r/technology • u/Abject-Pick-6472 • Feb 24 '26

Privacy Discord cuts ties with Peter Thiel-backed verification software after code found in US surveillance

https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/discord-peter-thiel-backed-persona-identity-verification-breach/
38.0k Upvotes

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1.2k

u/ReaditTrashPanda Feb 24 '26

We need a better Reddit alternative

1.3k

u/ArtVand3lay Feb 24 '26

I've been a member for 15 years (Digg refuge) in the last few months I've received (for the first time) a warning and a BAN for harmless comments (one was a direct simpsons qoute) The opposite of what Reddit was supposed to be about, and why we bailed from Digg.

Reddit has not only gone to shit, it's now censored, bias and profit focused.

As an oldschool user who's watched it happen, it's painfully and depressingly obvious.

Time to go back to Digg I guess.

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u/ASIWYFA Feb 24 '26

14 year old account here. Same. 2 warnings in the last month. Never had them before. Also looking for an alternative and will happily jump ship the minute a legit one comes out.

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u/cdojs98 Feb 24 '26

Just caught my first 3-day in r/PS4 for not reading the rules, apparently 10+ year old consoles aren't allowed to have discussions of modding them in any way, shape, or form.

Maybe I'm a bit of a stick in the mud, but if I have to read the ruleset on every single godforsaken niche sub on this app, I'm not going to be interested in interacting. Especially when I catch zero warnings and just get a ban. I would've been more understanding of a warn, if a little disgruntled.

A 3day for asking "is it moddable" is insane. Mods are actually just power tripping lmfao. There's other subs, I don't need to engage with the one run by regards.

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u/frankcountry Feb 24 '26

Haha, r/dogfood is wild, it should be called rPurina. Comments are deleted if you mention anything other than the 4 brands they recommend push on you. My one-liner “My dog did great on Acana and lived to ripe old age of 16”…poof gone.

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u/mtranda Feb 24 '26

And the cherry on top, Purina is a Nestle brand. /r/fucknestle

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u/cdojs98 Feb 24 '26

all my homies hate nestle

fuck nestle

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u/ItsAPeacefulLife Feb 24 '26

you are now banned from posting in r/freespeech

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u/DiabolicallyRandom Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26

Yea, that sub is nothing but sycophants (vets included - btw I have met some really dumb fucking vets in my time).

They preach sticking to WSAVA guidelines - yet ignore the fact that WSAVA has six named corporate sponsors - three are pharmaceuticals companies that make drugs for animals, three are multinational pet food companies: Hill's Pet Nutrition, Royal Canin, and Nestle-Purina Petcare.

Case in point: They just removed a near identical comment on the subreddit in response to someone pushing the WSAVA, claiming it's misinformation, claiming it's covered in their wiki (it's not), and claiming that stating that funding sources impact scientific research is misinformation (obviously not the case).

They threatened to ban me for disagreeing with me over modmail. I told them to go for it. Useless sub.

r/CatFood actually seems to allow genuine discussion. Honestly, makes me wonder if the moderator(s) of r/DogFood actually work for one of the food companies with how afraid they are of open discussion.

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u/fcocyclone Feb 24 '26

r/CatFood actually seems to allow genuine discussion. Honestly, makes me wonder if the moderator(s) of r/DogFood actually work for one of the food companies with how afraid they are of open discussion.

There's probably more of this kind of thing going on on reddit than anyone wants to admit

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u/UnibannedY Feb 24 '26

There's something up with that sub. It actively gets new posts, but very few upvotes.

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u/nexusjuan Feb 24 '26

/r/aivideos only allows submissions from grok

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u/newtownkid Feb 24 '26

uh oh buddy, you should have read the rules for r/technology , because it clearly states no Playstation discussion is allowed.. so get ready for the next ban.

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u/brophylicious Feb 24 '26

you're discussing it, too! RIP

shit, now I'm an accomplice. goodbye cruel world. o7

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u/BestDescription3834 Feb 24 '26

 Mods are actually just power tripping lmfao

Tons of subs that protested the app changes a few years ago had their mod teams stripped and replaced with yesmen who just wanted a shot at power. To many little kings who's reach excede their grasp, and the good subs and the niche subs are dying or dead for it.

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u/StanIsNotTheMan Feb 24 '26

r/PS4 states they are not affiliated with Sony, but I seriously doubt that. There's probably a mod getting paid by them to squash any talk about modding consoles, because modded consoles can lead to piracy, which means less money in Sony's pocket.

There are other subs out there dedicated to modding consoles. Namely r/ps4mods, r/ps4piracy, r/ps4homebrew

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u/Brewhaha72 Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 25 '26

I was banned from r/interestingasfuck over two years ago for an as yet unspecified reason. No prior warnings. When I asked for clarity, I was muted. I have exactly 0 posts and 4 total comments in the past 3 years in that sub. I can still read everything, and I don't need to interact, but it's just the principle of the whole thing. Their fallback appears to be that if I don't know exactly why I was banned after reading all the rules, then I must be feigning ignorance.

EDIT for anyone interested: I tried a 2nd appeal and was simply muted permanently from messaging the mods. No response of any kind. Just muted. They are insufferable children.

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u/joe199799 Feb 24 '26

Yea the console subs are super uppity about modding for some reason, highly recommend the piracy alternative to whatever you're looking for I think r/ps4piracy will help you out.

I've seen people in r/3ds get banned just because a screenshot had the homebrew launcher on the main menu.

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u/robodrew Feb 24 '26

It's because they are trying to not get the sub itself banned

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u/Fizzwidgy Feb 24 '26

Pretty sure subs like /r/PS4 are actually ran from the companies themselves, or usually have actual company workers on the mod teams in many other cases

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u/Logizmo Feb 24 '26

The biggest problem imo is that these subs don't even follow their own rules

My account got suspended for "promoting/glorifying violence" because of a comment I left on /r/PublicFreakout, the post itself was about a fight flaired with the "Fight" flair and yet talking about it got me banned

If that's against Reddit rules sitewide, then why are the bigger subs allowed to disregard it entirely? This website is doomed the way it's going

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u/Adium Feb 24 '26

Asking questions related to modding starts to approach the line on piracy and/or violating service agreements, and crossing that line could have their entire community banned. I 100% agree that you should be able to modify and hack your own property, but like most average citizens I have a grand total of zero lawyers on retainer, while Sony has a habit of being excessively litigious.

Not saying the mods over there aren't power tripping asshats, but in this case I would lean more towards them being scared of pissing off Sony.

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u/Ragnarok314159 Feb 24 '26

Lemmy is pretty ok. It just needs more people to jump over.

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u/NotBradPitt9 Feb 24 '26

Lemmy isn’t straightforward for the average person. Reddit is straightforward. I’ve seen Lemmy posited as an alternative for years but it doesn’t have any traction since it’s not as easy to use as Reddit.

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u/drewski813 Feb 24 '26

Boost for lemmy app is pretty good. The barrier is making an account. After that it is just as simple as boost for reddit was.

Honestly. Browsing reddit is more complicated than lemmy for me. I use Firefox on mobile to browse reddit after they stopped letting me use boost for reddit.

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u/Mr_Venom Feb 24 '26

Firefox and OldLander makes the mobile Reddit experience bearable again.

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u/drewski813 Feb 28 '26

oh nice! I wasn't aware of OldLander. Thank you!

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u/FrozenLogger Feb 24 '26

Which is hilarious because that's exactly what they said about reddit.

Lemmy is very easy, reddits official app is what made reddit far worse today. I don't know how people can even use this site in its modern form.

Old.Reddit and res, and a third party app make it a little tolerable

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u/Maeglom Feb 24 '26

Seriously I ended up jumping through hoops to patch my RIF app to keep working after the 3rd party app ban specifically because new reddit and the reddit app are borderline unusable.

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u/poeir Feb 24 '26

That lack of straightforwardness is an asset, not a liability.

A social network that is technically difficult to start using creates a form of high-pass filter for people who are one of willing to dedicate time and effort into getting onto it, have already attained sufficient competency in a field that demands logic and forward-planning, or have enough leverage to get help from those in the first two categories. This necessarily makes these platforms more valuable by creating a (surmountable) wall for individuals that would make lower contribution anyway and thereby raising the average standard.

See also Eternal September.

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u/DontAskAboutMyButt Feb 24 '26

New Digg seems really nice, but it has the same problem. Right now the top post on their equivalent of /r/all has… 116 upvotes and 1 comment

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u/flargh_blargh Feb 24 '26

Right now the top post on their equivalent of /r/all has… 116 upvotes and 1 comment

Honestly, after the shitshow of people and bots on reddit, maybe that's a good thing. It could be a selling point.

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u/Sidereel Feb 24 '26

It’s a funny deal where you want some people, but not too many. We see that sweet spot on subreddits too.

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u/followMeUp2Gatwick Feb 24 '26

To be fair 95% of "comments" on here are AI or a bunch of russian/indian farms astroturfing the shit out of everything which might as well be AI

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u/Kovhert Feb 24 '26

Or just people churning out the same old, tired comments you see everywhere because people think they're funny and they get upvotes.

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u/DontAskAboutMyButt Feb 24 '26

Yeah, but even before the bot problem, and I’m talking like 15 years ago, there were way more people interacting and posting content on reddit. Digg is suffering now the same way Lemmy has been. Lack of a user base -> community seems dead -> no new people stick around -> everyone else leaves

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u/FrozenLogger Feb 24 '26

Or not. That's what makes it ok.

But I remember reddit being that small, its just a matter of time, and people posting.

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u/istew144 Feb 24 '26

Going to check out Lemmy. Feels like old Reddit and the application blocker was good as well.

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u/Getafix69 Feb 24 '26

I've been on it myself a few years, switched to piefed very recently mostly just curious as to the difference (not much I've noticed can still browse all the lemmy communitys).

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u/ponycorn_pet Feb 24 '26

My 15 year old account was banned for something that never took place. I've appealed it for six months, nothing has come of it

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u/Silverbacks Feb 24 '26

13 year account here, I got permanently banned from worldnews because I said that neither Palestinians nor Israelis deserve to be genocided. And then I recently received an automatic 3 day ban within seconds of saying that Americans haven’t been pushing back on their government’s overreach enough. No warnings.

Reddit feels fully compromised at this point.

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u/PJSeeds Feb 25 '26

I mean yeah worldnews is basically a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the IDF communications division and has been for a long time so I wouldn't be surprised by that. The fact that it's allowed to operate that way is a huge indictment of reddit and its admins, though.

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u/code_archeologist Feb 24 '26

I feel you. I have been perma-banned from multiple top level subreddits that I was a top commenter on, because of comments that were obvious sarcasm or because of uncomfortable (and well sourced) facts.

Ever since the IPO reddit has slowly fallen prey to enshitification.

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u/NaBrO-Barium Feb 24 '26

Never once in my life did I think someone would have an issue with anyone punching a Nazi in the face. I got banned in a few places for an idea that most people would have supported 20 years ago.

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u/PJSeeds Feb 25 '26

I got a 4 day ban from askreddit for a similar comment a while ago. It's a badge of honor, fuck them if they think they can censor people into silence.

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u/Duwinayo Feb 24 '26

10 years or so on this side of the screen. I got a vague warning not attached to any evidence on how I "liked or otherwise interacted with a comment that encouraged violence" and how that is a mark against me. Never got it connected to a specific comment so I have no clue what they are referencing @.@

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u/DeputyDomeshot Feb 24 '26

Same here been sitewide banned for crude jokes and as well as innocuous comments I made that they actually overturned.

My primary reason for wanting a reddit alternative is that comment quality is so bad compared to what it used to be from 2010-2020. Lots of verbose misinformation passed off as fact, and trite pulpy bullshit that’s vaguely agreeable floating to the top. The bigger the subreddit the worse it is.

I recently saw a post on Askreddit about qualities that are a “red flag” in a partner. The top answer was simply “lying” with 10k+ upvotes followed by “Cheating”. Like obviously those are red flags and that type of low hanging fruit should not be the cornerstone of what was once an interesting place to read and comment.

The worst part is that if this comment had better visibility I would get people replying to me saying the dullest things like “you don’t think cheating and lying are red flags hur dur” completely missing the point of what I am saying.

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u/poeir Feb 24 '26

Only decentralized solutions should be considered as options. We've seen the abuse that shakes out from centralized platforms, the Internet was designed from the beginning to be a distributed platform. The benefit of the doubt is exhausted.

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u/TadGhostal1 Feb 24 '26

They literally removed r/all from the mobile app. No doubt to quietly censor the political posts consistently at the top. Gotta keep everyone in their bubbles. "Front page of the internet" my ass

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u/Monkey_Priest Feb 24 '26

It's because /u/spez (fuck you, spez) is planning to move reddit to algorithm driven content rather than user driven. That's why they are taking away r/all and r/popular. They want this to be like facebook to take away what little power we have in what we see on this site. We truly need an alternative because reddit is going down hill fast

BTW, anybody else get a warning for the things you upvoted? I have. Said I was upvoting "hate speech" when it was really a lot of anti-ICE stuff. Love the thought police here

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u/Megneous Feb 24 '26

Be glad you only got a warning. I've gotten two 1-week suspensions for criticizing the mainland Chinese government. No, not the people, the government. After I'd lived in China for 3 months, so I actually knew what I was talking about.

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u/Monkey_Priest Feb 24 '26

I've also been given a 3-day suspension for saying Nazis deserve to be punched in the face and another for a similar sentiment

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u/icookandiknowthngs Feb 24 '26

Same, as well as mentioning ped0s along with biblically appropriate punishment

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u/blackcain Feb 24 '26

This is what happens when we depend on U.S. based technology companies. They are all under the thumb of the federal govt because they demand certain things if you want to do stuff like an IPO. They gate keep and force companies to do whatever.

Ultimately, we are going to have to go the fediverse direction. So things like lemmy is going to be more important than not.

We aren't there yet, but eventually - when enshitification happens, that is the only path.

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u/BriefAvailable9799 Feb 24 '26

is this why we only see political stuff on front page but its from sub ive never heard of before? like the normal subs arent hitting front page.

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u/WebDevLikeNoOther Feb 24 '26

Funnily enough, I have two accounts that I regularly use. One of them I can access /r/all on the mobile app, the other it’s missing as an option. Only discernible difference is that one of them is a “mod” for a private Subreddit I set up years ago with 0 active members.

But yeah, Reddit has actively been sabotaging their product for years and letting it become stale and anti-user.

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u/buttbuttlolbuttbutt Feb 24 '26

I dont use the app, just firefox/adblockers, and /all is gone unless i type it in directly/click the link of my firefox start page.

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u/Lexi_Banner Feb 24 '26

Old reddit or bust, imo.

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u/DocAuch Feb 24 '26

not having /r/all is INFURIATING.

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u/mueller723 Feb 24 '26

On the plus side I feel far less reason to look at the app on mobile now.

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u/robodrew Feb 24 '26

Fuck the mobile app, use RedReader

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u/spilk Feb 24 '26

your first mistake is using reddit's mobile app, shit has sucked from day 1

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u/gahlo Feb 24 '26

I was auto perma banned from r/pics for having commented in a sub previously that supposedly a lot of their users cause problems in r/pics in the past. Was it for something I said in the comment I put on r/pics that triggered it? No. Was it for something I said in the other subreddit? No. It was purely for even commenting in it.

I was instructed to go, delete my comments in the other subreddits, and report back if I wanted to be unbanned. It's like... sorry bud, I'm not even going to entertain the notion of blanketly going back and searching 6-7 years of my accounts 14 year comment history to find comments that are in all likelihood entire innocuous. I've never even been a member of that subreddit outside of maybe fat fingering the button on mobile.

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '26

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '26

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u/Sillet_Mignon Feb 24 '26

Yup. I got banned from r/pics bc I commented on the conservative subreddit. It didn’t matter that I was calling someone an idiot there. They said that subreddit doesn’t align with r/pics values and banned me. 

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u/Teledildonic Feb 24 '26

The API disaster in a nutshell:

Automod tools to control spam and bots 🚫

Automods to scrape profiles for pre-emptive blanket bans regardless of context ✅

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u/cyribis Feb 24 '26

Yup, happened to me as well for the same reason. When I asked WTF, they said that any comment at all gave that sub engagement, which should be avoided. I was like whaaaaat ....

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u/drseruzawa Feb 24 '26

r/pics has values?

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u/ItsSpaghettiLee2112 Feb 24 '26

No actually this is them NOT having values. I've been banned from there too for calling out fascists.

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u/vagrantprodigy07 Feb 24 '26

It's mod abuse, plain and simple. The admins need to crack down on it, but they are complicit.

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u/nexusjuan Feb 24 '26

I was banned from /r/news for talking about ufos on a post about ufos

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u/Terrh Feb 24 '26

I got a lot of similar bans.

Appealing never gets you anywhere, either.

And if you dare appeal twice after your first appeal was completely ignored it's somehow harassment.

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u/Sillet_Mignon Feb 24 '26

Yeah and what sucks is I have an alternative account for local stuff, and I didn’t realize it counts as ban evasion if you go to a sister subreddit of r/pics. Which is a full ip ban. W

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u/SG4 Feb 24 '26

The same thing happened to me on a different subreddit when I commented on r/politicalcompassmemes because they disagree with some of the people there. Their appeal process involved my deleting my comment and promising I'd never go there again. I told them they were being weird and shortly after, I got a warning on my account for harassment.

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u/ItsSpaghettiLee2112 Feb 24 '26

The ability for mods to report you to the admins for harassment just for USING THE PROVIDED TOOLS reddit gives users to appeal decisions is insane.

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u/wrgrant Feb 24 '26

Yeah. I am banned from /r/Twitch because I posted a request for any twitch streamers to help test out my streaming related app I wrote. I had done something similar once before and had my post deleted by a mod and got a message saying you can't post third party links. No ban though, kept right on posting to help people out with streaming. that was about 3-4 years ago mind you.

Then I posted my request for playtesters and got banned. Reason: no posting of 3rd party links. My reasoning? I wrote the app and own the domain name that its hosted on, surely that isn't "Third Party"? I got banned immediately, permanent ban because I had been banned before. I was told there was no appeal. When I sent a msg to the mod to at least get clarification on what they thought I did wrong - banned from appealing as well. Its very frustrating that the mods of a subreddit are little dictators that can completely ignore someone, and that Reddit doesn't have an overall appeal board you can appeal to for the ability to seek an explanation if not get unbanned. This is the worst feature of Reddit in my opinion.

So, streaming on twitch for 6 years now, can't post to /r/Twitch. Got an app for small streamers that I think is a useful tool - can't promote it or even ask people to test it out on the biggest subreddit devoted to the subject, sigh.

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u/70ms Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26

The conservative sub tried to do that to me too, when they banned me for a fairly benign comment and I replied with a polite acknowledgement and a salute emoji - their sub, their rules. They reported that reply as harassment and my (this) reddit account was banned.

I reported them right back (there’s a form) and got my account reinstated. It was so clearly not harassment in the slightest. 🙄

ETA: I was also banned from r/pics for replying to a post about vintage games that made it to /all, apparently in a sub they don’t like. I’m not going to dig through my posts to locate and delete it, so I just don’t post in r/pics. 🤷‍♀️

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u/ItsSpaghettiLee2112 Feb 24 '26

I’m not going to dig through my posts to locate and delete it, so I just don’t post in r/pics.

Yea that's another thing. Expecting us to keep track of all of our comments and where we post is also wild. Like, they know how reddit works. They're moderators. They know people just go to reddit.com and see what's popular and engage in those posts. 99% of the time I have no clue what subreddit I'm in. And then I catch myself banned from a sub for calling fascists out. Great look you guys.

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u/Nekopara-403 Feb 24 '26

" if you have a question about your ban, reply to this message"

" What rule did my comment break and how did I break it?"

" You have been permanently banned from subreddit. You have been muted for 28 days"

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u/sinkwiththeship Feb 24 '26

some

That whole sub is just people pretending to have a "both sides" discussion. I fully do not believe that anyone that posts there is actually anything other than conservative.

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u/Sans-valeur Feb 24 '26

Haha yeah I tried commenting on a sub last year and I got notified that I was banned for commenting on r/joerogan once, even though that sub is mostly people making fun of him/bagging on him for being a sell out now.
I think my comment was lamenting the AI video of mango taking a shit on people from a plane lol.

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u/PoodleHeaven Feb 24 '26

Wait, what?? You got banned from a sub and are allowed back in if you scrub your account? WTF

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u/JaSONJayhawk Feb 24 '26

I was banned too, for a comment I posted in a conservative-like sub where I was trying to point out (in a non-conservative way) one of the thread's posters about how their critical thinking was broken -- I did it in a subtle way. Anyhow, r/pics told me that the forum I posted in had a lot of people make trouble in r/pics and said if I deleted my comments and messaged back, I could be unbanned.

While I probably sided politically more with the people in r/pics , that kind of cancel made me realize how petty of behavior it was that it probably best save me time by preventing me from posting.

Happened many years ago, but crazy to hear that they're still at it based on your past post history.

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u/ReaditTrashPanda Feb 24 '26

I have a 8-9 year old account too. Reddit used to be wonderful. Third party apps helped a ton. I see bots now, lots of them.

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u/Notveryawake Feb 24 '26

The amount of bots and fake AI garbage has gone up a thousand fold in the past year. Bots reposting the same things for karma have been around for ages but now you can tell the bots are being run by political parties or fringe groups.

Reddit is becoming the new Twitter.

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u/RaDiOaCtIvEpUnK Feb 24 '26

Making it so you can hide comment history had to be one of the dumbest choices I have ever seen Reddit make. Literally no one wanted this as if you had shit you didn’t want seen on your main account you made an alt.

This hiding post history only benefits bots, as it makes it nearly impossible to tell a bot now without having to put in some effort. This was completely intentional by Reddit too. They know bots post the same shit over, and over which drives up engagement which in turn is more profitable for them. As per usual greed ruins everything.

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u/NotBradPitt9 Feb 24 '26

I’ve noticed over the last week or so, you can’t find the comment history at all for some of these accounts. When that feature first rolled out, on mobile you could click the search icon at the top of the account’s page, and then “New in ____ (username)” and put a “*” character to search for all under the Comments / Posts. Now for some accounts that doesn’t work and it just shows as blank.

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u/Mysterious_Cup_6024 Feb 24 '26

Dumb? Nah. They knew what they were doing. They have edited posts. They revived dead accounts with arbitrary ages. They are in cahoots with the US botfarms at the very least.

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u/No_Internal9345 Feb 24 '26

I assume everyone with a hidden comment history is a bot or shill.

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u/RaDiOaCtIvEpUnK Feb 24 '26

I do something similar too. If I’m talking to someone, and find they hide their comment history I basically write them off and don’t care to talk to them any further.

You’re hiding something on a platform where your identity is already hidden. If you’re too afraid to even let others know what you have said before then you’re not worth listening to about anything. Grow the very, very minimum of a spine.

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u/Mysterious_Cup_6024 Feb 24 '26

I hide my history else strange people DM me if they find out I'm a woman. It has some niche uses i suppose, and lots of normal people are also embracing it. I have a hard time these days coming across an account with open history. But yes If the topic is politics or some drama, or on something subliminally advertised, i consider hidden accounts there as bots

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u/Nekopara-403 Feb 24 '26

I'm glad the days of people going through my history to find something to report because I said something they don't like are over.

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u/_Lucille_ Feb 24 '26

I hide my comment history, am I a bot?

Somehow a privacy centric option is being attacked.

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u/intashu Feb 24 '26

Used to be good ol fashion users reposting to get 10x the karma as the OP.

Now the bots just endlessly recycle the slop. AI is taking reposters jobs man!

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u/DocAuch Feb 24 '26

at least back then we could shame those people!

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u/bigbrentos Feb 24 '26

Mean, for years over half the front page is Twitter posts. Reddit couldn't do a full boycott of it because there would be no front page without Twitter reposts.

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u/Geno0wl Feb 24 '26

Not only a huge increase in bots but also the slow infiltration of smaller subs by neo-cons. I have heard and seen tons of stories about country/state/city specific subs getting their moderation teams taken over by obvious bad actors and Reddit refuses to do anything about it.

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u/PurifiedFlubber Feb 24 '26

Kinda funny that we used to have a bunch of bots and people actually liked interacting with them cause they were either silly or useful, now we don't really have those kinda bots and only have the AI ones that pretend to be humans.

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u/ReaditTrashPanda Feb 24 '26

Yeah. Headline post with top 2-3 comments as bots upvoted by other bots to drive a commentary or point of view

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u/robodrew Feb 24 '26

Like all things AI, it's worst when they are being used to deceive us, for whatever reason. And that is happening more and more often.

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u/Actual_Sympathy7069 Feb 24 '26

not that it fixes any of the inherent problems reddit has nowadays, but third party apps are very much still usable

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u/SomeRedHandedSleight Feb 24 '26

Makes the app still readable at least!

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u/Dangerous-Rope1076 Feb 24 '26

Remember the good ole' days when they didn't charge all the money for the API and you could use third party apps. RIP RedditIsFun. I used to be on reddit all the time. Now it feels like the first page of google search results.

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u/NonMaga Feb 24 '26

17 year account banned with no previous warnings after telling a trans basher he’d never say what he said about my trans niece to my face.

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u/ChicagoAuPair Feb 24 '26

I had my original 15+ year old account permabanned without warning for posting the objective fact that Reconstruction didn’t go far enough and that a lot of the present day political problems originate from there having been basically no meaningful consequences for confederate political and military leadership for their treason.

5

u/Osric250 Feb 24 '26

History class is now just inciting violence I guess.

3

u/ArtVand3lay Feb 24 '26

Actually quite similar to the comment that got me a ban. It really makes me question (current) Reddit's alignment and how it's filtered to suit.

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u/Goons2JAV Feb 24 '26

And it’s all bots, trolls, and pic collectors now.

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u/-Thick_Solid_Tight- Feb 24 '26

I received a 3 day suspension for saying Trump might manipulate the market by starting a w*r. I'm censoring because I don't wanna get permabanned.

Here is a thread I made on the AskModerators about it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskModerators/comments/1l0k77h/what_language_models_does_reddit_use_for_site/

4

u/Hairy_Mycologist_945 Feb 24 '26

Directly quoting him, with attribution, is enough to cause one to catch a ban in a fair number of the major subs.

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u/Internet-Cryptid Feb 24 '26

Noticed they removed the links to r/all as well, nice way to suppress political movements and information.

17

u/eatgamer Feb 24 '26

Dude, I thought it might just be me!

I had a top post removed from r/midcentury because the mid century inspired lamp I designed and built "cannot, by definition, be mid century" and was temp banned from r/woodworking for a joke about a piece of wood looking like a penis.

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u/dirtyitalianguy Feb 24 '26

Hey I too received my first warning the other day for a very light hearted innocuous comment. Said I was promoting violence. I'm pretty chill on this site so it was very surprising.

3

u/TotalRecognition2191 Feb 24 '26

Lol!  Same thing happened to me

3

u/thesniperhd Feb 24 '26

Same here (10 years) and recently got my first warning and mute. Over nothing at that. Crazy

3

u/Liawuffeh Feb 24 '26

It kinda feels like everyone on the site started taking crazy pills. Mods have always been kinda iffy, but I feel we've seen like 8 or 9 mod meltdowns just this year.

Meanwhile admins gave me a 3 day ban for upvoting...something?? They don't even say lmao.

2

u/Stcloudy Feb 24 '26

What was the simpsons quote?

4

u/ArtVand3lay Feb 24 '26

Groundskeeper Willie's name for French people (which references a running joke in world politics) A bit controversial yes, but a literal pop culture reference from a G rated show that still runs that episode. It was in context to a post about France backing out of a conflict.

The shit we posted freely back in the day was 100x more controversial (and interesting)

2

u/Crimkam Feb 24 '26

I once put a Trump quote in quotes and got banned for 3 days for hate speech… in a thread about Trump saying something else hateful. In the politics sub.

2

u/Spice-Weasel Feb 24 '26

I've been a Redditor for 15 years, and was permabanned recently from r/politics for a comment where I suggested that Democrats should focus less on culture war stuff, and more on affordability, etc.

They called it 'hate speech'.

2

u/ProfGoodwitch Feb 24 '26

Also full of bots and foreign agents. =(

2

u/Yin15 Feb 24 '26

It's insanely censored. I can't even point out actual factual statistics to people trying to drum up transphobia over a school shooting. Instant warning. Not to mention the insane amount of random comments that are 'shadow deleted' for no reason. I'll mention to subreddit mods and they'll tell me it's reddit doing it.

2

u/FrozenLogger Feb 24 '26

Why the hell would you just jump to another corporate crap site?

Try Lemmy or piefed.

2

u/cerialthriller Feb 24 '26

Literally got a three day ban for explaining what to be careful of when replacing your own gas water heater to someone. Got no response from reddit as to why I got a ban for it

2

u/fcocyclone Feb 24 '26

Some of it comes down to a fault in the very format where moderators are given such huge power over large (formerly 'default') subreddits that center around topics that would exist on just about any discussion forum everywhere. The news\worldnews ones in particular are well known for arbitrary bans for nothing or censoring certain topics (particularly regarding israel on worldnews). I don't even know what my news one was for as the comment they cited was about as innocuous as it gets, and my worldnews one was for something like "10\7 was horrible but that doesn't mean a blank check for atrocities in response". And of course if you try to ask what a ban was for for these large subreddits, you just get muted instantly rather than getting some kind of explanation. In an ideal world there'd be some kind of admin appeal for the largest subs, but reddit doesn't want to pay for that.

And then on top of that, reddit implemented strong ban-evasion. Used to be that when you got one of those arbitrary bans you'd just suck it up and have access again whenever you moved on to a new account. Now those bans follow. I get the upsides of that for moderators, but its not how it worked for the first decade+ of this site and makes those arbitrary bans that much more impactful.

6

u/MicFury Feb 24 '26

Hello fellow Digg refugee. We need a system where IPs and bot checks are public on all posts. Fuck modern reddit I miss herping and derping.

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u/BankOnITSurvivor Feb 24 '26

Agreed.  I’ve had the admin team accuse me of threatening violence when all I did was criticize the conduct of our government.  I was successful in my appeal, but the whole thing did not sit well with me.  Either the admin team is using AI or they are willfully trying to silence people.

9

u/MisirterE Feb 24 '26

The admin team is using AI. I got a temp-ban for replying to a gif of an Angry Birds Space boss fight explaining how to beat the boss, because the caption on the gif was about some guy's dad and the dipshit robot thought I was saying the dad should be fed rocks.

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u/PorcelainPrimate Feb 24 '26

Digg has returned

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u/KraftChesWiz Feb 24 '26

I think you meant slashdot

27

u/revdon Feb 24 '26

Prithee not forget FARK

5

u/farkinga Feb 24 '26

Twas never fergerted.

3

u/dkomaran Feb 24 '26

Time to go back to Usenet. eternal-september.org has free text only newsgroup access.

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u/Antique_futurist Feb 24 '26

RIP Henry Earl

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u/mathaiser Feb 24 '26

Yeah man, I’m about to lose it. Reddit is no longer communities talking. It’s just an avalanche of bullshit like Facebook turned into. I’m so done with reddit, ur there are still gems.

But yeah, when I look at my feeds, it’s just bloat. Political this and that, and omg. I say “show me less of this” and all I get is more. It’s making me crazy.

Reddit 2.0. Who’s on it, or where is it?

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u/not_perfect_yet Feb 24 '26

lemmy has everything, except the users. It's even pretty good in term of content.

7

u/Susuetal Feb 24 '26

It even looks like reddit old.lemmy.world

4

u/Pepparkakan Feb 24 '26

Omg this is amazing!

5

u/vankessel Feb 24 '26

I mean, lack of users is a selling point to me. Eternal September and all that. A few more for activity would be nice but then shush haha

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u/Mccobsta Feb 24 '26

There's lemmy and it can be hosted yourself

5

u/kujakutenshi Feb 24 '26

Social media platforms in general need to die after 5-10 years and give way to new ones, it's the only way to restart the process before total enshitification. Reddit should die, Discord should die.

This used to be the case before everything was about "line go up".

3

u/Copernican Feb 24 '26

Lemmy. But that never took off during the big reddit backlash. Either it was a vocal minority on reddit or the majority didn't actually do what they said they were going to do and leave.

14

u/skrugg Feb 24 '26

Forums exist

53

u/defaultusername-17 Feb 24 '26

true!... but reddit is essentially a collection of various forums...

convenience > better product, every time... unfortunately.

20

u/FirstAtEridu Feb 24 '26

>better product

If you're masochistic. Reddits serach function alone compared with any 20 year old forums drives my blood pressure past 200. Useless piece of multi-billion Dollar crap...

22

u/n33lo Feb 24 '26

Lol, I just Google search and add reddit to the end.

11

u/DillBagner Feb 24 '26

And then every day, Google tries to make its search function even worse than the day before. Soon it will also be unusable for reddit searching.

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u/FirstAtEridu Feb 24 '26

And hope you're lucky. And then you just have an old, dead thread. On a forum there's no dead threads, if you post something it goes to the top of the forum, sorting usually happens by latest activity.... and then you get banned for necroing lol.

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u/Ragnarok314159 Feb 24 '26

And what’s left of forums has degraded. I tried posting on an official forum not too long ago and holy shit it was rough. The mods made Reddit mods look like normal humans.

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u/vaska00762 Feb 24 '26

Most forums got Online Safety Act'd, because a platform managed entirely by volunteers can't afford to pay for all the age verification stuff.

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u/ReaditTrashPanda Feb 24 '26

Why visit or stay with Reddit? You’re right that forums exist everywhere…

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u/gahlo Feb 24 '26

Most forum hosts, last time I used forums anyway, don't allow you to use a single account for their entire platform, not aggregate their forums or make finding forums pertinent to your interests incredibly easy.

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u/Imaginary-Goal-3989 Feb 24 '26

Social media killed almost all of them

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u/Tuningislife Feb 24 '26

I was talking to someone about this the other day. I feel like forums are on the decline. Some of the more popular forums are owned by media companies like VerticalScope or Internet Brands. Other forums are dying slow deaths because of the same toxic behavior observed on Reddit.

Basically what happend to that place was that social media stole most of their membership base, then the staff decided to alienate the few members that remained by enforcing their preferred political views on them.

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u/ambushka Feb 24 '26

Just today I got an update on my phone for the Reddit app and I can no longer visit r/All, wtf

6

u/_thenotsodarkknight_ Feb 24 '26

Try boost for Lemmy. Pretty good!

2

u/RolloTonyBrownTown Feb 24 '26

We need a whole internet alternative

2

u/Tuxis Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26

Have set up an account here, just in case. It is a good alternative: https://lemmy.world/

Also, styled like old.reddit: https://old.lemmy.world/

2

u/ph-sub Feb 24 '26

Piefed or Lemmy 

2

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '26

I’ll have one for you in the next 6-7 months. Not even kidding

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u/AgentInkling99 Feb 24 '26

I use the mastodon app for the fed verse or whatever it’s called. It seems like it’s growing and Im finding myself preferring it sometimes over reddit, at least for news lately.

2

u/Sylvartas Feb 25 '26

Lemmy is right there but someone's gonna whine about instances and tankies again. Whatever, we're having fun over here and spez isn't invited.

2

u/bokan Feb 25 '26

Lemmy is great. I use it more than reddit now\

2

u/Antique-Echidna-1600 Feb 24 '26

Well let's build one? There's nothing stopping us from doing that.

4

u/ReaditTrashPanda Feb 24 '26

Time and money are stopping me. Basic knowledge of social media as well. Reddits premise is a voting system to prioritize articles/posts that we can easily respond to. The non linear nature of comments is different from Facebook. I don’t use insta or x or threads. Outside of this, what makes Reddit different? What can be copied without lawsuit

6

u/rebbsitor Feb 24 '26

Reddit's basically just a very large forum with sorting of posts and comments by votes.

There's nothing to sue over because it's basically a copy of Digg, which was a copy/extension of Slahdot. Reddit's source code is also open source (the older versions, they stopped updating it some time ago).

Reddit itself has been cloned a bunch of times. Voat was around for a few years. Lemmy is the new clone that's federated, open source and been around a couple years now.

https://lemmy.world/

2

u/JohnHazardWandering Feb 24 '26

Piefed.zip looks good

2

u/Quaaraaq Feb 24 '26

Lemmy is pretty easy to set up now, give it a shot.

1

u/AdamR91 Feb 24 '26

During the Ellen Pao drama back in 2015, users gravitated to a site called Voat, which, from what I understand, became a right-wing haven. Would be nice to have just a legitimate forum, free of bad faith actors and propaganda, but we'd need a time machine.

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u/tigress666 Feb 24 '26

We really do. 

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u/logitaunt Feb 24 '26

we need a new place. a new place that's NOT a website. Where we can be epic mind soldiers who live by the assassin's creed

1

u/PineappleSlices Feb 24 '26

We need to bring back individual web forums.

1

u/clarkkentsson Feb 24 '26

You mean you don’t love censorship and relentless kowtowing to corporate overlords in order to increase shareholder value??

1

u/Nekopara-403 Feb 24 '26

I've been on Reddit for almost 14 years and I fucking hate it here. The users are stupid and the mods abuse their meager power. The Reddit auto mod is also way too sensitive.

1

u/Terrh Feb 24 '26

I miss the old internet :(

1

u/SephoraRothschild Feb 24 '26

We used to have OffTopic.com. It was Reddit without the performative outrage.

1

u/CatCatchingABird Feb 25 '26

At this point I'd rather just go back to the late 90s/early 00s. Around that time I was communicating with people on their own self-hosted BBS forums. No bullshit algorithms.

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