I'm on day one of my third temp 7-day sitewide reddit ban this past year. Before that, I was a daily participator on reddit for over 10 years with no site-wide actions.
I thought it might be fun to share the story of my bans. Feel free to share yours.
The first one was for summarizing Bill Maher's views on fat women, old women, and transgendered people. This was understandably determined to be hate speech by the AI, but was upheld by human appeal.
The second one, I don't even remember clearly. I think I may have been criticizing Zionism on somewhere, probably a popular news subreddit. One thing you have to keep in mind is they delete the offending comment and so you have to guess at what your offense might be; then you only have 250 characters to defend yourself. The ban was done by AI. About five days after my seven-day ban ended, I got the notification: Your ban has been overturned. Thanks!
The third one just happened, so it's fresh in my memory. I wanted to talk about something I found crazy on one of my favorite TV shows: a black woman, mother of two black children and wife of a black man, who was in her 30s living the United States had her FIRST social justice epiphany--and it was about press freedoms in Guatamela. The post was shadowbanned. I commented on another thread, warning a user that the mods would come along soon to shadowban any comments on race. Both our comments were shadowbanned, and thereafter, I was perma-shadowbanned on that sub--any comment I made was immediately sent to the shadow realm.
I looked for discussion about the show's treatment of race (which would be interesting since the show did not--as the subreddit does--ignore the issue entirely) and found nothing more recent than 14 years ago. The sub had been wiped clean of any discussion of race on the show.
I wrote the mods and asked them to either a) lift my shadow ban or b) ban me permanently.
To make things easier for them, I also called them racist cowards. An hour later, I received my temp ban for bullying and harrassment.
My appeal simply laid out the facts: they objectively demonstrated both cowardice (by shadowbanning) and racism (for shadowbanning discussion on race) therefore it is not bullying to call them racist cowards. Any conversation forum that shadowbans members for conversing is obviously lost, and then further sitewide bans them for complaining, is clearly lost.
I got a seven-day time-out for trying to reason with some troll who kept going 'so you secretly agree with me :)' in barely more words. Finally said "insert it inside yourself," and that is the reply the admins considered harassment.
I got another seven-day time-out for explaining how printer drivers inspired the open-source movement. I suffered a number of bewildering replies from some idiot confused why a 1970s printer would matter today, and finally said "You might be an idiot." Apparently that's bullying.
I got a third seven-day time-out for telling someone "Okay, enjoy your dead kids, I guess." That one at least sounds awful in a vacuum. But if you just scroll up, the context was an antivax crank asking, 'are parents meant to disregard their own experience in favor of a study?!,' and the repeatedly explained answer was, yes. Medical science is how your children stay alive.
My account is from mid-2007. I lurked for a few months beforehand. When they pulled that API shit, I was gone. Didn't even use a client. old.reddit.com, exclusively, for fifteen years. But I could see the writing on the wall.
Yeah, it's like every redditor is a palestinian--everything you do can never be justified by context and is always unprovoked. It's so maddening.
"Enjoy your dead kids," sounds perfectly fine to me. I read it and it immediately thought you were telling someone they were doing something that was going to put their kids at risk. "Enjoy the obvious consequences of your actions" is a perfectly valid thing to say in my book.
i had 3-7 from r/tech for criticizing or mentioning something about TRUMP, which everyone else was doing too, but somehow mines was picked out of all of them. and then i noticed i was recieving multiple reddit notifications, they were other account bans. i know they were cleaning house of criticism against trump/musk, so they can astroturf the new ones.
Also new users also gett shadowbanned on the regular too.