Ask Lemmy

Reddit just banned me, a moderator, for fighting bigotry just because one of my responses to bigotry looks like bigotry itself in a vacuum. The rest of the mod team is appealing for me but this could be the last straw.

I do 5x more mod actions than the second place mod so the community right now is headed to the dump.

I'd been fed up with reddit for a while, but the API bullshit was the final straw for me: As soon as discovered the fediverse I was sold.

Connect is a great mobile app btw.

Years and years of reddit getting more and more problematic and lower quality:

Reddit is dangerous. The admins are out of control. Humanity needs a viable alternative.

I got permanently banned for suggesting that the fastest, most effective way to deal with someone hanging a Nazi flag on their front porch was through the ancient Nordic practice of hús-brenna. The ban ended up affecting all my electronic devices that I'd ever used to access Reddit, so that even new accounts got permanently banned within a few hours.

This was before the IPO, or banning access to their API.

It was a progression of things. Closed source, ads, Spez, terrible content feed filled with reposts and the same botted comments, and finally the end of API and 3rd party apps.

Now I'm on a better platform helping to build out my smaller communities.

Their IPO was my line in the sand.

They banned me but I was still able to see the subreddits on Reddit is Fun. When that died I came here. Reddit is gross and other than search results I haven't used it since.

It just got too busy and corporate for me. The pace of Lemmy is better and more manageable, and I believe its structure is more resistant to commercialization.

They killed the standalone apps. The desktop version redesign was/is crap. And the official mobile experience is less pleasant than having the clap.

Kept getting banned for no reason. Last straw was when I was getting constsntly harrased and threatened by this massive dipshit who had been following me around for months. So I reported it to admins and I was the one who got banned for "inciting violence".

I got banned lol. Not even a "Okay maybe I shouldn't have said that" ban, near as I understand it I was just one of the last mod protest holdouts so they were like, "aite fuck this guy"

I left with the 3rd party app ban, Reddit's quality had been dropping steadily for a while at that point and now I couldn't even use an app that worked.

The official Reddit app stopped working for me altogether early last year, with comment sections taking upwards of a minute to load.

I still use Reddit for specific gaming communities that I check from time to time, since they don't exist here on Lemmy.

The demise of third party apps made me look for a Reddit alternative. I had been using Apollo for years, and it was so much better than the official app. I had been using Reddit for more than a decade when they made the API changes.

The official reddit app is trash. The’ve injected more advertisements, and now they’re even injecting ads into comment sections. it’s the very definition of enshittification.

This is all only stuff that’s visible on the surface, too. Under the hood, there’s definitely bots manipulating the conversation and posts that get upvoted and downvoted.

It’s still fine for smaller communities that are more niche, but that doesn’t change that Reddit has a monopoly over online forums and we really need alternatives. The fediverse seems like it’s able to do that, though it still needs to grow and diversify a bit more.

Boost stopped working. The Reddit app is ass. It was pretty great at first, and I still prefer to Reddit. I have noticed a lot more negativity lately.

I tried Lemmy during the API BS and found it was a lot like the internet chat rooms of old, with way less manufactured rage.

Two years ago, I noticed the comment section was getting worse.

Someone would post a thoughtful post, and the top comments were jokes. Thats not my problem. But when I clicked on the commenter, I noticed a pattern. All their comments were a single sentence joke for like a year. I'd do it a hundred more times and would continue seeing it for the top comments.

Bots or not, it didn't feel like comments meant anything anymore. Redditors weren't sharing thoughts or talking to each other. It just felt like they wanted upvotes and validation. That sucks for conversation.

Got banned for joking that we could find out if old torture methods were real by trying them on child molesters. At the same time there was a thread about some shitty thing HP had done and 100s of the top comments were suggesting the same type of things for their executives. I appealed my ban and asked what the difference was between my comment and theirs and provided a link. All I got was a canned "fuck you". A week later all those comments were still there so I can only assume reddit admins care a whole lot about creating a safe space for child molestors. Not interested in participating on a site like that.

I find Lemmy much more ethical. It truly is by the community, for the community.

On reddit, a select few are getting rich by the content YOU create. Seems a bit weird to me. You create content, they get to buy a new house/yacht. No thank you.

The overwhelming oppression of free speech and expression of ideas through power hungry and immature moderators and anti-human rules made me leave. I have had several 10+ year accounts banned due to "breaking rules" of a Sub... BANNED, with zero explanation that made any sense if you can understand the English language.

The mods use any excuse to tie your comment to some "breakage of rule" and instead of warnings, post removal, or ya know, something CIVIL that would RETAIN USERS. They just outright ban people for anything and the appeal process is a fucking joke.

Losing RIF. But after more than a decade on the site, most posts felt like something I had read before.

API changes. Now I only use it for some niche communities, all the big ones are overrun by bots anyway.

I came over because spez is a greedy little pig boy

I wouldn't say I switched because Lemmy isn't perfect and lacks a lot of the smaller communities that Reddit still retains, but:

1. API apocalypse. I didn't like Reddit's upper management at the best of times, but Spez showed how much of a money-grubbing snake he was.

2. Power mods. Many of them are sociopathic basement dwelling assholes who will banhammer you for breaking hidden rule #273, and then cry 'harassment' to the admins when you call them out. To be honest, the only silver lining to come out of the API purge was watching iBleeedOrange and AwkwardTheTurtle finally piss of Spez enough to get the banhammer. Fuck those guys.

3. Bots. Aside from automoderator being used to effectively censor and shadowban 'bad words' on a lot of subs, the fact that 95% of the chat requests I get are from spam accounts and e-girls mindlessly spamming their OnlyFans to every user in existence should say it all.