Ask Lemmy

I left due to the abusive, lying mods over at /r/steamdeck, I got permanantly banned (reported me for harassing over and over even though I wasn't) simply for criticizing them. Eleven years, gone. But.. I wasn't even upset. Reddit is a dead site full of karma bots and abusive mods. The admins didn't even check me out, they just killed my account.

API change protests. I am not giving up in just 2 days.

I used to use the official Reddit app, but you know, the more people that join the better.

I've never used 3rd party apps, but I was planning to participate in the blackout in solidarity of the protest of reddit's API changes. Then greedy pig boy made statements about how it wasn't a big deal and everyone would be back, and I immediately started looking for a replacement. I do miss the super niche subs that Lemmy doesn't have nearly the population to support, but the overall experience is much better here and reminds me of ye olden days of the internet before corporations took over everything. I deleted as much as I could from my 10 year old account, but didn't delete my account itself because all that does is remove any control you have over comments that get missed for deletion.

When israel started their Genocide the entire frontpage was filled with Zionist bots and any criticism of israel would lead to a ban.

All while IDF propaganda of beheadedbabies was spammed all over the place.

Reddit just banned me, a moderator, for fighting bigotry just because one of my responses to bigotry looks like bigotry itself in a vacuum. The rest of the mod team is appealing for me but this could be the last straw.

I do 5x more mod actions than the second place mod so the community right now is headed to the dump.

I got permanently banned for suggesting that the fastest, most effective way to deal with someone hanging a Nazi flag on their front porch was through the ancient Nordic practice of hús-brenna. The ban ended up affecting all my electronic devices that I'd ever used to access Reddit, so that even new accounts got permanently banned within a few hours.

This was before the IPO, or banning access to their API.

They ban you for bs reasons. That's it, even if you don't go against their rules, apparently saying the truth is enough to get banned.

Multiple reasons. I first started on Slashdot as a news aggregator/discussion forum. Also SomethingAwful, then Digg. I've moved from platform to platform as the enshittification spreads, until I've landed here. I think the fediverse has the best chance to not go down the same holes the others have. The final straw though was the API change and elimination of 3rd party applications.

Death of third party apps

Got banned for joking that we could find out if old torture methods were real by trying them on child molesters. At the same time there was a thread about some shitty thing HP had done and 100s of the top comments were suggesting the same type of things for their executives. I appealed my ban and asked what the difference was between my comment and theirs and provided a link. All I got was a canned "fuck you". A week later all those comments were still there so I can only assume reddit admins care a whole lot about creating a safe space for child molestors. Not interested in participating on a site like that.

The API changes were the starting point but it was when Spez said something along the lines of "Meh, all these annoyed users will come back"

A year later and I haven't been back and have no plans to.

Their IPO was my line in the sand.

I noticed that reddit stock has went up a lot and almost doubled. That shit company somehow managed to make everyone believe they have a future.

I was kicked off Reddit for criticism of Israel

I left from Reddit after the AMA with u/spez and over the API. I knew at that point he wasn’t relenting on the third-party apps and the loss of access for me personally, but mostly for the deaf and blind community, showed me that the CEO had no intention of putting accessibility over profit. I was an Apollo user and I was looking for an alternative while continuing to browse Reddit - using them as a resource, as I always had - and I was seeing censorship abound. Reddit was blocking mentions of alternative sites and blocking discussion about Spez, which just solidified my decision.

I used those last few months of Apollo to help with the protests (John Oliver in /pics) while exploring other options (I started with Mastadon simply because they had an app). When that was over, I went full fediverse and never looked back (okay, I did participate in the r/Place that they ran soon after to contribute my pixels to “fuck spez” one last time).

Bots

Commercialization

Too much mainstream marketing honestly

It just got too busy and corporate for me. The pace of Lemmy is better and more manageable, and I believe its structure is more resistant to commercialization.

They banned me

The overwhelming oppression of free speech and expression of ideas through power hungry and immature moderators and anti-human rules made me leave. I have had several 10+ year accounts banned due to "breaking rules" of a Sub... BANNED, with zero explanation that made any sense if you can understand the English language.

The mods use any excuse to tie your comment to some "breakage of rule" and instead of warnings, post removal, or ya know, something CIVIL that would RETAIN USERS. They just outright ban people for anything and the appeal process is a fucking joke.

Blatant nazi stuff, mod infiltration, creepy mod rules for NSFW subs

I got a lifetime ban on all accounts for no reason. It made me want to use a platform that isn't corporate controlled. Lemmy fit the bill. No power tripping mod can ban you from all of Lemmy. At most you get kicked off their instance which is fine.

I also generally hate corporations and capitalism so using non-corporate alternatives is always nice.

Got banned because I approve of people killing Nazis before the Nazis try to kill them. Why was I contributing even shitposts to a site run by far-right lunatics? It was always a struggle to get blatantly racist subreddits banned, but if someone suggests killing Nazis is a good idea they are on it.

I still mostly use reddit.

IMO the most toxic redditors migrated to this site. The mod drama is worse, the spin is worse, and the toxicity is somehow worse. Plus there are large groups of people attempting to make every single post a referendum on politics, and those groups are usually unhinged tankies.

It's not all bad though. There are a lot of niche subs that are much better here than on reddit. Usually those subs revolve around nerdy interests that haven't gotten caught up in the culture war. In those subs both the content and discourse are significantly more informative and respectful than reddit.

Reddit is a mainstream platform these days. There's some good in that, but also a lot of bad. Lemmy is more raw. A lot more objectively crap stuff to sift through, but also more gems.

Corporate douchebaggery

It’s full of trash comments. I spent too much time arguing over obvious facts. High ranked comments often have nothing to do with the content of the story. It’s become too popular.

Not sure how many knew about "Compact Mode", but when that quit so did I. Was once as simple as appending ".compact" to the end of a Reddit URL to switch to a nice, simplified interface without ads.