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Ask HN: Account has been permanently suspended from Reddit

• netfortius 5y ago
  OP - follow-up: Reddit is certainly inconsistent. While my account is suspended, I was still able to log in and clean up all comments and submissions, including my verified email, and now every time I log in they're prompting me for an email address :-)
• guywithahat 5y ago
  If you're looking for alternatives there's communities.win But same happened to me, it sucks
• logicalmonster 5y ago
  You can try and appeal, but my guess is that Reddit is cleaning up their site to get in Wall Streets' good graces for an upcoming IPO, and probably doing an incompetent job. I got my random 10 year old personal account banned from Reddit recently because I was told my username "contains a slur" even though the term in question is an exact match for an existing subreddit and appears all over Reddit.
  • WalterGR 5y ago
    What’s the slur?
    • logicalmonster 5y ago
      Thank you for asking. I am avoiding being specific because of doxxing concerns. Suffice it to say, there's subreddits with that term in it, and that word appears all over Reddit. It doesn't really matter because I don't care enough about Reddit anymore. There's better communities for freedom of speech where you will not get blocked or banned when you don't express the same exact opinions in lock-step with everybody else. Reddit can have their corporate advertising friendly safe space.
      • gaws 5y ago
        > It doesn't really matter because I don't care enough about Reddit anymore. OK. So, what was the slur?
      • WalterGR 5y ago
        blocked or banned when you don't express the same exact opinions in lock-step with everybody else. Wait, did you get banned because you expressed your own opinion or because your username contained a slur? Or do you mean that using slurs is something that should be allowed because it in itself is expressing your own opnion?
        • logicalmonster 5y ago
          The stated reason for my ban was that I included a slur in my username, despite this term appearing all over Reddit. This is a separate topic, but Reddit seems to be becoming increasingly dismissive of opinions that don’t fit into the narrow pre-approved pro-corporate orthodoxy. I’ve been blocked from many subreddits in recent weeks simply for politely voicing pro-choice posts on anti-mandate subreddits.
  • ASalazarMX 5y ago
    I guess it will make it better for the media that report using Reddit as a source. No more "Reddit user Bob<slur><curse>Penis420 reported at 14:00 that..."
• throwawaynay 5y ago
  Do you use windows or an android bloated with awful apps?(or your kids/partner?) My best guess would be hackers using your IP as proxy, and getting blacklisted I was suspended from reddit too, but my other accounts were never suspended, and to be fair I say a lot of stupid things on all my accounts
• GoodJokes 5y ago
• dablweb 5y ago
  You might be able to go to reveddit.com and run your profile through it? It shows banned and shadow-banned content. Subreddits are banning people for simply participating in blacklisted topics / subreddits. Reddit's censorship has gotten so bad I think it's a real societal risk considering how prevalent it is.
  • sithadmin 5y ago
    Subreddit-level censorship is a different issue than global bans. Subreddit bans don't have any bearing on global site bans, and subreddit moderators can't shadow ban content (only remove, lock, add flair, or mark as spam for the global spam filter). If OP is globally banned, they've either run afoul of the global spam filter (possible to trip if enough mods mark your submissions as spam, but as a mod that has collaborated with mods from other subs to deal with corporate astroturfers - the threshold to get a ban this was seems pretty high if there's a human generating posts rather than a bot) or some other global abuse detection system.
    • josephcsible 5y ago
      > Subreddit bans don't have any bearing on global site bans Yes they do. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30322984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30322984 explains how.
      • StellarTabi 5y ago
        The abuse detection system that user is talking about does not kick in for 3 users on a shared IP who seeming accidentally participated in a subreddit another account was banned for. You would need much larger numbers or a moderator to formally acuse you of ban evasion to the admins.
        • josephcsible 5y ago
          The other comments in this thread make it sound like it absolutely does kick in in cases like that, and that no formal accusation of ban evasion is required for it to ban you.
• throw_m239339 5y ago
  Reddit will ban you if they detect that you are using multiple accounts, especially if you get banned from a sub. Just changing IP and create a new account doesn't necessarily work. Neither does just changing browsers, you have to go an extra step and change the fonts you have on your computer because they obviously use the font list for fingerprinting. And also block WebGL for reddit domain. All that effort isn't worth it IMHO for a site that has a very bizarre policy as what content or speech they find acceptable and what they don't. There is a few good subs yes, personally I can't support a website where its admins let the website be moderated by very questionable individuals, sex offenders when there are minors on their websites, and let these mods manipulate people with mental issues and autists into delusion and nonsense.
  • yoz-y 5y ago
    > Reddit will ban you if they detect that you are using multiple accounts, What? Their official client literally supports multiple accounts.
    • manicdee 5y ago
      Once you get banned from a subreddit, using those multiple accounts becomes “ban evasion”. Permanent ban from all of Reddit will follow quickly after.
    • josephcsible 5y ago
      If one of your accounts gets banned from a subreddit, even for a stupid reason like "because we don't like a certain other subreddit, and you commented there once", or "because we're /r/ThanosDidNothingWrong and decided to randomly ban 50% of all accounts just for fun", if you ever visit that subreddit with another account, then Reddit permanently site-bans all of your accounts.
      • yoz-y 5y ago
        Good to know. Is there any way to ban yourself or do you need to keep a list.
  • deleted 5y ago
• VLM 5y ago
  There's a natural cause and effect relationship between meaningless internet points as a status symbol and banthirsty behavior. HN is one of the few places where people can have points without the resulting anti-social behavior. I believe the secret sauce is on HN you can't know at a glance I have 13865 karma right now.
  • hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
    How do you figure? Your profile clearly shows your karma (13867 at time of writing).
    • VLM 5y ago
      That took more effort than most people will put in. Most HN participants will judge your post based on the content of your post, rather than taking the time to click thru to examine your position in the social hierarchy groupthink relative to mine or theirs, yours is merely 234 at this time, which is about one 59th of my exalted rank in the hierarchy. Given our power disparity I believe you're supposed to address me as Honored Sir, BTW. (just kidding... I think?) As for Reddit its funny how classist it inherently is, given its political leanings of most of its few remaining unbanned participants.
      • 535188B17C93743 5y ago
        The amount of Reddit comments with "well you post history" blah blah on it and then they'll mention posts from YEARS ago. Not sure I agree.
        • sudosysgen 5y ago
          That's most likely from the RES tagging feature. They may have had you tagged beforehand, or they may have downloaded one of the dozens of taglists floating around, after which they can simply click the tag and arrive at one of your most egregious posts.
        • VLM 5y ago
• rubyist5eva 5y ago
  You’re banned for life my friend, their ban evasion detection tech is quite sophisticated. I got quite far with a new account and a VPN but one day I accidentally logged in without the VPN and I was snatched immediately. My crime: simply stating the fact that IBM worked with Nazi Germany to create the census system which helped facilitate the extermination of Jewish people.
  • sudosysgen 5y ago
    Yeah, Reddit is incredibly ban happy these days. You can get permabanned for saying "John Brown did nothing wrong". You can also get permabanned for ban evasion if you have multiple accounts and one of them gets banned on a subreddit you then comment on, which isn't difficult because subreddits will ban you simply for having posted on another subreddit, or mentioning them in a bad light, or because one of the mods read one of your posts in another subreddit and decided to ban you, or because you posted a news article somewhere that the mods didn't like, or because a powermod banned you from two dozen subreddits at once for an unmentioned offence and you lost track, etc... Basically, Reddit wants you to use a single account forever and never post or say anything remotely controversial. Which makes a lot of sense because that's how they make the most money.
• DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  I had the same situation with an older 11 year account. I honestly wasn't too bothered apart from losing the links and comments I had saved. I was innactive for a while before the suspension. My only guess is that the account had some market value due to age/karma and was hacked (weak password). And someone posted something that would lead to the suspension. But I agree with other comments that reddit is definitely trying to sanitize accounts that might not look good for corporate.
  • netfortius 5y ago
    Permanent ban does not result in losing access to account, for saved posts. In fact I have been running a script for years, to export the saved posts links to a file, and tried it again post-ban - worked just fine. So one could just monitor, save and export links of posts of interest, but lack of ability to participate would definitely slowly kill this social media ... eventually ...
    • DoingIsLearning 5y ago
      This is my point with the theory that the account has been taken over as i could not log in. But I could see that that the user was suspended.
      • netfortius 5y ago
        I'm the OP. I'm telling you that my account could still be logged into, all data is still there, nothing new or unknown to me, and saved posts are fully available. It's just a "reddit thing", apparently, which really convinces me that it should now become just a source of data (read only approach, moving forward). Not sure how they're planning to scale out, if to IPO and such, if they kick out people at random.
• aikinai 5y ago
  A few months ago I made a new account that I will probably want to use in the future in a professional context. I never posted anything and in a month or so it was banned. I wrote asking why it was banned and they said it was a mistake and unbanned it. Maybe worth asking.
  • DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    Who did you write to if you don't mind me asking?
    • aikinai 5y ago
      There’s a dedicated form at https://www.reddit.com/appeals https://www.reddit.com/appeals
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• kornhole 5y ago
  Sorry to hear your bad news, and yes we regularly see these asks for help on all the corporate controlled platforms. There is no solution to this censorship other than switching. Reddit has had a great run, but they are preparing to IPO. We can expect it to get more controlled by its customers(the advertisers and financiers). I am planning to spin up an instance of Lemmy on my Yunohost. This is the federated free and open source alternative to Reddit. You can check out one instance at https://lemmy.ml/ https://lemmy.ml/. The challenge will be getting more people to participate in the alternative that is designed to be free of such censorship.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    Lemmy is not necessarily designed to be free of censorship, there's been quite a bit of controversy about them including an active-by-default "profanity filter". Not that there's anything wrong necessarily with censoring bad words, but it's nice to be accurate about this stuff.
  • t-3 5y ago
    When I last looked, most groups on lemmy are censored and intentionally aim to be echo chambers. Federation prevents local bans from being global, but it doesn't prevent censorship.
    • kornhole 5y ago
      Yes thanks for clarifying. The federated nature lets communities set their own moderation rules. Like all federated social media, you should join one that has rules aligning with your expectations, or you can create your own instance. Few instances seem to exist currently which is why I plan to spin one up in anticipation of further Reddit crackdown as well as the need of more variety.
• haunter 5y ago
  You can't do anything. You can get banned for a single upvote in a wrong thread or comment, so just accept the fact and make a new account
• PaulKeeble 5y ago
  Discord is doing the same thing as well in its preparation and its making a lot of mistakes. A lot of the users haven't done anything at all but were actually on servers that were nuked because somewhere on them something dodgy happened, guilt by association. This just seems to be the way these social tech companies have always behaved, Facebook has arbitrary systems and bans legitimate customers for no reason including for just trying to attach their new VR headset. None of them have good customer services to allow it to be fixed either.
• samstave 5y ago
  My 15 year old account had the same issue... I appealed and was denied flat out... I have begun deleting my comment history on reddit - then I will delete my account
• igetspam 5y ago
  I have an email address that look fake. People use it for all kinds of things. It has been used to sign up for reddit hundred of times. It has only once been used to legitimately sign up for Reddit. At some point, they started garbage collecting and ate all the accounts with that address. I appealed. I created a new account using Google auth, to prove it was real and there was a human behind it. They killed that one within hours. I made zero comments/posts. Killed for TOS violation. Failed appeal with no explanation. Good luck.
• mikequinlan 5y ago
  My account was 'permanently suspended' a couple of years ago. I appealed a couple of times (following the instructions in the notification) saying that I had never done what I was accused of (brigadding?) and explaining my strategy for voting. I never got a response but a a few months later my account was no longer suspended.
  • q1w2 5y ago
    I think the solution is just to not get too attached to your account, so that you can just create another new account without thinking twice.
    • mikequinlan 5y ago
      That is called 'ban evasion' and causes an immediate banning of the new account. It is better to not get too attached to reddit so that you can leave it entirely without thinking twice.
      • q1w2 5y ago
        I don't care what they call it. I have been doing it for years and have had multiple of accounts on Reddit - and they've never been banned for "ban evasion".
• badinsie 5y ago
  if you posted in a subreddit on the new account that one of your older accounts was banned from they would ban that new account
• sleepingadmin 5y ago
  Surprisingly still not banned site-wide. Which given my previous political subreddit associations... that's exceptionally surprising. The reality here, reddit did you a great favour. Just take this as a sign to move on.