I left Reddit, deleting all of my content, because I disagreed with the elimination of third party apps and because of Reddit’s response to the community. Full stop. I wasn’t a heavy Twitter user - I tend to enjoy more drawn out discussions and topically focused communities - but I stopped using it entirely because of Elon’s moves, including his rejection of corporate censorship.

I have no problem with a service establishing a ToS that includes trust and safety policies that will remove posts and ban users over hate speech. I have no problem with forced demonetization and deplatforming of hate accounts. I would have no problem if federal and state governments enacted more anti-hate laws to bring us in line with other democracies around the world.

That’s because I do not think that permitting a group of American brown shirts to fly Nazi flags and shout racist slurs at passersby increases freedom. I think it decreases it, because it causes a large part of the population to live in fear. I think hate speech rules by private companies serve the same purpose.

Not censorship, but enshitification. Reddit has been steering in an anti-user direction for quite a while. Killing the 3rd party apps that made that site useable was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

People who whine about being booted over “personal beliefs” tend to conveniently neglect to mention what those beliefs are. If you feel strongly that pineapple should absolutely NEVER go on pizza, then I’ll disagree with you and leave it at that; if you get booted from a community over that opinion, yeah that’s fucking crazy and indicative of a community that should be abandoned anyway. If you feel strongly about things like gay people should be killed or women should have restricted rights, then I’ll disagree with you and report your ass for every comment that even hints at bigotry, cuz you’re a horrible person and are absolutely not welcome here.

Spez killed third party apps so he could track people and sell ads. First party apps were bad and getting worse. And the whole way it went down was just dishonest and shitty. I don’t wanna support that.

I also really enjoyed being able to see new content AND comment on it/interact with the community. That was the reason Reddit was cool to me. If I didn’t channel that energy towards something else I’d have ended up back on Reddit.

And the cherry on top, I love the idea of decentralized social networks. It’s better for the internet.

Censorship had nothing to do with me leaving. I couldn’t use my app anymore, and I didn’t like theirs, so I found something else.

I wanted something Reddit-ish to fill time and entertain me. The money-grab moves Reddit was doing annoyed me. The final straw (and most important factor) was the retirement of my favorite viewer app - Apollo. Moving to Lemmy using Voyager is a no brainer compared to Reddit’s shitty user interface.

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Some of the subreddits I follow are related to emulation and piracy which has caused some subreddits to get banned or at least take action to limit legal threats. When the Reddit blackout happened a lot of them went down and said they were shifting here. I find they’re a little more open to discussion than other places that just copy and paste some old post or refer you to a Wiki

reddit permabanned me for mass reporting very obvious spam bots, as i was “abusing the report feature”, then ignored the appeal (which i’m sure went straight in the trash anyway). 9 year old 500k karma account, and a huge content generator for their money farm, down the drain.

i was already done with the site but mostly stuck around for some of the community content I still cared about. it was obvious they PREFER spam bots over real users, as long as they generate traffic and ad revenue. money over all, they’ve always transparently been that way. and the third party app ban was just the icing on the cake. They give no craps about any kind of censorship unless it censors the voices that might get between them and IPO money.

fuck 'em, fuck spez and his blue-eyed golden boy affluenza-afflicted pedo ass. they can have their spambots in their nice little walled garden. i’m having a lot more fun over here anyway.

edit: and in case a LW mod considers this “uncivil”, my last statement is factual, not an attack. it is an open secret that spez first modded, and then explicitly allowed the continued existence of /r/jailbait for many years (quick google); he is also so self-centered via his golden-boy affluenza complex that he thinks he will be a slave owner in the coming apocalypse.

I was hoping that lemmy had more level headed users and less tribalism. I was wrong.

Reddit permanently banned me because I was mocking white supremacists on a subreddit made for mocking white supremacists. That happened because one of the Nazis I posted who has a giant swastika face tattoo noticed his picture on Reddit and said on Facebook he was complaining to the admins.

So Reddit is supportive of white supremacists so fuck Reddit.

Like others, the final thing that prompted me to leave the corporate r-word site was the decision to start charging for the api that forced most of the 3rd party apps out of operation.

The inconsistent, impersonal, and at times improper censoring was already pushing me away before the api change, though. I don’t mind safe spaces and civility being a precondition to participation, but if you’re going to ban people for being uncivil or using a subset of derogatory terms, then be consistent about it.

One of the many tiresome things that happened to me is that I got a warning about being banned site-wide for using one of the banned words in a completely innocuous and generally contextually acceptable way. My comment was something like “you can use baking soda to [redacted verb which in this context is commonly used to mean slow or delay] the growth of mold.” in a post about that topic.

The warning I received was basically, “you’re on our list now, and further infractions will result in a site-wide ban” and of course my otherwise helpful and relevant comment was deleted. Also, there was no way to respond or ask for clarification that I could find, as this was an admin warning, not something from a moderator of a sub. Anyway, a warning like that was obviously obtuse and stupid, but whatever.

What made it irksome is that after that incident, any time I noticed a post, title, or comment using that same word (or some variation of it like td, f*ck td, sh*t t**d, etc) in a derogatory manner, I would report it. And invariably, the comment would not get removed and I’d get the response back “we investigated but did not find it to be in violation of our policies.”

Granted, I also took issue with the fact that the banned terms list was woefully inadequate at addressing the dozens of disparaging terms that were frequently used to target the LGBT+ community and which for some reason where considered completely acceptable by the corporate r-word site.

And no, I don’t think Lemmy is any better on the consistency / censorship front, and in fact is inherently worse in some ways as a result of the general decentralized architecture.

No, I came because of:

• the removal of essential moderation tools
• the insertion of ads and promoted content
• the huge data requirements of the official app

So kind of the opposite of censorship. I came because there’s too much low-quality content.

The API changes woulnd’t even have affected me directly - I don’t use any apps, never used bots, and was part of a sub that was noticable more friendly and clean than a whole lot of similar subs, no toxicity but interesting content and very active mods.

But it didn’t sit right with me how nonchalantly u/spez disregarded any and all complaints, didn’t give a shit about people who would be literally unable to use his site with the changes he wanted to implement (the majority of people in r/blind for example), openly mocked everyone that wasn’t a bootlicker and still to this day thinks that he did everything right and “crushed the protests” and all that jazz. This guy lives in his own little bubble in which he is convinced the dumpster fire he calls reddit is the best thing since sliced bread and he’s a genius without fault.

Fuck u/spez.

I deleted everything I had contributed to that site over the course of 9+ years, nuked my account and moved to LW instead. I’m still in the process of reformatting and reuploading everyting I had removed from the former site, but I feel a lot more at ease having my guides, art etc. hosted on a site that isn’t a corporate shitfest run by a delusional egomaniac with an army of astroturfing bots.

…and in retrospect, it was about high time I jumped ship, as my former main sub has gone down the drain big time since that debacle. The original creator hasn’t done anything in months, the formerly active mods obviously don’t give a shit about scammers, repost bots and trolls anymore (or they, too, have simply left) and the most upvoted posts and comments are always some cringey regurgitated meme spam and low-effort shitposts. I’m glad I am no longer part of that, albeit in a bittersweet way. It feels like seeing an Ex that you formerly adored turn a crackhead hobo after you broke up.

I dropped 95% of my activity on Reddit about when everyone else left earlier this summer.

This is not censorship but it’s similar, it’s the problems with Reddit’s automated moderation system. It’s not something unique to Reddit since lots of platforms have this issue, and it is a risk on Lemmy as well if we can’t figure out other ways to combat spam effectively once userbase grows

• On Reddit, our university sub’s moderation team had nearly all of their accounts banned (including all the alts), because we shared a mod account to do basic mod actions (before Reddit had some of that functionality built-in). The mod account wasn’t the reason, but we assume that’s what the automated system used to decide we were all one person. It took a while to resolve, and our initial attempts to point out the issue resulted in automated messages saying we were wrong and that we couldn’t appeal anymore. Eventually we posted on mod-support and the only solution was to self-dox our alts to each other in order to get some of them reverted (the ones we didn’t feel comfortable sharing we never got back). It was a mess.

I think we also need to consider the flip side of this issue. Yes, some people are banned wrongfully from these platforms. However, sometimes people are banned for sharing content that also isn’t welcome here, and over time we WILL get more users like that showing up here because Lemmy will look like the next best thing for them. I’m not sure how that will work out and maybe the Fediverse will let those users find their place away from the rest of us, but it’s important to know that not all bans from other platforms are unjustified.

It wasn’t about censorship, it was about the platform losing respect for its users.

This wasn’t my reddit handle if that’s what you’re wondering next, have fun looking.