They did not provide a reason. There was no further dialog. I just got a system message telling me I was removed.

I was also silmultaniously shadow banned from Reddit and my posts and comments stopped showing up. I had created a post complaining about being removed as the moderator (the only moderator for over a decade) of a sub that I built from the ground up and donated literally thousands of volunteer hour to over the last 14 years. It had zero upvotes or downvotes or comments and was not visable as an anon user.

In the end, I decided to rip the bandaid off and killed my 16.5 year account. I was one of the early supporters of Reddit (user #7758) and had left Digg for good in May of 2007 after the AAC contraversy. They showed their authoritarian side in that moment and I knew Digg had reached their high water mark.

Reddit is at that moment now. They won’t be dead tomorrow. They won’t be dead next week. However, it will also never be the same, and it’s only downhill from here.

Much like Digg. Much like Myspace. I am sure there will be a blurb a few years from now as an addendum in some business journal how Reddit sold to a third party for an undisclosed sum and some Skittles…

The future is the Fediverse and I’m glad I was forced to remove my Reddit crutch and dive in full force.

  • PippinVanderspiegel
    41•1 year ago

    I’m really sorry to hear that they did this to you. I went through something similar, but only as a poster.

    There was a really famous Usenet poster called Humdog who, back in 1994, wrote a brilliant essay called Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace. It talks of how cyberspace, instead of doing away with hierarchy and creating equality, actually commodifies its users and transfers power to large corporations.

    cyberspace is a mostly a silent place. in its silence it shows itself to be an expression of the mass. one might question the idea of silence in a place where millions of user-ids parade around like angels of light, looking to see whom they might, so to speak, consume. the silence is nonetheless present and it is most present, paradoxically at the moment that the user-id speaks. when the user-id posts to a board, it does so while dwelling within an illusion that no one is present. language in cyberspace is a frozen landscape.

    i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management.

    You can read it all here:
    https://archive.org/details/pandoras-vox-on-community-in-cyberspace-by-humdog-1994
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Hermosillo

    It really does show that none of this is new. It’s what the internet really always has been.

    • IninewCrow
      8•1 year ago

      Great perspective and a fanstastic way of seeing how we should view our participation in all this internet activity

    • Jim Vernon
      3•1 year ago

      @PippinVanderspiegel @vaprz I’d dispute that he gained nothing from “the sale of his soul”. We all get something out of posting online, even if we’re not paid for it. Money isn’t the only thing of value one can receive. I greatly value the discussions I’ve had over the years and the knowledge I’ve gained from anonymous posters contributions. I don’t think I’d even have the job I have today without online exchanges between people looking for and giving out helpful information.

      • PippinVanderspiegel
        4•1 year ago

        It’s a fair point but, I think, misses the gist of her argument. Humdog was super famous back in the 90s as a prolific online poster. Her entire life was pretty much online at a time when that was highly unusual. Keeping in mind that this was back in 1994 (so one year after the World Wide Web came into existence) and the prevailing attitude of most people back then was that the internet was a great leveller that would remove hierarchy from society and give power to the individual.

        Her point was simply that the nature of posting on a large corporation’s computer network actually gave more power to these companies than to the user. She wasn’t saying that posting online was pointless or valueless.

        She was pretty much the first person to ever say this.

        • Jim Vernon
          3•1 year ago

          @PippinVanderspiegel @vaprz

          This is completely tangential, but it’s pretty wild that I could reply to your comment by simply pasting the link into Mastodon. No account creation on a Kbin instance required.

          • PippinVanderspiegel
            2•1 year ago

            It’s great isn’t it?

            It’s actually the first time I’ve been excited for web technology in the last decade!