Reddit has permanently suspended my account for supporting Lemmy.
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.
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 another good reason to stop using reddit. The internet used to have millions of active message boards for discussion of numerous topics. Reddit has essentially become one giant message board to rule them all. The world does not need this. Best to help decentralize the internet by promoting alternatives.
I'm advertising Lemmy on every popular post on my 11 year old account.. I'm already through the painful part of the breakup, and have moved on to better things. Go ahead and ban me Reddit
I just ran powerdelete suit on my reddit accounts and replaced all of my posts/comments with ones urging users to join lemmy. I was going to wait until July 1rst but if reddit is going to get that serious, then so am I. I am OUT!
Reddit permanently suspended all of my accounts because I said Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a cunt for not retiring when she had the chance. R/politics banned that account, and then a few weeks later I'd forgotten about that incident and commented in another post from a different account. That's when reddit permabanned all of my accounts.
I've been on reddit since August 2008 when Randal Monroe published this xkcd about it: https://xkcd.com/477/
"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.
If this is true, this is probably an anti competitive practice and you can report it to regulation authorities in the US and EU, you might want to consult some non profit that deals with open source and free software for legal advice.
Today I'm gonna run one of those edit and delete scripts for reddit accounts, and I want my last message to be one promoting this place as a viable alternative :).
BTW I have filled an appeal, but I don’t expect this to be reversed
They wont. My friends who were banned after connecting to my WiFi appealed, and Reddit declined their appeal. They legit did NOTHING wrong, and Reddit doesn't care.
This is unsurprising, sadly. Reddit’s moderation is a joke, and they’re very well known for putting down oppositional posts and users. With the impending public offering this is only going to get worse.
Cracking down on people advertising it is a sign of weakness, they're afraid and need to limit people spreading the word. Hopefully the coordinated moderation strike that a lot of subs are doing makes a dent on their user base, I hope people really move to federated alternatives this time instead of staying on the hostile platform/just crossposting like it happened with the Twitter/Mastodon thing.
Pretty sure Reddit can't ban people for promoting/linking to competitors sites as there is EU regulations in place to prevent this.
This issue was raised when Twitter tried to stop people from linking to their Mastodon accounts. Twitter put the policy in place and then quietly removed it soon after.
If you really believe that you were banned for promoting Lemmy then you should mention this in your appeal but as others have mentioned it seems like the issue was spam.
And sure maybe they were waiting for any reason they could get to ban you because you were promoting Lemmy and they got you on spam, always gotta read the contract/TOS to make sure the other party doesn't get you on a technicality
I don't trust the reason for your ban completely, but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt on this.
That's shitty and I've been in your shoes (being banned on the shittiest way*), but on a lighter side it shows that promoting Lemmy there has an effect!
I think that "we" (i.e. people who are trying to convince people to migrate) should be doing this harder. Like, mentioning that you've been using Lemmy and other instances in the app subreddits, encouraging people to migrate, highlight other issues that happened and will happen with Reddit, this kind of stuff. A lot of us will be banned under shitty excuses... but frankly? Consider it as a badge.
* What pissed me in that case wasn't even the ban, but which accounts were banned. They banned all my accounts, regardless of recent activity, except the one that I used for mod duties. "We don't want you, but we still want your free worker, you sucker" doesn't work for me. (I don't regret dropping the mod duties on the spot then.)
Shameless promotion of my new community: SNOOcalypse. I created it so people can discuss Reddit's downfall, as it's kind of off-topic for /c/opensource, and plus I want to see some activity coming from people who want to get rid of Reddit.
So, this might or might not provoke the Streisand effect? At either case it's important to post links to your alternative accounts on different platforms on your bio and put it in archive.org + archive.today for ban reasons. Anyone on any platform can get banned, it's important to have a plan for that. Hope you can recover at least partial/full of what was banned.
I wonder if "cross-posting about /r/LemmyMigration to a bunch of other subs" triggered an automatic spam filter in a way that a bunch of different people saying "hey have you heard about Lemmy" does not. There's a certain level of slack I'm willing to cut for people trying to moderate something as huge as Reddit or Twitter or whatever; it's what happens in the next few days that's really going to be worth reacting to.
Why would you work for free to help reddit, when you know what they are? Is it because you still have hope the site will go back to how it was when you started?
I was looking for an alternative for a long time. Your posts and sub just offered me an option that was better than any I'd seen before. Kudos, man! I logged out of reddit and don't see myself going back, honestly.
As I read your post, I had a lot of the same thoughts as others have replied... first I was ready to kill my /r/ accounts and run away forever [which I would regardless, except the masses are there..] and then I didn't full trust the reason behind your ban - I've talked about other open source/federated projects on Reddit, a lot...
And I assume the truth of the matter lies somewhere in between... regardless of that, tho, I appreciate your post. I'm sorry that you got the boot from big brother and I'm happy that you're here, using Lemmy and whatever Lemmy community you're on. [I'm on Beehaw.org.]
While I use Reddit, I think I know the solution for me... I'm going to start talking about Lemmy there in all my /r/tech* subs. Lemmy is worthy of the talk, and for users to come over... I'll promote Beehaw.org, as I fully agree with their policies and ideals for running the site - and I'll see what, if any, pushback I get on the /r/ platform.
If for any reason I run into the same as you're experiencing, I want to know sooner than later so I can rid myself of the /r/ forever!!
Seems crazy they would ban you for talking about lemmy as its so tiny but there probably scared it will blow up like mastodon and start losing them money better to kill it now before it gets well known