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!

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.

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.

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.

No RIF, no reddit, bye Felicia…

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.

Got a lifetime ban for “antisemitism” in a major sub for criticising Israel politics.

I used to have been on Reddit for about 10+ years. I enjoyed the platform because I was able to feel like I was part of a community. I got to vent about my work, rant about my problems, help out people by answering their problems, giving suggestions, post my opinions on things in some subreddits and contribute to others. Felt like I was a member.

Then I just noticed the atmosphere change for the worst, thanks to politics and socially charged individuals who politicize and turn every platform into an activist podium of some sorts. Everyone seemingly got argumentative, trolls became more and more prominent. It was at this point I was starting to see bans after bans. It was pissing me off so I got mutinous overtime which lead to more bans, making more alts that equaled to more bans.

It got to a point where I’ve been banned so much that I was shadow-banned on sight, regardless if I made a account on a VPN or not. The old trick of going to AskReddit to build karma up on a new or alt account wasn’t working anymore. Because Reddit was getting on to those tactics thanks to others having done it multiple times. So after these 10+ years, every and any enjoyment I’ve had on that platform was all but gone.

And I’d like to believe that because of my main IP being changed, I’m able to partake into it again recently as a couple months ago to the present now. The platform is all but unenjoyable. You see the same posts. The same questions asked hundreds of times. Moderators being trigger-happy on bans, which already I’ve gotten one from a wrestling subreddit of all places. Rules don’t matter because everywhere on every subreddit there’s a section that says ‘Moderator’s Discretion’ which means that moderators can do whatever they fucking want anyways so why have rules?

And the whole Reddit filtering shit is awfully annoying. Yeah, have fun making a post where you pour even some of your most natural feelings into it, without trying to be offensive or stepping on toes, just for that damn thing to trigger and remove it altogether. Good luck talking to moderators too, who take their sweet time getting around to even viewing the post, with a good chance they’ll remove it themselves.

It’s like Reddit has committed all of their resources, to make it an unbearable wasteland of shit. Spez did a good job at that. For every step forward he thinks he has taken of progress, he sets the platform five steps back. That’s some talent.

And Spez can absolutely go fuck himself for being the corporate dick-sucker he’s always been.

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.

Months before the API shit, I and like 90% of the users in a comment thread on a post of a woman wearing a shirt that said something like “perform your civic duty: punch a nazi” praising the shirt’s message were banned with dubious reasons. I appealed multiple times until it was reversed, but in that appeal process it became clear that the admin team itself had a huge nazi problem. I jumped onto Lemmy as soon as I heard about it after that.

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.

Permanently banned from reddit for threatening to kill reddit staff. my post triggering the ban:

talking about how pedophiles and rapists should be executed (death penalty).

kinda telling don’t you think?

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.

Banned for pushing back against the claim that “from the river to the sea” is genocidal. I didn’t push back especially strongly (because I suspect that sometimes it does have genocidal intent) nor did I say it in my own voice (I only quoted it - because I think that, even though it’s usually not genocidal, it is nevertheless maximalist and aggressive and therefore unhelpful). This was in the immediate aftermath of October 7 and got me banned from two of the big subs I frequented the most.

It actually left a big hole in my life and I felt very down every time I thought about it. On one sub I’d left thousands of comments over years, and I knew that the mods who’d taken that away didn’t have a second thought for that. I’d already tried Lemmy once due to API/app nonsense but this was what pushed me off.

The really annoying thing was that the ban message says you should message the mods if you have questions. In neither case was it really clear, actually, what the reason was - one quoted a rule, but not what they thought broke it, and the other quoted a sentence, but not what rule they thought it broke. I suspect that I never broke any identifiable rule because in those early days there was very little support for Palestinians and I was trying to talk to people where they were, not where I wished they were.

Made a joke with a Garfield quote and the automod latched on to me like plague. Got several comments removed and my account banned by stuff human reviewers said was ok. I appealed the ban and the automod banned ne again as soon as I logged in back again. I just couldn’t be bothered with it anymore so I came back to Lemmy.