I lurked Reddit for a long time before creating an account which is now over 6 years old. I was a ‘Top Contributor’ and in the rewards program. 89k karma, never promoted violence or targeted any group, but I got a 7-day ban which was followed up hours later with a permanent ban. This is because of a comment criticizing Senator Radcliffe, trump, and Musk. The comment included profanity, (I called them hypocrites and cunts), but it wasn’t directed at any user or marginalized group. Just harsh political commentary.
Reddit initially issued a 7-day ban, which I appealed. That appeal was approved, the comment was restored, and they admitted it didn’t violate the rules. But the permanent ban still stands, and my follow-up appeals on that have been ignored. No explanation. No transparency. Just gone.
It’s made me realize how fragile “free speech” is on platforms like Reddit. You can insult regular users and get away with it, say horrendously racist, misogynistic, and homophobic things, but speak too plainly about powerful people and suddenly you’re promoting “hate.”
I combed through the Reddit rules, and nothing I have ever commented or posted violates them.
That’s the reason I’m here on Lemmy now. I’m trying to read more, scroll less, and engage with platforms that aren’t actively censoring political dissent. Who else is in the same boat? Is there anything that can be done to hold Reddit accountable or make people aware of they way they are censoring speech? This is my first Lemmy post. I marked it NSFW because of the profanity.
I really liked Reddit, getting a lot of value out of the content posted there by people. And I met some cool people through it.
I never got banned from it myself, but as time went on it was very clear that the company in charge of the platform was not steering things in a good direction, and was not responsible for the value I liked. They just captured the value by being the place where people posted. They really drove that point home when they locked off the API, and I completely quit Reddit at that point, migrating to Lemmy instead.
I definitely feel that Lemmy doesn’t have as much value collected on it yet compared to Reddit. There’s just not as many people posting and generating that value. But, it is free of that sort of draconian control that Reddit has. Not just temporarily free, as a favor from venture capital to draw people in. Permanently free. So, if we build up the value of Lemmy by having more people post here, we will be able to enjoy that value free from the corpo BS.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. :P
I think you’ll just want Substack and/or BlueSky then. Most long form content has moved to Substack.
I noticed a big difference after they cut off the API. I’ve only been on Lemmy a few days, but I feel the same way about the amount of content. Hopefully more and more people will migrate here as reddit continues their nonsense. It’s a shame to see what it has become.
Been on Lemmy from Reddit for over a year. Really don’t miss it, except for a few niche communities.
I’ve been here since the third party app culling and it’s been steadily growing I think from my anecdotal feels when using it. It definitely has a long way to go to replace what reddit was, but hopefully it just keeps growing bit by bit. I see posts like yours frequently these days so you’re definitely not the only one leaving.
I’d guess a good bit of us used to almost entirely browse reddit through a third party app (me with Sync) and for various reasons didn’t capitulate, been on Lemmy since and have vastly increased my time with Linux as a result xD