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.
They absolutely know about us, probably from a long time ago, but especially in this past week, with lemmy getting posted everywhere.
They’ve done an amazing job at burning their community. They think 3rd party apps are only used by super nerds (or at least many of the people I’ve talked to do), but I think they forgot who provides most of the content.
Well, bots now, but good content usually came from the super nerds
Sometimes I do get a bit doomerist about it. If reddit is to be believed, they claim something like < 20% of people use old.reddit, or mobile apps. That seems incredibly low to me, but I must admit most of the people who I encounter IRL that use reddit don’t know about old reddit, RES, or other apps.
Which is why they’ve been waiting, I’m sure they kept the numbers updated to know what critical mass they thought they needed to be able to chop off this part of their userbase. Ignoring that this part was also the ones who are their most dedicated users, there for the longest amount of time.
I think it has more to do with timing on business/IPO decisions. They’ve decided their plan forward, and they’ve decided that they can afford to lose some users.
I think they’ve also convinced themselves that most people using 3rd party apps or old.reddit will just get in line, because they won’t want to actually leave the platform.
I wonder how that’ll work out for them.
They could be pulling something sneaky here. The vast majority of people lurk, and most people who lurk probably don’t even have accounts. If you haven’t bothered to sign up, you probably haven’t bothered to use the old interface or a third party application. It wouldn’t surprise me if the vast majority of their traffic comes through the standard web interface, even if the stats for user activity paint a different picture.
Plus a lot of the things they have been doing recently are dark patterns to get the visitor to make an account or even force it. Google a thing not logged in and they will force you to log in.
These are traffic statistics from r/privatelife from the past 12 months. This is the most favourable scenario for third party Reddit client users.
The reality is, third party users and old.reddit.com users are a minority and are easiest to ditch for Reddit as a company. And they will no longer care for us, so its best to prioritise our interests just like they are.
I have a feeling that if you really crunch Reddit’s numbers, the content that provides the most engagement and revenue is NSFW content. Reddit is one of the only large social media websites that allows NSFW and the subreddit system makes it much easier to categorize and find content than Twitter, so there are a massive number of invisible users who do not use the site for anything except NSFW, which is also why it’s specifically targeted in the new API policy. Long-term, technically knowledgeable users who produce high-quality content are not nearly as financially exploitable as the mass of users who use Reddit as a NSFW directory and who have no alternative to migrate to.
Plus, the majority of active Reddit users are non-technical “normies” who joined Reddit after hearing about it from trends like the GameStop stock. Those users use the official app and have no idea what an API is, so they don’t care and will continue to use Reddit.