I remember what made me quit facebook, way before it became Meta: the TV serie Person of interest. It gave me a big awarness of the scale of mass surveillance. I already had the project to quit because of Zuck’s shenanigans and the lack of interest i had in the platform, but this was the last straw for me.
Socially I quit Facebook back when it was Facebook, when I was just starting to have extreme anxiety attacks because of repressed memories from my childhood and the people I had considered friends started spreading libelous claims behind my back and the fallout was either being unfriended by people that had been relatively close friends, and posts that I commented on became barren dessert’s, it was obvious people were isolating me out, what I didn’t know until much later, was that people were telling them I was a danger to others in whatever specific way would freak them out to make them isolate me. For instance some women were told I would sexually assault them if we were ever alone if they were particularly afraid of that, or they would say I would rape their kid’s if I had alone time with them. The weirdest was that I like to rape old ladies because I like the texture of their paper thin skin. Weird fucking shit from very sick, demented minds. I was already having anxiety attacks because of having my face bashed in when I was 2yo by a cop, intentionally. So being further abused on Facebook was a no brainer on things I won’t partake in. The truth is I wasn’t a danger to anyone, but I know who it was saying those things about me, the police in my old town know who they are and they did nothing. I am definitely a danger to those people now. But I’m states away, so how much damage could Lil ol me really cause with a 3/4in thick, 6ft titanium rod…
I joined Facebook back when you needed a .edu address, left because I hated it and I hated them stealing my data. I deleted my twitter after king bazinga bought it. Reddit was the API exodus, but the massive numbers of repost bots and awful liberals really had me tired of the fucking place for a long time before that.
I don’t consider anonymous forums social media so I’ve never had a social media account.
I killed Instagram and Whatsapp recently when Mark started buddying up to Trump.
Deleted Twitter shortly after Elon took over, which bummed me out since it was a good place for software development information.
Quit reddit after the API ordeal when I didn’t want to use the official client.
I was a long time user of each platform, and I was bummed when I had to leave each.
Now I have bluesky, lemmy, mastodon, and some occasional discord servers I hangout on. I miss Instagram as a time waster, but I’ll survive without funny dog videos and fitness models.
Loops.video is a great insta/tiktok replacement for dog/cat videos at least.
I quit Reddit and deleted my account after nearly a decade last week. I just found it to be a source of consistent stress. It got to the point where the most innocuous comments kept getting me temporarily banned from subreddits. The final coffin nail was when somebody posted an article about how the Trump administration scrubbed all the information on HIV/AIDS from government health websites. I replied in the comments, “Double plus good.” Apparently Redditors thought that I was endorsing this censorship as a good idea and downvoted me. So to clarify, I edited my comment and said underneath, “For those downvoting me, read the novel 1984 by George Orwell.” That’s all. I didn’t say, “You fucking idiots need to read a goddamn book!” I simply cited the reference for my original comment. For this statement I got a three day ban not just from the subreddit but all of Reddit due to harassment. The ban was automatically imposed by the bots, so I had an opportunity to appeal and have a real person review it. I did so, fully expecting anybody who actually looked into it to be reasonable, but they kept the ban in place, so I decided enough was enough.
I think people don’t even realize the scale of the removals, because when it isn’t banning you the platform goes out of its way to hide it from you when your comments are removed, it looks like it is still there while you are logged in but no one else can see it, I only even find out by using the reveddit extension, and I’ve been banned from subreddits just for mentioning that there’s a way to do this. It’s usually a totally innocuous comment that gets removed, assuming they just have a keyword that triggered a bot or a mod just didn’t like what I said and clicked delete. What they’re doing can hardly be termed ‘moderation’ anymore.
They wish to drive away the people who wish to speak the truth. I created an account here yesterday to hedge against Reddit becoming even more of a cesspool.
The use of automated tools that blindly ban based on keywords and the subreddit is out of control. As you found there is NO attempt to put anything in context. Truly moronic administration that violates their claim to be a “place for discussion”. I got in trouble because I left a comment questioning antivaxxers in an antivax subreddit and suddenly got flooded with bans across reddit because I had left a comment in a politically incorrect subreddit. They use scripts to moderate. Of course there is NO recourse, no mods will listen to you, no reddit admin of the mods to contact, nothing.
My feeling is reddit has reduced discourse to bad puns, nothing even slightly controversial, must agree with the sub’s echo chamber and ads, lots of ads. If you go against the herd you will be culled. Just smile and nod.
