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.
“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.