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 hour to over the last 14 years. It had zero upvotes or downvotes or comments and was not visable 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 contraversy. 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.
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.
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_Hermosillo
It really does show that none of this is new. It's what the internet really always has been.
@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.
It's a fair point but, I think, misses the gist of her argument. Humdog was super famous back in the 90s as a prolific online poster. Her entire life was pretty much online at a time when that was highly unusual. Keeping in mind that this was back in 1994 (so one year after the World Wide Web came into existence) and the prevailing attitude of most people back then was that the internet was a great leveller that would remove hierarchy from society and give power to the individual.
Her point was simply that the nature of posting on a large corporation's computer network actually gave more power to these companies than to the user. She wasn't saying that posting online was pointless or valueless.
She was pretty much the first person to ever say this.
@PippinVanderspiegel @vaprz
This is completely tangential, but it's pretty wild that I could reply to your comment by simply pasting the link into Mastodon. No account creation on a Kbin instance required.
It's great isn't it?
It's actually the first time I've been excited for web technology in the last decade!