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.
Asking multiple third-party app devs consider Lemmy + Made the same post here as well
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 a blatant lie, I mentioned about the cross-posts right IN THIS post: “Asking multiple third-party app devs consider Lemmy + Made the same post here as well”
As you can see, I made the post right here and on reddit, i never missed any details.
It’s not my opinion. It’s literally in the site rules - https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043504051 Bullet point 2 in the second list. Bullet point 3 arguably also applies since lemmy could be said to be unrelated to the subreddits in which you were posting. And when site wide rules get broken then it’s the admins that step in, not subreddit moderators.
Edit: As for the self promo part I mentioned in my previous comment, that would fall under bullet point 2 of the first list in the link. While you may not actually have a stake in lemmy, your actions on reddit definitely made me suspicious that you did before I looked into lemmy more and learned who the the heads of the project are. It would have been easy for a mod or admin to have seem just your comments on reddit and assume the same thing.
I’m not saying I disagree with your motives but your actions were pretty clearly breaking long established rules.
There are plenty of other reasons to criticize reddit. Enforcing their existing rules is not one of them.
Again I don’t agree with this. Why?
I wouldn’t say Lemmy was completely irrelevant, and it was certainly not just me asking devs at r/ApolloApp to consider switching Reddit’s APIs to Lemmy’s thanks to the recent API news, this was totally relevent, here is another post from another user mentioning lemmy on the r/ApolloApp post.
If these other users mentioning alternatives are not banned, why was I?
Also as mentioned in the 3rd bullet point, if I am not sure, contact the mods right? The very same mods would have very well seen my posts, especially when it had a lot of upvotes, if that was actually considered as spam, they would have removed it.
The user you linked made a single post and a single comment on the topic. You spread a ton of posts and comments across several subreddits.
The subreddit mods might have reported you to the admins as a spammer - that’s what they do when they see someone breaking site wide rules. Like it or not, they are under no obligation to communicate with you about it beforehand. It’s also possible that none of the subreddit mods had an issue with it and you happened to be noticed by an admin who saw you were breaking the rules.
I did cross-post it, and I think that is indeed what cross-posting is for.
If that’s true, they would have also removed my post, even if a one sub’s mod team missed it, I cross-posted it to a couple of other subs, did all of them just let my post grow and silently report to Reddit’s admins? No, I don’t think this is the case.
EDIT: As a long-time reddit moderator, I know what we would typically do if we saw spammers, we can report them as you said, but we also mainly (and first) remove their posts, but that did not happen across any of the subs I cross-posted to. And this does not explain what happened briefly with my r/LemmyMigration sub today morning either.
I think we’re just going to have to agree to disagree. In my opinion posting the same thing across 11 subreddits (even as crossposts), pinging a bunch of other users, and making a lot of comments that mostly just said “move to lemmy” is excessive.
I’m not a mod of one of the subs so I can’t explain why they did or didn’t do something.
Again, I don’t necessarily disagree with your motives but you made yourself a really easy target for reddit.
I don’t know man, I get where you are coming from, but seeing my sub about lemmy get banned and unbanned a few hours prior to that, and no mod removing my cross posts and marking it as spam and suddenly suspending my account.
The way things were operated, I mean, it was all shady to be honest. And it was not even a temporary, but a permanent suspension, when I have clearly contributed a lot through helping so many communities for years on Reddit.
Yeah, this is just shady, I do have to admit I gave them something they could use against me, even if it may not have actually been spam, good enough reason for them to throw me off.