the people that built Reddit over the last decade, with high volumes of posts, and they never had reasons to ban us. Then suddenly, in February, ALL of us became such egregious violators that we all had to be permabanned?
Whatever, Reddit was becoming increasingly frustrating. Every post was filled with puns, bots, Russian Propaganda Farmers, conservative trolls, and other such nonsense. Without all the active veteran posters, it’s only gotten far worse.
i had a 11year account that started on pokemon console, and i dint even know it was banned til i was sent an email, then i recieved 5+emails, turns out that one temp ban in feb12-13 triggered like 5 accounts to be sitewide banned instantly, i then fled to another forum(not lemmy) and they reported the same 5-10+years accts isntantly banned. although the forum is geared towards evading for income. then we also found out they were planning to sell REDDIT which make sense, since you need to sanatize the site and also not get on trumps and musk crosshair, they are definitely preparing for reddit to become X/facebook hybrid.
even new users are getting canned too, shadowban for no reason? also using vpn or a cheap proxy is also enough for a ban.,
feb-march was a big massacre, specifically march started the whole anti-luigi bannings.
Yep, I agree. Total shitshow now. I don’t even peek in much.
I was banned from a sub for explaining why “globalist” is an antisemetic dogwhistle. They said my comment was hate speech but left up the one I responded to, dogwhistle and all.
When I asked the sub’s mods about the ruling, I was given a 3-day sitewide ban. I brought it to admins, and instead of any explanation, they responded by making that ban permanent.
I dont think there is any way they don’t know what they’re doing. Reddit is complicit.
See I don’t understand why reddit allows this, responding to questions about a ban by permanently banning them! The mod (and admin?) abuse seems to be getting worse. I was banned from a sub for saying it to turned to garbage in a different sub.
The cross-sub silencing is crazy too. I got banned from a bunch of tesla subs for participating in r/cyberstuck. On that one, I did message the mods and told them to go fuck themselves for stifling free speech. Someone actually replied back and said, “Freedom of speech, doesn’t mean freedom from consequences.”, which is an infuriating misuse of that expression in this context. Then I got a 3 day ban.
its crossbanning, its the wierdest policy to pre-emptively ban someone for not even participating in your sub. just because you went to a sub that the mods dont like.
im not surprised, i was temp ban for reporting someone like your commentor, and i was banned for it. basically the guy was making incorrect, misinformed comments, insta ban, because “we saw you reporting too much, so report abuse” temp ban, later i found out people were getting perma ban after a temp ban, so i just deleted my account. now i tried to appeal on 2 different ones banned at the same time, all denied.
The CEO is just as horrible, a friend of Musk and a white suprematist.
i avoid israeli related post for that reason, i was burned by israeli mods/trolls back oct 23. and subsequently i reported pics that were discussing israeli/gaza in a propagandish manner.
I posted the below about Netanyahu and didn’t get banned on 2 different Lemmy subs, to my surprise:
i meant on reddit.
I know, I’m contrasting the experience bc there’s no way 99% of Reddit mods would allow the comment I made
First permaban was for asking: “Any updates on Mitch McConnell? I could use some good news.” Mod appeal denied
Then on another account a year later (bc I got so many death threats from Nazis on Reddit), I forgot I had a ban on that sub and said, “We should spend money feeding our kids instead of spending it to blow up someone else’s kids.” And that was an IP ban.
Crazy, I’ve seen literal Nazis on there not even get comments removed. We live in dark times.
the first reason was ridiculous, jyust for asking that question? you know it turning right wing, when you cant even IMPLY things. i used accounts like you did, dint get ban that aggressively, maybe because i was also using multiple locations, confused reddit for a while.
Wiped out my 13 years of posts and comments and deleted my account when they started this crap. I thought the day they killed old reddit would be when I left but I can’t stand by while they censor free speech. The site has been a shit pile for some time though and not even a ghost of what it was in the good old days.
I suggested that the most appropriate way to deal with Nazis moving into your neighborhood was the traditional Scandinavian practice of hús-brenna. Apparently the admins dislike effective solutions.
It took me a few days to overwrite all of my comments from the prior 15 years or so, but I did it. Because fuck 'em, they don’t get to train their AI on my data.
To be fair, what sounded like some northern European idea of just ignoring the person so much they have to leave did, on researching, lead to the Wikipedia article titled “Arson in Medieval Scandinavia” and was about burning people alive in their own homes.
Reddit still sucks and all and I wouldn’t be at all sad if this happened to quite a few of these fuckwads but I mean c’mon they definitely weren’t mad at the effectiveness of the solution.
They seemed to be upset that I was advocating for an effective and permanent solution. :)
I regret nothing.
they will probably ban talks of inglorius bastard, or Xmen first class someday.
they are mad, now that nazis is control of the government, a NAZI complained to reddit and told spez to increase his “moderation”.
basically like a niche sub i was visiting where the youtube channel owners were asian and jokes about news, and when they turned magat-ty they couldnt take any criticism at all and even started to systematically attack the sub, trying to get it banned, they fled to FACEBOOK of course to orchestrate thier attack, they were concerned the sub was revealing too much about thier shitty behaviour it was driving down thier viewership, they attacked instead of addressing they were the sole cause of thier decline.
the fact they are ASIAN/POC and literally sucking trump and musk off is some mental gymnastics, also contains hallmarks of conservatives, talks of pedophelia, cyrptoscams,etc.
Conservatives that aren’t rich, white, and straight surprise the hell out of me. Like, it was literally founded to push only that group and at the time even Irish people weren’t the right kind of white.
the mental gymnasitics from lgbtq+ is probablly even more shocking. your a gay porn stars and a trumper. im guessing because they believe they are white, they are exception to the rule. besides the one that was reported in media recently(trumps first term) other white ones were criticized, like how come you never slept with POC guys, and only white guys with big PPs in pornos. back when abercombrie stores were around the staff were all white, typical blond males, when any poc entered the store they gave a nasty stare.
they believe if they are warmonger, evangelical enough it counts. i have a feel asians are probably on the lowest totem pole of a token, because they almost never are confrontational in public.
I’m sure they kept copies of the data to train their AI on.
Possibly. They’re not supposed to by their own claims, but possibly. I suppose that if I lived in the EU, I could sue them over it.
hús-brenna is the practice of setting someone’s house on fire and refusing to let them leave the burning structure.
…Which, you must admit, is a singularly effective way of dealing with Nazis moving into your neighborhood.
I said McConnell looks like he should be dead. They banned a million sub moderator and 14 year old acct. they can suck a massive dick.
i always called him a lICH, and undead. they dont like dirty words.
