It absolutely was and is like that.

The thing is, when those horrible posts got boosted to the front, it just made for more drama, more "engagement" and more links being shared across other social media sites.

Reddit ignoring their responsibility to administrate wasn't a bug, it was a feature.

It's the same as what Jubilee is doing now, boosting the worst voices on both sides, making people hate each other more and giving people a distorted view of demographics in our country. It's line going up at the expense of everything we've worked the last several thousand years to build. I'm happy I was banned and will never return, I just wish more people would realize what these places are doing to us all.

No, you're absolutely right. Discord is incredibly impermanent. Besides the lack of being able to search for things or split conversations into separate threads for every topic because it's a chat tool, not a forum, as soon as a server disappears, everything hosted on that server goes as well (as far as end users are concerned. I'm sure Discord can pull stuff from their backend).

We need a return of niche forum communities and the like for the sake of the preservation of information.

Not true. They followed me through an extra Gmail I made but made a temporary email and have been fine for close to two months.

It’s sad to see sites like Reddit and Imgur dying. They used to bring me so much joy.

At least Fark is still holding steady, although photoshop contests just aren’t as fun as they used to be.

I wrote a very fiery letter that I'm sure a bot deleted about how it cheapened the phrase "violence" to have it be slung casually around at speech their shareholders don't love.

Read 'liked to participate' as mostly lurked in their spaces. I shouldn't have to change accounts to look over the fence. Especially if it's because you're being a lazy mod. I know my comment history. I said something like "I'm so sorry" once and that got be banned.

I shouldn't have to justify myself when I didn't break a communities rules and a community shouldn't have the right to police my content consumption when it doesn't impact that community.

Yeah. The mod infiltration by bad actors really sucked. What was it like 50 people that were basically modding entire site? Then you have unmodded communities that get banned and you can't create a new one because the other one was banned. It's like the catch-22 they use to keep communities in check.

reddit takes a much harsher stance against links now. people have to "refer to the site, rather than dropping the link.

They sure love to admin now. The silence of Reddit admin drove me crazy. Especially when I tried to run my own subs.

92 people control about 500+subs on reddit, you can guess which one they are, and the ones less likely to get banned.

Pretty much. Damn...2015

reddit has been coming down hard on vpn users since last year. its futile one they shadowban you, rarely i see peoples ban get lifted on the shadowban sub, apparently and pretty obvious, The user said reddit "made a mistake because thier filters were misconstruing your words for somethng offensive", i doubt reddit admins have time to look at every appeal, thats why i believe they ignore most of them, if not all accounts that are part of the multiple accounts from a single users.

they want a read only site, filled with fake bots, and fake engagement. for the purpose of being read only, for advertisement, or they are planning onf selling the site down the line. the gop and musk, thiel would very much like to have control of something like reddit, especially musk, since he has triggered 2 ban waves when he complained to reddit(they were criticizing him).

ever since REDDIT went public thats whats been happening.

I haven't noticed. Maybe because they don't announce it here? Still a pretty shity thing to do. It's hilarious that a platform that is supposed to be about getting around censorship is so crazy about it. Federated stuff in general. You market it as this web of free ideas but really it's everyone on their own island and if they don't like you then they put up walls to keep you out. Maybe it's from being raised in 00s internet where you were shit on for saying anything but that's dumb. Early internet you had a voice and if you said dumb things you got ignored individually or down voted by the community at large.

This tribal bullshit is what keeps us divided. You shouldn't be able to rob someone of their voice when they use it in a way you don't like.

That's how the right keeps winning people over.

even if they lifted a ban, people have reported being re-shadowbanned almost quickly anyways, because they dont clean out thier filters, after someone ban has been lifted. you only need to look at reddit wrong to get banned. new users, old accounts are not safe.

only the determined people will ban evade, have new IP address, new device, and other methods of ban evasions. those that make hundreds if not thousands of accounts to earn money from.

lemmy largely get reddit users, if reddit started banning in large amounts again. but i think they caught on to the fact that if they do perma-site wide ban too many people will notice and they will jump ship too fast.

thats why shadowbans are much more insidious, people might not even notice right away that they were shadowbanned.

I'll admit the streaks kept me hooked to at least checking in daily. Then I got a permaban so I couldn't do streaks anymore so I stopped using the site.

The engagement farming is reaching facebook levels.

There are a lot bigger things that we had to deal with daily, and there are lot bigger problems with the platforms, communities, and broader social impacts that remained on my mind than the small percentage of people inconvenienced by the decisions some people made to keep their mod teams from being overworked. You're not the only one butthurt by the bot, but the alternative was worse so I still don't really care.

people might not even notice right away that they were shadowbanned.

It's feeling very strongly like their ideal platform has millions of shadowbanned users, or more correctly, millions of users in their own instanced versions of reddit, populated entirely by AI creating the impression of community, influencing and shaping the attitudes, behavior, political beliefs and shopping habits of entire nations.

The massive influx of bots pretending to be humans doesn't really bode well for the future of social media.