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…
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Today I stopped using Bluesky because they suspended my account for suspicious activity. I’m sure it’s because I use a VPN to bypass age verification. Oh well. Mastodon and Lemmy it is.
I love that it says “This account is banned” Then immediately “Jump back into explore communities” Lol
“we don’t want you to participate anymore but we still want you to look at ads”
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.
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.
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.
Hear hear
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”.
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.
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.
That’s ridiculous. Reddit went to shit fast when they stopped letting you use 3rd party apps.
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.
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.
So you didn’t so much stop as much as you were stopped.
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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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
That reddit shit slowly becoming Instagram 2, most of the origin community already gone ;(
Gone where though? I wish some of them atleast come here…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Congratulations 🎊
Thanks :)
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”
The last straw for me was when RedReader stopped working
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.
I wish I’d had enough willpower back then to get out of this cesspool :(
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?
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.
