Context:
/r/ProgrammerHumor/ closed for a couple of days, then - “because mods have to listen to the community or otherwise they get replaced by more /u/Spez compliant mods” opened up again, and held a voting which new rules to enforce. The sub opened up with the new rule allTitlesMustBeCamelCase.
I made the first post about 15 minutes after the sub re-opened (because I’m in their discord, I was aware it opened up again, it wasn’t announced yet, I think) - and of course I just make a shit-post about John Oliver since it’s the /r/pics (and a bunch of other) subreddits way to protesting the API changes.
It wasn’t even that good of a post to be honest, it got temporary taken down by the subs’ mods since they mentioned “it’s only anecdotally related [to programmer humor]” - but after messaging them explaining the context they put it back up. So it’s basically approved by the moderators of the subreddit. And not against the content policy of the sub
It got like 3k upvotes in about an hour, so I got a message from some bot that I was on the frontpage of /all/ as well. At the end of the day it had 13.5k upvotes
About 48 hours later I got an automated message:
Your account has been permanently suspended for breaking the rules. This account is permanently suspended due to violations of Reddit’s content policy
I posted an “appeal” basically just asking “Lol you banned me for posting John Oliver?”
And the only response I got was:
Thanks for submitting an appeal to the Reddit admin team. We have reviewed your request and unfortunately, your appeal will not be granted and your suspension will remain in place. For future reference, we recommend you to familiarize yourself with Reddit’s Content Policy. -Reddit Admin Team This is an automated message; responses will not be received by Reddit admins.
I posted another “appeal” yesterday asking “Could you clarify which Content Policy rule I broke?” To which they haven’t responded yet.
It’s the only post I made in the last 2 weeks, so there wasn’t any other reason to suddenly ban me besides this post…
My reddit account was 12 years old at this point. I was going to leave anyways because the Reddit client I use (sync) already announced it would be shutting down June 30 - so I don’t care that much that they banned me - just though it was a pretty weird approach from the Reddit Admins to start banning people for getting John Oliver on the front-page
Congratulations! There should be “Banned from Reddit” medals on Lemmy/Mastodon/kbin
That’s fucking ridiculous. Maybe we should all start posting this meme and get ourselves banned.
Reach out to The Verge, they’ve been covering the Reddit debacle pretty well and I bet they’d love to hear from you.
I’m hoping they’re still going to respond to the appeal, as my first appeal wasn’t really a real one, just basically a “lol wtf?” one… Considering maybe it was just one random “hardcore” rogue admin on a banning spree for things they didn’t like. - And that if I just submitted an appeal another admin would see it and unban me. But that didn’t go as expected
So I’m hoping they at least answer the second appeal asking to give me a reason. I’m curious if they’re going to admit it’s for the John Oliver post, or if they’re going to pull something from the history and be like “2 years ago you said something mildly problematic we just discovered” - or most likely, just keep it vague and say I violated the content policy without explanation
If reddit doesn’t reach out in a reasonable time do still reach out to news media outlets including the verge that are likely to cover the story
It’s not that good of a meme though… https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/14f5kks/whenaprogramtellsyoutojustfollowtheinstallationwiz/
I’m surprised that they replied to your appeal at all.
I got “permanently suspended” a couple of weeks ago for “report abuse” (I was reporting comments in /r/conservative as misinformation, because they were misinformation, and the mods apparently decided to retaliate against me) and Reddit can’t even be bothered to respond to my appeal.
I also sent a data request a couple of weeks ago, and they haven’t responded to that yet either.
Reddit is really not backing down, huh? Welp slaps knee i guess I’m leaving for good.
My reddit account was 12 years old at this point
I’m guessing that’s a big reason why. You know what Reddit used to be like, and that’s not where they want it now, so you’re more of a liability than an asset. They’d rather grow their userbase with millions of new users who will adapt to whatever shitty platform they’re continuing to morph into.
I think mine is 13. Might have to try to get banned myself! Wonder if there’s a pic of John Oliver holding a ban hammer.
Arbitrary enforcement of the rules is the main problem here.
Reddit can be thought of as a three tier hierarchy, in decreasing order of power:
- Layer 1 is the admins
- Layer 2 is the subreddit mods
- Layer 3 is the users.
Now, the admins have the interest of having the mods and users work for them for free to generate contents. To do that, their best interest is to have Layer 2 and 3 constantly in conflict with each other so they won’t turn their attention to what’s going on in Layer 1, and they can just step in as needed as “the good guys” when things get out of hand.
(Don’t say the name of the book please)
The way they did that, is of course, by making a “Layer 1.5”, the so called powermods, and promises them arbitrary powers that they can abuse (delete and then repost other’s content, blatant karma farming) to have the attention and the hate from Layer 2 and 3 on them instead of Layer 1, and so they can get away with whatever they want for flimsy excuses. (closing source code, shadowbans for real people, quarantine, awards, NFTs, new reddit, etc.)
Previous attempts at leaving reddit (Pao, controversies surrounding other various hate subs) failed because only Level 3 and a few lower member of Level 2 were responsive to the problems, most people are just indifferent and want to have reddit the way it is now, so Layer 1 can just pled ignorance and have people move on.
So, what’s different this time? This time both Layer 2 and 3 are collectively moving against Layer 1 for the very first time, and to maintain the illusion of normalcy would require more direct interventions from Layer 1 since playing dumb is no longer an option. Of course, powermods (all around bad person awkwardtheturtle, for example) outlived their usefulness as distraction, so they can now be arbitrarily disposed of as well.
I don’t know what you are talking about, I’m just here to promote my new movie “Barbie”.
Easy! Level 3 is everyone one problem away from being homeless and anyone worse off than them. 2 is the middle class all the way up to some movie stars and athletes. 1.5 is the ridiculously over paid stars/ athletes all the way up to the very richest individuals. 1 is all the families that have their wealth spread out enough so we don’t talk about it, but have the real financial weight to get what they want done. I know, you think Elon musk and Jeff bozos should be in layer 1, but if they were, they wouldn’t be showing their dumb faces in the news to us IMHO.
I think you just described every political and economic system in the western world
