Context:
/r/ProgrammerHumor/ closed for a couple of days, then - “because mods have to listen to the community or otherwise they get replaced by more /u/Spez compliant” opened up again, and held a voting which new rules to enforce. The sub opened up with the new rule allTitlesMustBeCamelCase.
I made the first post about 15 minutes after the sub re-opened (because I’m in their discord, I was aware it opened up again, it wasn’t announced yet, I think) - and of course I just make a shit-post about John Olver since it’s the /r/pics (and a bunch of other) subreddits way to protesting the API changes.
It wasn’t even that good of a post to be honest, it got temporary taken down by the subs’ mods since they mentioned “it’s only anecdotally related [to programmer humor]” - but after messaging them explaining the context they put it back up. So it’s basically approved by the moderators of the subreddit. And not against the content policy of the sub
It got like 3k upvotes in about an hour, so I got a message from some bot that I was on the frontpage of /all/ as well. At the end of the day it had 13.5k upvotes
About 48 hours later I got an automated message:
Your account has been permanently suspended for breaking the rules. This account is permanently suspended due to violations of Reddit’s content policy
I posted an “appeal” basically just asking “Lol you banned me for posting John Oliver?”
And the only response I got was:
Thanks for submitting an appeal to the Reddit admin team. We have reviewed your request and unfortunately, your appeal will not be granted and your suspension will remain in place. For future reference, we recommend you to familiarize yourself with Reddit’s Content Policy. -Reddit Admin Team This is an automated message; responses will not be received by Reddit admins.
I posted another “appeal” yesterday asking “Could you clarify which Content Policy rule I broke?” To which they haven’t responded yet.
It’s the only post I made in the last 2 weeks, so there wasn’t any other reason to suddenly ban me besides this post…
My reddit account was 12 years old at this point. I was going to leave anyways because the Reddit client I use (sync) already announced it would be shutting down June 30 - so I don’t care that much that they banned me - just though it was a pretty weird approach from the Reddit Admins to start banning people for getting John Oliver on the front-page
I posted an Oliver pic, maybe I’ll get that account banned. Reddit bans are pretty stupid. One of my accounts, the oldest one, is permabanned for telling off a racist. I didn’t even cross a line, I just told them that if they’re gonna be racist, that’s all they’re going to be and anything else they have to say doesn’t matter.
I’ve been saying this a lot over the last few weeks: Reddit is a tool. Just use it on your own terms. Reddit admins legally own the site, but fuck them, if you wanna use their tool, use it. Just let the behavior of the tool guide how you decide to use it. As it is, I still use it, but it will change next month and I won’t be downloading the official app, so I won’t use it as much, and I will no longer be a “feature” of the site, as in the subs where I was only there to contribute to the site, I have left. The subs that are still useful to me, I keep. If they ban me, I will just use one of the accounts they don’t even know is me and I will pare my subscriptions down to only the subs that don’t have a strong community elsewhere. I also will only interact with the site in ways that allow me to block all ads.