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.
Got banned for antisemitism around the time the genocide ramped up in Gaza.
And I was just criticising Israel. Things got a bit heated for the other guy apparently, and then I got brigaded and reported. I didn’t defend Hamas or advocate violence, just criticised Israel.
i was banned from worldnews in '23 for seven days, i partially abandoned that account and went with an OLD one, which usually is more trusted. up until this year, where they decided a temp ban= we will check all the other accounts you made that participated in banned subs, and ban you for that, you this is pretty ridiculous. i think someone also mentioned your account is easily linked with a strangers if any of them get banned you get a indiscriminate ban too.
this time they said i reported too many times tech sub, something about trump so i recieved a 7day ban, then all my accounts were instantly banned, depesite the accts never going into those subs(until like 1-1years later). so they were routing out old accounts you havnt used in years. but thier bannings always increase when a GOP is in power, it was like severe version in 2017-19, now that trump is in power spez is somewhat afraid he will ge the wrath of MUSK.
I had my main and a business account permabanned during the election, after Trump said Liz Cheney should be shot. I said I didn’t really care or have any empathy, because Liz is a warmonger who’s called for violence against millions of people.
I didn’t say I agreed, and I didn’t say someone should do it. I simply said I didn’t care that she felt threatened by him. Permabanned.
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.
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.
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.
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 ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
One of my accounts banned for “my Lu Ouija board spelled CEO. What’s that mean?”
Or something along those lines.
Haven’t been back since. Timeline is essentially accurate to my baby lemmy face here^
Is there anything that can be done to hold Reddit accountable or make people aware of they way they are censoring speech?
Many people on social media platforms don’t realize the spam filters can be abused by attackers to prevent certain topics from being mentioned. And on front-page subreddits they do not publish comments, they look published if you are logged in, but if you check from off-axis they are unpublished. I’ve been posting some of them here and on Bluesky, but nobody cares (on Bluesky, but people have here) [email protected] maybe some tech press will cover it.
Lifetime (of the person) bans on Reddit for individual subreddits and accounts are dumb. That sites been around for decades. I can only image how many people got banned there at age 16 and are completely different people at age 22. I never see people bring this kind of criticism up.
from what ive heard, subreddit bans are usually 1 year, but it can be lifetime in some circumstances, now it can be anything can be lifetime. its pretty clear they are randomly doing it as well. reddit will look very empty if they get rid of all thier trolls and bots.
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 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 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!
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.
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 :/
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 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.
been banned since 2015 when I told a white supremacist Nazi to drink bleach and fuck themselves.
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
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.
Yep, I agree. Total shitshow now. I don’t even peek in much.
