Ask Lemmy

So many reasons, in no particular order.

1. Same questions and content being repeated again and again

2. The environment became hostile, so many people arguing.

3. Intrusion of politics into everything. Particularly right wing politics.

4. Extremely inconsistent modding of forums and inconsistent bans etc...

5. Going public, changes to API, old reddit, comercialization, selling data for AI

I joined when it was a much smaller place, now there are many millions. I realise I like smaller communities. It's why I left Facebook.

I run and grew /r/piracy for over 10 years. I took part in the api protests and also urged people to migrate to lemmy publicly. One of my mods went behind my back and asked the admins to demod me and rearrange mods so that they're on top, and the admins complied. Then the sub went back to business as usual.

Pre 2014 Trump, I believe reddit was so successful in disproving Republican bullshit that they decided to just take it over because they couldn't fight the truth. It was a slow yet successful highjacking. I literally believe they had a thinktank dream it up and hired people to do it.

It's around then when you saw the influx of more right wing users but they were still getting banned by the mods because reddit was a notorious left leaning community. But I think gradually they were able to become mods of themselves.

I think I'm the only person to be banned from world news for being pro Israel and eventually saying fuck israel.

The difference between reddit then and reddit now is night and day. It has become a safe haven of the right wing.

I come from a generation where there were many societal references to younger males (let's say 12 to 16) being attracted to older women. Think of Van Halen's Hot for Teacher or the scene from the Blues Brothers where the playboy Bunny was thrown through a kid's bedroom and he says "Thank you, god!". When I was that age I would have loved the chance to have had sex with an older woman. I think it's a normal part of the sexual awakening of young straight males.

So there's a story very similar in some sub about a 14yo kid having a woman in her mid-twenties coming on to him. I don't remember if anything physically happened between them. The news about it at the time was saying the kid was traumatized and everyone was screaming it was sexual assault. I posted something along the lines of it being a dream of mine for this to have happened to me. And it would have been. Well you can imagine what happened next. Those on the Internet whose views have been hardened by group think and psychology and where there is no room for any discussion or questioning of these ideas attacked en masse. One person in particular said they were immediately reporting me to the admin of the sub, and sure enough I was banned from the sub within 30 minutes.

People on social media fall into being judge and jury at the slightest push. They're so terrified of losing their group identity that they've shut out any ability to question or consider another viewpoint. They're exactly like the villagers with pitchforks rushing to Frankenstein's castle to kill "the monster".

I used to have an iPad, and watching an entire movie on the Netflix app drained the battery by 2-4%. The Reddit app took 15-20% of the battery over breakfast, so I switched to Apollo. Then, I could get through breakfast with the battery still at, say, 95%. Clearly, the official app did something else in the background; since they didn't disclose what, it was probably nefarious. One day, Apollo stopped working, and that was that.

It was really fun a long time ago; getting gifts/exchanging gifts. Secret Santa. Making artwork and just trading it for stuff, lots of subs. And overtime all of that was gone. It became a hateful festering pile of shit. Once reddit became "old" it was done and it showed. It really became a hardcore data mining trash bin. Getting multiple down votes for things I disagreed with was it for me; not that I care about the down votes, it's just there was no comments no interaction. Reddit maybe has a few more years left in my opinion, with new users only joining because it was indirectly advertised by the people that made it what it is. It's like Regr'etsy, wasn't too bad on launch to hey allibaba or temu is in the house!

was banned when I told a Nazi they should "experience the freedom of Auschwitz" if they were true believers. and to not worry about what others have said because "the work you will do there, will set you free".

mods didn't like that and banned me. oh yeah, the Nazi just continued to post white supremacy bullshit.

3 day ban for "They (here meaning men in the American southeast) hate electric vehicles almost as much as they hate black people."

I said that nuclear arms race was just stupid at this point.

"I'll kill everyone"

"If you kill everyone I'll kill everyone"

"Well I can kill everyone 3 times over"

"If you kill everyone 3 times over I'll kill everyone 20 times over"

"Oh yeah? We're working on a way to kill everyone 200 times over"

Anyway that got me a 3 week ban for inciting violence. When I pressed the appeal button and said "its actually condemning violence, theres context there" it got upgraded to a permanent ban.

That was the 3rd time I got banned. The first time was from typing "genji main btw" into an overwatch post complaining about how theres no people playing support.

The mod for r/AdultChildrenofNarcissists disappeared, and replacement essentially admitted that they were running an experiment and couldn't give more details because it would ruin the experiment. They also said they were going to try to remove the anti-parent bias in the subreddit. So much for that support group.

So anyway, r/AdultKidsofNarcissists was created, but there's no reason to think that same sort of thing didn't happen to a bunch of other subreddits. They will eventually sell the comment database to someone who'll run a poorly thought out LLM and find red flags by cross referencing a support group subreddit with other subreddits and cause real world consequences. It isn't enough to stop using reddit now; they already have the posts and will have them forever.

I cant remember which sub it was, but I posted something along the line of "If Israel doesn't stop this genocide, they're gonna find out soon."

I was perma banned by a zionist mod for inciting violence.

No RIF, no reddit, bye Felicia...

Permabanned for calling Ann Coulter racist. Appealed, appeal said bam was overturned, account suspension was never lifted. No way to appeal further. 15 years on the platform down the drain. You can't even look at my comment history anymore.

I was one of the people who they actually unbanned because the bot wrongfully banned it. But because I used a second account during the wrongful ban, again cannot underemphasize so wrong that they admitted it was wrong, it perma banned all of my accounts.

Reddit just sucks. That’s all there is to it. Bots, trolls, /hailcorporate, forced ads, forced app, bans, the API debacle, getting rid of Victoria, quarantining everything while leaving right wing trash subs brigading other subs, hivemind, karmawhoring, race to be the quip for karma no matter how serious the subject… so many reasons to avoid the place in general.

I moderated a large sub that participated in the blackout. Our mod team was threatened by the admins into reopening, and that's when I knew I was done with the platform.

No story, just dozens (hundreds?) of wasted hours reading slop (the human kind at first, but increasingly also the bot kind later)

Got into a thread that was all transphobia. Not the subtle kind, but totally messed up. I was furious nothing was done about it. Glued to my phone, I reported every single one.

Next day I was suspended for abuse of report button. Unfair, but here's the kicker: It was a report 6 months earlier in a different sub, completely different topic.

So these shithead mods let transphobia bullshit slide, then got mad at me for flooding their mod queue, report me, and someone looked through my earlier reports to find something. The reports in that transphobic threads were legit. Mods should have been punished but it was me.

Permabanned for "threatening violence" because somebody asked what everyone was planning for retirement, and my answer was a sturdy rope. So I guess suicidal ideation is verboten

User culture change for sure. The subversive, progressive, smarmy nerds that used to hang out there were "my people" so to speak. The shift to a 50/50 mix of bots and soccer moms made it kinda useless as a forum. Lemmy isn't quite the same, but I think it's a good thing. Much less culturally homogeneous, but 100% authentic.

For me, it’s the API stuff. I used the Reddit app for a long time until I started seeing the He Gets Us ad everywhere. I hated it because it’s from an anti-equality organization. I blocked the account and I stopped seeing it for a while. Then it started popping up again after I blocked the account, so I started using Apollo to avoid it. Once the API thing happened and Apollo stopped working, I said fuck it, deleted my account, and moved on to Mastodon, BlueSky, and (after a time) here.

If they let me block that stupid fucking ad, I would probably still be there, at least if not for all the other dumb decisions they have also made.

Just how I got banned, really. I forget what the topic even was about. Someone who abused a child and got off light. Like they got probation or jail time served or something. I said people who harm children should face longer sentences, like a decade or more. I'm not sure if it was my wording or what, but I got banned for inciting violence against a protected class. I wasn't sure if it was an AI thing (automated, like automod) or what, but I appealed and they upheld it... so I didn't go back. I figure if that's their position, I don't want to be there anyway.

"The API stuff" is so glossed over by people who either weren't there or forgot or, I dunno, don't want Reddit to look as bad as they were? They tried to accuse a third-party developer of extortion, but he recorded the conversation and provided the raw recording as well as a transcript. I think Reddit mostly just wanted Apollo in particular to go away and tried some underhanded tactics to make that happen, but they didn't expect the developer would record the conversation and embarrass them.

The gamification of Reddit. Stickers, awards, achievements, all for creating content and engagement, regardless of quality. Now they have actual games in Reddit where you can win awards for... Stuff... I guess. I refuse to engage with any of it.

Deep ties with NFT and crypto. The NFT side died, finally, because nobody really engaged with it. I was given an NFT avatar on Reddit for free, with a whole lot of advertising to engage in lootboxes and such. My response to that was essentially "ok. And fuck you". It's still doing cryptoshit, though, but doesn't advertise it anymore.

Are you a moderator of a loving community? Hate what Reddit has done? Wanna protest? No you can't. If reddit doesn't like your opinion, or you protest against some of their actions, they'll just remove you from the sub you created and the new owner will be some schmuck who agrees to everything.

API stuff. I stopped contributing and started deleting my old comments when they made it clear that third party apps were done. I had been using Stealth to continue following my local regional sub until they locked down old.reddit more recently. Nowadays, when friends try to send me reddit links, I either ignore them or tell them it won't let me see the content.

This happened years ago before most of the big reddit controversies popped off and before words like incel and red pill were coined. There used to be a medium sized community called /r/foreveralone. It was mostly a community for people who were romantically alone and provided support and semi-edgy memes about it. Mostly though it was a support group by the time I found it. It was a decent community then full of lonely people who mostly encouraged each other and tried to help each other overcome those mental blocks we all set up that keep us from what we want.

Over time though new users started to migrate into the sub offering a different kind of support. They would claim that women were to blame for their lonely state and their rhetoric became increasingly aggrieved and violent. Around this same time /r/redpill was coming into it's prime and sucking many users down a very dark path. The /r/foreveralone community fractured and a schism created two groups within the community, those that wanted it to remain mutual support and chuds that wanted more red pilled content. Unfortunately the chuds won.

Despite many efforts my members of the community and mods to combat the problem nothing worked. I know many users also reached out to the reddit admins for help, but they chose to do nothing. After unmasking who knows how many chuds posting for support only to try to manipulate the community I left and moved on with my life. But it wasn't until months or years later (I can't remember the exact timeline) that the reddit admins squashed /r/redpill and helped the /r/foreveralone community recover their subreddit, but even now it's still fairly poisonous.

Like Facebook and X after them, reddit had a choice to keep the community free of knuckle dragging chuds, but chose not to for some vaguely defined, free speech ideal. That's why reddit sucks.

Left in 2023 when the API thing happened and never looked back. Nowadays I only go there through search engines when looking for a tech solution. Most of the useful stuff is either deleted or outdated. Reddit sucks.