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 mods” 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 Oliver 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’m hoping they’re still going to respond to the appeal, as my first appeal wasn’t really a real one, just basically a “lol wtf?” one… Considering maybe it was just one random “hardcore” rogue admin on a banning spree for things they didn’t like. - And that if I just submitted an appeal another admin would see it and unban me. But that didn’t go as expected
So I’m hoping they at least answer the second appeal asking to give me a reason. I’m curious if they’re going to admit it’s for the John Oliver post, or if they’re going to pull something from the history and be like “2 years ago you said something mildly problematic we just discovered” - or most likely, just keep it vague and say I violated the content policy without explanation
If reddit doesn’t reach out in a reasonable time do still reach out to news media outlets including the verge that are likely to cover the story
Or at least they’ll combine it with other incidents into a bigger story.