Speaking as someone who joined it as early as 2007, getting banned from reddit with no explanation and no chance of recourse was the best thing that happened to be me in 2024.
Moderation has become a real weak-point for reddit. They expect anonymous and unpaid volunteers to do the hard and thankless job of keeping large numbers of passionate strangers, malicious bots, trolls, etc. under control while being impartial, honest, etc.. In reality, their mods are usually either power-tripping, pushing their own agenda, or state-sponsored propagandists. There's absolutely no recourse if you see shady moderation going on. Reddit doesn't care so long as everybody keeps clicking.
I recently decided to take a break from reddit, and may yet make that break permanent. There is still some good stuff there, but it's getting rarer and harder to find in a sea of spam.
The same thing happened to my extremely old account (17+ years). A few weeks ago I noticed I stopped getting replies and taking a look in incognito mode verified my suspicion. I had stopped existing. I think it was because I had started the habit of deleting my older comments. Oddly enough, the hundreds of comments I had deleted had returned (only visible to me of course...other uses clicking on my profile would see an "account doesn't exist" message). At that point I just deleted the account in disgust.
Same! My >decade old account was banned in 2023 despite having great karma and a clean track record. I swore the place off and have been much happier and more productive since.
I engage with real people on various discord servers instead nowadays.
I doubt you were banned from 'reddit' with no chance of recourse. More likely that you were banned from a subreddit; site-wide bans are generally clearly explained.
My account is 18+ years old with 100k+ of organic karma evenly split between posting and commenting. I was an active moderator for both my local country sub and part of the moderator reserves program.
Did you contact Reddit? A similar thing happened to me a few years ago, turns out I had accidentally upvoted my own content from a different account. Admins replied to the e-mail with an explanation, and fixed it quite fast.
I did and got back what appeared to be an automated reply given the near immediate response.
>Thanks for submitting an appeal to the Reddit admin team. We've reviewed your request and your appeal will not be granted and your ban will remain in place.
>-Reddit Admin Team
>This is an automated message; responses will not be received by Reddit admins.
It's really a bummer to lose an 18+ year account that I've accumulated so many friends and community relations, and one that is tied to a common public nickname I use on socials and is literally tattooed on my arm. So I figured I'd wait a year and request again.
But that was years ago. Since shortly before the API purge, all you get is an auto response of "we have reviewed your report and there was no mistake."
