cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/73406944

It all started when my main Reddit account was banned—simply because I posted a comment criticizing the banning of a subreddit—resulting in the immediate loss of an account I’d held for about 4 years, with 102k karma. I appealed, but I received no response—not even a reason for my ban, nor any notification that I had been banned in the first place. I’ve filed appeals repeatedly over the past few months, but today, I’m finally giving up. Fuck Spez and his pathetic, whore of a family. When I submitted my appeals, there wasn’t even any indication that they had gone through; I was just left in total silence, unable to do a thing. I started using an existing alt account for basic tasks, but today, that account was banned too—all because I recommended the non-profit, open-source “VPN Gate” project to someone who was complaining about the mandatory KYC (age verification) requirements being imposed in my country. The only reason I was still using Reddit was out of habit, and I’ve decided it’s time to change some of my habits. Ultimately, this is the inevitable fate of every centralized corporation—without exception. There’s no guarantee that some complete moron won’t end up in charge of any of them. I wish more people realized this. If four years of my effort are being sold off to AI data companies, and everything can be permanently wiped out overnight without a word of warning, then that is, quite simply, data theft. Once again, fuck you, Spez—you absolute piece of shit. If you had even an ounce of courage or integrity, you wouldn’t have imposed those damn API restrictions in 2023 and ruined Reddit. I truly regret the four years I spent here, but it’s better to cut my losses now. Goodbye, you son of a bitch Spez, and your puppet, Reddit…

    • OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Have you tried recently? Because the paradigm of having many reddit throwaways is a thing of the past. These days you can still register as many account as you want but the instant shadowban comes the moment you try to post something.

      Emphasis on the shadowban, which is the default behavior. You can still submit posts and comments from as many accounts as you want but nobody else is going to see it.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      8 days ago

      most people wont risk that, plus reddit will ban people faster if you use the same email. i just used a fork of FF, and old reddit and spin up a new email on a trusted email like hotmail(i dont use that for anything else). gmail used to be super trusted by reddit until Google started to restrict the amount of emails you can have per device. niche subs only, and you are safe, but on any of the large subs on the main page, will likely get you banned, because i think the filters/detection is heavier there.

      new device/IP change/browser is enough as well.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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      9 days ago

      My alts got popped pretty quickly for ban evasion when my main account got banned. I didn’t even have email addresses associated with them.

      • NeedsMoreWD40@lemmy.zip
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        9 days ago

        Yeah, the moment you use a connected mail address, number or IP address, it’s banhammer time. I got permabanned for advocating violence… when I discussed suicidal ideation

  • rekabis@lemmy.ca
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    9 days ago

    I have always wondered if some griefer could find an exploit that leveraged the ban hammer… and used a script that just banned everyone.

    Like, literally everyone. All at once. Bots. Humans. Mods. Admins. No distinction. If you log in using the front door, the account is banned.

    I’m not much for chaos, but abrupt chaos at a deserving target would be enjoyable to rubberneck at.

  • nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de
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    10 days ago

    Apart from habits, what were the sub-reddits that kept you there, and stopped from transitioning completely before? We can start making similar content and bring more people here.

    • nogooduser@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      I went cold turkey after the third party app debacle but I really missed the home assistant subreddit. There is a home assistant community but it’s nowhere near as active.

      • bedwyr@piefed.ca
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        10 days ago

        I miss getting help with all sorts of stuff, home improvement and repair and how to stuff, brewing, growing stuff, and the like. Plus they have way better animal videos, to say nothing of all the other video content not found on lemmy.

        Can’t be helped, reddit is unusable, politicians and rich dickheads are leaning on them to make moderation decisions and they are trhing to bend us over for them.

      • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        With respect, “it’s not as active” for a Home Assistant community as in what? You don’t get replies to your questions? People don’t ask you enough of them?

        If the former, that is a genuine problem, but hasn’t been my experience on Lemmy. There are fewer responses, but they are more thought out and less likely to be puns, references, and other low-hanging-fruit jokes.

        If the latter, then proactively make guides so people will be more likely to join? Someone has to be the first on the dance floor.

        • nogooduser@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          That’s a fair point and it is the latter.

          I have only posted one question about a problem that I had and I got an answer that resolved my issue.

          Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to help build up the community. I have a very small and basic setup and don’t have time to build it up let alone make posts about building it up.

            • nogooduser@lemmy.world
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              8 days ago

              A sample size of one isn’t sufficient to conclude that every question gets answered.

              Also, I didn’t say that it was inactive. I said that it was nowhere near as active as Reddit.

              There are about two or three posts per week which includes all the release announcements for home assistant and various components.

              On Reddit there was at least five or ten times that activity with posts every day including questions, automations and dashboard ideas.

              • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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                8 days ago

                Okay? The ocean has more water than my sink, but you don’t see me complaining that my sink has too little water.

                • nogooduser@lemmy.world
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                  7 days ago

                  You seem to have got your knickers in a twist over something and I don’t understand what.

                  Let me summarise the conversation from my point of view. Someone asked what subreddits kept someone on Reddit. I made the comment that a particular sub that I liked on Reddit was more active than the equivalent communities on Lemmy. It wasn’t a complaint but a statement of fact about what made the transition more difficult for me which I made to contribute to the discussion. Then you seem to have taken that as a complaint and taken offence at it for some reason.

    • Ariselas@piefed.ca
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      10 days ago

      Don’t know what his subreddits were, but I still go there for guitar, and luthier (well 8 guitar related subs in total).

      We have a NDP community here, but it’s not very active, even though I suspect that the sub is mostly bots at this point.

    • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
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      10 days ago

      I’ve been clean cold turkey from Reddit for over 3 years now since I made my Lemmy account but I still really miss active discussions about newly released games :(

      You can make a post in one of the gaming comms here and sometimes you’ll get a couple folks, but it doesn’t really catch on the same. I had a grand old time reading tons of build discussion and memes when Elden Ring came out, but since Nightreign came out I effectively haven’t interacted with its community at all.

      I like Lemmy specifically because it is smaller and more close knit, usually. But it misses out on some of the bigger town-square types of discussion that reddit could enable because reddit had sixty five gorillion users, especially in the gaming space.

      I expect that whatever discussion of this type doesn’t exist on reddit probably exists on Discord but that also sucks for a completely separate, but similar, set of reasons. I still use Discord, as of currently, but I hate interacting in big public servers and never do it, and it misses a lot of the thread-and-comment structure that I liked so much about Reddit. (Discord does technically support threads, but they work differently and nobody uses them properly anyway.)

    • LiarAmongAll@lemmy.zip
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      9 days ago

      I try to keep mostly to lemmy, but the American football scene and the OSRS scene are nearly non-existent here. OSRS being the worst of the two, there’s almost never any updates or posts even. Yeah yeah, be the change I wanna see, but I don’t wanna talk to myself, that’s how dead it is lol

    • False@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      I read reddit but no longer contribute in any way. Activity level is just way lower here, especially for niche interests. I’ve increased the amount of other websites I look at (here, hacker news, steam forums) overall

    • dhork@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      Not OP, but there are a lot of niche subreddits where you simply can’t get information anywhere else. I quit Reddit entirely after the APIocalypse, and I know around that time people started replicating the extensive network of Sports team subreddits in various places here. But, there are simply not enough people here to make that work.

      I have not logged in (other than to manipulate the crypto out of my Reddit Vault and sell it before it crashed) since then. There are precisely four subreddits I monitor via RSS because the info simply doesn’t make it here. But Reddit has already announced their RSS access is going away. When it does, I guess I’ll just have get that info somewhere else.

      • theedqueen@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        The niche subreddits are really hard to adjust without. I would’ve gone cold turkey if it weren’t for those because you simply can’t find the info anywhere else. I was using RDX to browse those subs but now that’s gone too (for now, hopefully the dev finds a workaround)

        • xtr0n@sh.itjust.works
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          10 days ago

          I was able to use RDX up until a few days ago. Like you I was mostly out after the API debacle but I did use RDX to browse r/all for mental junk food. I started out just doing it once in a while but I got more in the habit even as the quality dropped. It’s for the best that I no longer have that crutch. I will miss being able to look up the post episode discussion of whatever show I’m currently streaming. I don’t see Lemmy getting the critical mass for those types of discusaions anytime soon.

          • theedqueen@lemmy.world
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            10 days ago

            Yeah it’s probably better I don’t have the crutch either. I was using it a lot to read stuff like AMITAH and the amount of stuff that was either fake or AI was through the roof. I guess I just wish I had more lead time to wean myself off because being cut off just like that is a hard struggle.

            • xtr0n@sh.itjust.works
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              10 days ago

              Girl/boy dinner diaries is basically AMTAH-lite and consistently on the front page. Why is it like catnip to me? I was never gonna wean or taper. It just had to be cold turkey

              • Pratai@piefed.ca
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                9 days ago

                Once you realize that it’s all written by AI for the purpose of engagement, its easer to walk away from it.

                None of that shit is real.

        • Pratai@piefed.ca
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          9 days ago

          It’s all mostly bots and repost slop. At least it was when I left. I can’t see it being different now.

    • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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      9 days ago

      Lemmy does not have a very active Boardgames community or a Blood on the Clocktower community. Just doesn’t have the numbers for it.

    • BossFeather6325@lemmy.zipOP
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      10 days ago

      Most of my habits stemmed from the fact that I found the general chaos of Mastodon overwhelming and too complex for daily use. For instance, while Reddit has its own straightforward website and app, Mastodon lacks a clear, simple interface—which made it seem overly complicated to me from the start. Consequently, I always found it much easier to quickly hop onto Reddit to post or leave a comment. Most importantly, the number of active users on Mastodon is, unfortunately, still far lower than on Reddit.

      • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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        10 days ago

        You’re on the Lemmy version of the fediverse. Mastodon is like Twitter, whereas Lemmy and Piefed are like Reddit.

        • Change up how you see stuff: Hot, Scaled, Every 6 hours. Active is the least active ironically.
        • Remember, this is mostly not an angry factory like reddit, so you’re going to go through withdrawal. I’m serious.
        • Upvote if you like it an post stuff that interests you.
        • Remember there are still trolls here. They brigade and fight with you for odd reasons. That should give you a heads up if that starts to happen.
        • Not every instance is great.
      • orclev@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        Since Mastodon was mentioned I’ll also add that a thoroughly hate that Mastodon doesn’t even attempt to show you anything unless you enable Javascript. I’m a user of NoScript so websites don’t run JS by default unless I explicitly opt in. For most sites that’s not a huge deal since it’s just a one time thing but because Mastodon is federated I need to opt in every instance individually which means 90% of the time on the rare occasion I visit a Mastodon link nothing loads initially.

        I wish Mastodon did the thing most non-sketchy websitss do and renders at least a basic view of its content without JS so I could at least decide if it’s worth enabling JS in the first place.

    • bedwyr@piefed.ca
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      10 days ago

      Plus when reveddit stopped working, at least with that I could see what comments were being auto removed by mods or admin without notice. And other details. That was in 2024 I think.

      • zollus@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        RedReader stopped working this summer. It’s amazing that it kept going even after the API restrictions, I think it’s because Redlib uses reverse engineered API calls from the official app

  • Cellery@quokk.auBanned
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    10 days ago

    Lmfao, that’s me here every month. Nothing changes when you switch groups of douche bags. Don’t feel bad, I lost my Reddit account when I called out an online stalker in the open. Apparently my words were “uncivil”

  • Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip
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    10 days ago

    I don’t understand the flex in posts like this, you didn’t stop using Reddit, you were told to leave.

    Getting kicked out of the Nazi bar is okay… but why were you frequenting that bar to begin with?

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      It’s not a flex. It’s sharing information in hopes it resonates with other people. The same motivation behind this derisive comment, only not rude.

  • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    Congratulations leaving that trash fire. I went back a couple times out of curiosity and man did I regret it. It’s way worse than it was in 2019 which was my peak reddit usage time.

  • dwightb@piefed.social
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    10 days ago

    Similar thing happened to me. It was a near 20 year old account. Somehow it got hacked and banned. for my history I felt a sense of loss because I realized I wanted to be able to look back and see my old posts and comments. I appealed with no answer, it’s like appealing into the void.

    I still had the addiction to seeing content and reading comments, seeing something always new. But I slowly started coming around to fediverse. Not all at once, I created a new reddit account just to see the content. It pissed me off they gated the content to people logged in, pissed me off they keep trying to push you to use the app, but I eventually gave in because of my content addiction to seeing that new dopamine drip feed.

    The final straw was when I started noticing a more hostile commenting environment. I would comment something innocuous, but then I would get people arguing with me on fairly un controversial comments. I would notice they would be accounts with private histories less than a year old. Some would have only fans- like ads in their profile.

    I also noticed a vast uptick in rightwing trolling and right leaning comments. These accounts all seemed suspect. Reddit had always been a left wing space. I really think a lot of the money being funneled into these midterms is being used for troll farms and bot farms to astroturf narratives on social media platforms. That was the last straw. I was arguing with people who were probably bots on reddit, giving reddit the engagement they want and I had enough.

    It really is an addiction, I had to cut it off but I still try to pull up reddit sometimes when i’m bored. But I think fediverse is really going to be the future and we have to keep getting people to gradually come here.

    • tfm@europe.pub
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      10 days ago

      “we don’t want you to participate anymore but we still want you to look at ads”

      • bedwyr@piefed.ca
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        10 days ago

        They have ads? Joking but I never saw any with firefox on ublock. So at least I screwed them back a little, but they got all my comments for free, no small thing adding up all of our contributions, worth more than the ad revenue in many ways.

          • bedwyr@piefed.ca
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            9 days ago

            I kind of wanted to leave mine up for posterity though. For the real people that may come across the stuff. But perhaps that was a mistake I’ve been turning that over, wondering if I should’ve just deleted it all.

            • tfm@europe.pub
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              9 days ago

              I get where you’re coming from. It feels wrong to let years of writing just vanish when it might still help someone. But leaving it up keeps concentrating all that value inside a company that only ever wanted it to sell ads and train models with it. It’s already bad enough that a normal search often means appending “reddit” to the query. They gain so much power from that dynamic that I’d rather burn my old writing with me than keep feeding it. And honestly, since they can wipe an account overnight without a word, “posterity” there is rented at best. I’d rather start over and help build the information here, in the fediverse, where it can’t be taken away by anyone person or organization.

          • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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            9 days ago

            I used that to delete all my posts, and then a month later had a notification for a reply on a post that from my profile page I couldn’t see (as they were all deleted) but on the thread was still visible.

            Don’t delete, edit your posts to fill them with nonsense.

  • Victor@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    Whenever I see people getting banned from Reddit I always revel in the fact that I left on my own terms. I never go back there voluntarily since the API Epoch. Eat my shorts, Reddit.

    • BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      10 days ago

      I left when the great conservatisation started before the API issues. When they basically wanted more conservative moderators in “liberal” places for fair and balanced approach. When people were being banned left and right for speaking out against the regime or telling LGBT people to arm up.

    • COASTER1921@lemmy.ml
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      9 days ago

      Seriously. At least back then their Android app was basically unusable. I haven’t tried it since, but suspect that because ads I’d probably hate it anyways. It was an unhealthy addiction.

    • TheBrideWoreCrimson@sopuli.xyz
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      9 days ago

      Same here. I just found it appalling, the way users were, and are, being treated. Was getting some strong “livestock” vibes. And all the bots and brigades don’t exactly help Reddit’s cause.

  • JustPlainDave@lemmy.zip
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    10 days ago

    What was the likely innocuous comment that caught you a ban? I got IP banned for asking when they’re going to launch Marjorie Taylor Greene into the sun. Apparently that was “promoting violence”.

    • BossFeather6325@lemmy.zipOP
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      10 days ago

      Someone was complaining that in their country, everything requires identity verification under the guise of “age verification.” I mentioned the existence of “VPN Gate”—a completely open-source, non-profit, educational VPN project that uses residential IPs rather than standard VPN IPs. My account was likely flagged as spam.

      • skisnow@lemmy.ca
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        9 days ago

        Oh yeah they make a lot of money from sponsored posts, can’t let people mention products and services without paying

    • bedwyr@piefed.ca
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      10 days ago

      I got a violation, (never banned yet but went through maybe 10 accounts in 3 years of use,) one of the later ones was for suggesting Musk should ride his spaceships up into orbit.

      Apparently it’s threatening violence. Appeal denied.

      • Mantzy81@aussie.zone
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        10 days ago

        So many pearl-clutching bootlickers. You never said you would personally strap him to his own rocket. That’s also not violence either. Not anyone’s fault if he can’t breathe in space.