/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
But why use a proprietary app when there are awesome people making Free and Open Source applications? For example Jerboa or wefwef.app. Anyone can audit their source code and make sure they don't spy on you or do anything malicious.
Because the developer has years of experience in crafting a near perfect app for Reddit, much of which applies to Lemmy as well.
Over the years this dev definitely earned the community's trust and I see no reason to assume he will pull sneaky shit now.
FOSS is awesome, but I kind of dislike the militant push towards it here on Lemmy. As soon as someone does not release their source code people go "But have you thought about open source?", "Why not open source?", "No source, no install" and the likes.
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
I like how they permanently banned your account, it's against their rules to make a new account to circumvent a ban, then said "for future reference please read our comment content policy".
It is truly incredible how little it takes to get permbanned on reddit. I posted something in r/politics once that the hivemind didn't agree with, despite being neutral in language, and immediate permban. That is why people keep making accounts over there, they can try and whack-a-mole but you can't stop an idea.
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.
People not responding to your comments or posts, or not voting, even though it's a post that you may reasonably expect a lot of engagement with. Not an obvious way to tell, but if you've made a ton of comments or posts for a week and there's no engagement with anything, you may get reasonably suspicious.
Log out of reddit or use another account to check your original comment. If nothing comes up, it's been shadow deleted. You might figure it out this way if you have multiple accounts or if you share your posts with a friend. If every one of your posts has been shadow deleted, you're almost certainly shadowbanned
I've been wondering why I haven't seen ANY anti-Reddit posts on the front page lately, despite anti-Reddit sentiment being really high and almost all sub action votes are heavily anti-reddit.