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.
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.
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’.
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.
Welcome aboard! Glad to have you here!
Also, eff spez!
I’m so sorry for what they did. I hope you can feel at home on the Fediverse. Starting over sucks so bad, but I’m sure you will find awesome people here. Heck probably the same awesome people as there!
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’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.
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.
If you’re the sole-mod of a sub - always add like 4 of your own alt-accounts as mods below you
I was added as a mod to one sub without sub-settings permissions and the main mod account was deleted, so I deleted all the posts and stickied a text-comment saying 2023 blackout, message mods to join private community hehe~
I’m glad a good experienced mod has come over from reddit. Having good content providers here will help speed reddits demise.
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.
There does not seem to be a celebrities magazine here yet. You could make one and become a mod of it.
Already full at work building something better, so happy to have another experienced power user among our ranks!
