Banned from Reddit after posting John Oliver : reddit

this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023

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Banned from Reddit after posting John Oliver (i.imgur.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Context:

/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

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Reddit is really not backing down, huh? Welp slaps knee i guess I'm leaving for good.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

By the way, sync for Lemmy is coming ;)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

Edit: there is also Memmy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Over the years this dev definitely earned the community’s trust and I see no reason to assume he will pull sneaky shit now.

The fact that he puts you in a position where you have to trust him makes him not trustworthy. There is no place for trust in computer security or privacy. If you have to trust something, it is bad for you. For example it would be ridiculous if encryption relied only on trust and nobody could verify that it's actually secure. I'm not saying the developer is malicious, but he should know better than this (all programmers should).

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.

Why do you dislike that? Do you not want to have control over your own devices and software that runs on them? Free and Open Source software gives you the freedom to study the program, modify it and distribute the original and any modifications you make to it. This way not only we can verify what the program does, but we can also change it to fit our needs. But also this makes it impractical to implement any malicious functionality, because users can easily remove it and share the modified version with others. So instead of the developer having power over users, the users are the ones in control. They can have privacy and security, which is impossible with proprietary software. That's why proprietary software is unethical.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That is an awful way to go about it. Have you verified your bank's computer systems? What about the servers your health data is stored on? I hope you use an Android AOSP ROM with a public source code. Do you even trust your microwave to not send death rays because of a malicious programmer?

I don't dislike it in general, I just think that FOSS is not a good fit for every project. A good and recent example: I work as a software engineer in a pretty niche market and my team and I have developed what we believe is a really neat algorithm for a pretty niche problem. There are already other players trying to replicate the solution, but thankfully they are falling short compared to our approach so far.

Suppose instead of keeping the library proprietary we would make it open-source (and free). Well, now every competitor in the market just needs to look at our GitHub, and months of R&D budget would be basically wasted while at the same time, our competitors would get our IP handed on a silver plate.

I'm pretty sure that Sync for Lemmy will have a pro version priced similarly to the Sync for Reddit pro version (~ $4.99 one-time). The dev would be stupid to release it as FOSS, if he intends to make money on premium features, when literally anyone with a computer and two brain cells could just compile the premium app from a public GitHub.

Now take good examples of FOSS: Blender, Gimp, Inkscape, and the likes. The main difference is that there is no obvious monetization happening besides donations and sponsorships and for such passion projects FOSS is absolutely the way to go as you can pool in the knowledge of the community if your project generates enough traction. Blender wouldn't be what it is today without all the volunteer devs contributing to it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That's fucking ridiculous. Maybe we should all start posting this meme and get ourselves banned.

Reach out to The Verge, they've been covering the Reddit debacle pretty well and I bet they'd love to hear from you.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If reddit doesn't reach out in a reasonable time do still reach out to news media outlets including the verge that are likely to cover the story

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Or at least they'll combine it with other incidents into a bigger story.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Now you don't have to scrub your post history.

What's the problem?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I can't even "scrub my post history" anymore... The account is in readonly mode basically - and I can't delete or edit anything from my history

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Hell, I got banned for agreeing with a post. And when I complained about it to the mods, they had reddit perma ban my account.

Reddit is slowly going to fall apart. For example, one subreddit i used to like (before THEY banned me) has made it so that only people who are considered "experienced" (whatever the hell that means) on the subreddit are now allowed to post topics.

And the subreddit that banned me would not openly list there moderators.

I don't really care as they have finally soured me on the site permanently. TBH they have done me a solid favour. Reddit is just slowly going to eat itself.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

They banned me forever for quoting historical facts. It was a 16 year old account. It really did turn to shit.

Anyway, I'm sure degenerates from /r/palestine will contribute much better content to their community.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

At least they told you you were banned. I was shadowbanned and didn't figure it out for a week.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How do you know/realize you are shadow banned?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

No one commented or voted on my comments for a few days. So I logged out and ran a search for my username, and got told I didn't exist.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

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".

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They ban for anything but yet /askthedonald /politicalcompass and /conservative still exist

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

/r/Palestine is literally Yeey Hamas and kill the Jew every other post. And they let it pass.

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