A small group of people were offended by a joke that unintentionally came across transphobic, and as a result this persons account was blacklisted. Even after getting the account reinstated, there were lasting complications with the state of the account (these probably technical issues) and the account was basically lost for good.
The 9th paragraph is where the incident is discussed.
What do yall think of this?
I’ve definitely been misunderstood myself, and it kinda sucks to think that my account could be lost for good due to a few reports, hasty banning, and some bug in the software.
This is a little scary. You can find yourself banned pretty easily. All it takes is to annoy someone with nothing better to do than dig through your post history, and find something old that you wrote hastily which might break a rule. I know because it happened to me.
Back in my Reddit days I got banned twice - once from a subreddit and once a site-wide shadowban (which got rescinded when I appealed, amazingly) and both were random bolts from the blue where I didn’t actually break the rule I was banned for. In the shadowban case I happened to belong to a subreddit that was apparently in the midst of brigading another subreddit I was reading, and when I upvoted a few comments I guess I triggered some kind of anti-brigade filter. In the case of the subreddit ban, there was a guy being downvoted who was complaining about it and I explained to him why I thought it was likely that he was getting downvotes. That subreddit had a “no downvotes allowed” rule and the mods must have figured that since I was explaining why the guy was getting downvotes I must also be downvoting him. On Reddit there’s no way to actually tell who’s downvoting who.
Here on the Fediverse it’s both a bit more scary since every instance can have whatever standards of care it wants, but it’s also less scary because every instance can have whatever standards of care it wants. I can just create a new account at a different instance if the one I’m on turns out to be run by yo-yos. Hopefully the account migration features get implemented soon to make that even easier.
“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” –Cardinal Richelieu
This kind of thing is why digital privacy is so important. But everyone is like “i have nothing to hide from the government”
We are statistical outliers, etc etc.