They did not provide a reason. There was no further dialog. I just got a system message telling me I was removed.
I was also silmultaniously shadow banned from Reddit and my posts and comments stopped showing up. I had created a post complaining about being removed as the moderator (the only moderator for over a decade) of a sub that I built from the ground up and donated literally thousands of volunteer hours to over the last 14 years. It had zero upvotes or downvotes or comments and was not visible as an anon user.
In the end, I decided to rip the bandaid off and killed my 16.5 year account. I was one of the early supporters of Reddit (user #7758) and had left Digg for good in May of 2007 after the AAC controversy. They showed their authoritarian side in that moment and I knew Digg had reached their high water mark.
Reddit is at that moment now. They won’t be dead tomorrow. They won’t be dead next week. However, it will also never be the same, and it’s only downhill from here.
Much like Digg. Much like Myspace. I am sure there will be a blurb a few years from now as an addendum in some business journal how Reddit sold to a third party for an undisclosed sum and some Skittles…
The future is the Fediverse and I’m glad I was forced to remove my Reddit crutch and dive in full force.
Edit 1: The messages are starting to come in faster than I can reply. Thanks for all the well wishes!
Edit 2: I’ll also add, that I was never going to re-open the sub because I knew Reddit wasn’t going to yield. Thus, I was prepared for the outcome. I did hope to string them along for a bit longer and waste resources, but you can’t win them all.
This should be a lesson to all remaining mods to stop putting their effort into that site. Reddit doesn’t care about who helped build it. They only care about making money for themselves.
What a shitty way to remove you. Completely uncalled for.
Mods should quit moderating altogether IMO, more than 20 thousands participated in the protest, there’s no way they could replace them all in a reasonable time-frame, it would be a much better chaos than the blackout.
Yeah, I get that they must be very passionate to what they do for free, but to keep putting energy into a place where they have been shown to be considered expendable seems difficult to find the motivation. Don’t seem worth it to me unless the organization they volunteer for is supportive. People quit for less for paying jobs.
Maybe, for maximum damage, they should save this mass resignation for when the IPO happens, just to screw Reddit’s admins. In the meantime, the mods should promote Reddit alternatives in the subs. Nothing too explicit, but some links being mentioned in sticky posts/comments should suffice.
No, just quit. Trying to get perfect with it when it just fails.
I got banned from both shittylifeprotips and interestingasfuck for posting porn which was in rules with the site-wide rules.
Why are they asking for chaos and then try to moderate it? They really should just quit being mods but they cant for some reason.
It’s very possible it was the admins banning you, not the mods (admins are reddit employees for those who don’t know, mods aren’t).
There have been other reports of people being banned by admins for “contributing” to the protest with NSFW content, they’re desperate, they’re trying to keep the protest under check by any means.
I’m really sorry to hear that they did this to you. I went through something similar, but only as a poster.
There was a really famous Usenet poster called Humdog who, back in 1994, wrote a brilliant essay called Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace. It talks of how cyberspace, instead of doing away with hierarchy and creating equality, actually commodifies its users and transfers power to large corporations.
cyberspace is a mostly a silent place. in its silence it shows itself to be an expression of the mass. one might question the idea of silence in a place where millions of user-ids parade around like angels of light, looking to see whom they might, so to speak, consume. the silence is nonetheless present and it is most present, paradoxically at the moment that the user-id speaks. when the user-id posts to a board, it does so while dwelling within an illusion that no one is present. language in cyberspace is a frozen landscape.
i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management.
You can read it all here:
https://archive.org/details/pandoras-vox-on-community-in-cyberspace-by-humdog-1994
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_HermosilloIt really does show that none of this is new. It’s what the internet really always has been.
A very good read and quite prescient.
@PippinVanderspiegel @vaprz I’d dispute that he gained nothing from “the sale of his soul”. We all get something out of posting online, even if we’re not paid for it. Money isn’t the only thing of value one can receive. I greatly value the discussions I’ve had over the years and the knowledge I’ve gained from anonymous posters contributions. I don’t think I’d even have the job I have today without online exchanges between people looking for and giving out helpful information.
Thank you for your effort building a community on Reddit. It gave a lot of people enjoyment. I’m sorry that Reddit didn’t treat you better.
There does not seem to be a celebrities magazine here yet. You could make one and become a mod of it.
How do you make your own magazine
That sounds like a very good idea. The work must carry on!
I don’t know if you need to hear this or not; but you also don’t have to donate your time to anything for free anymore. Nobody would blame you for throwing in the towel (if you feel you need to, that is)
Friend, is there any truth to the rumours of a lawsuit from current and former mods against Reddit, for back pay? I’m pretty convinced there’s a case there, and your story is a prime example. One argument from Reddit might be that you and the community were the primary beneficiaries of your volunteer labour, but for Reddit to take your mod powers unilaterally sure makes them look like an employer rather than a maintainer of a public forum.
In the US, there are no circumstances under which a private for-profit company can legally accept volunteer labour like that. Further strengthening your case would be how much Facebook pays for moderation of their platform. Reddit built an entire business on the backs of people like you, and your stake in that should be recognised and compensated.
I just read a write up AOL that someone linked on another thread. AOL started selling ad space and changing the chatrooms up on their whim even though it was the unpaid works or volunteers that built the community. AOL expanded and looked for a pay out. It normally happens, but the way they did it destroyed any good faith between their unpaid workers and AOL proper. They ended up having a class action lawsuit and settled for 15 million. 5 to each, unpaid workers, lawyers, some charity. I could see a class action lawsuit building for this.
Terrible mate, it sucks that you got the shit end of the stick. Reddit admins are putting the squeeze on heaps of mods, they’re not interested in resolving any issues, just silencing opposition.
It’s a shame that something you put that much time and effort in has all of a sudden vanished, hopefully you find a new home / community here.
I just deleted my account on Reddit. This behavior is not acceptable anymore at all. Sorry for what happened to you, this must feel disappointing and betraying having put so much of yourself into the platform that simply kicked your out of the door.
holy fuck
i’m just some asshole with a 13+ year old account that would bitch and moan in the comments section
i can’t imagine dedicating so much of my time to build a wonderful community and then being unceremoniously cast away as part of a large purge of dissent
I’m so sorry. It’s a real loss of something you valued and took pride in. It’s also a loss of community. Be kind to yourself while you mourn the loss. (We’re all feeling it to some degree.) But you have a fresh, new community right here for you.
That’s just insane. Even if the content is good… I’m just not sure I could justify going back to a place like that.
Yup. any site that treats their userbase and mods that way isn’t worth using. Mods and users put in countless hours to make that site a better place, and this is how Spez treats us. Fuck that. Fuck spez. Fuck reddit
I somehow ended up as the sole moderator for r/Corfu. It’s a VERY slow subreddit. I’m not sure if I should ignore it, or if there’s something I can do with the tiny lever of ‘power’.
So many stories like yours are coming out. Thanks for sharing.
The momentum definitely seems to swinging Lenny’s way. Glad to see it.
I can’t imagine how it feels to put so many hours into building a thriving community just to have it thanklessly ripped from your hands.
As an 12 year reddit user who almost never posted or commented, thank you for all of the hard work you and others like you put in to make reddit as great as it was.
Hopefully fediverse will prove more resistant to greedy corporate interests in the years to come. I’m looking forward to building this new community with all of you!
I manually deleted all of my comments from the past 13 years because I don’t trust an app to complete that process. It took a long time, partly because I revisited a few threads along the way. I’m feeling great about my content being unavailable to Reddit, regardless of whether anyone cares or misses it.
Yes, I do miss Reddit. No, I will not go back. Not because I don’t find any value in it – I do – but because my personal sense of justice gets in the way of wanting to contribute any longer. The time I used to spend scanning Reddit for new information or drama or funny anecdotes is now spent thinking about how I can contribute to my community in other ways.
Reddit won’t die in a big catastrophic Digg moment, that was a rare event that doesn’t usually happen so blatantly.
However, Reddit has reached its high water mark though, I absolutely agree. It’ll slowly continue to bleed good, contributing power users like yourself in favor of becoming an algorithm-run mass-appeal corporate shit hole just like Facebook. It is very sad to see moderators like yourself being treated so poorly though and I hope you stick around here at least somewhat even if it’s just for your own sanity.
