I wanted to publish constructive criticism towards Reddit on Reddit but unfortunately that’s basically impossible since they’ll do everything to censor/silence that for their own gains to not hurt their reputation (you might also get censored for mentioning Reddit alternatives like Lemmy).

So I have to do it here.

I’m addressing censorship because that’s basically the biggest issue.

I’m not always against all censorship as it can be beneficial in some circumstances to provide constructive discussion to not end up like X where everyone is shouting hateful opinions without getting heard anyways. (But very generally I’m still strongly against censorship).

My main problem is about wrongful censorship. Reddit is basically unusable for me since I had the experience multiple times that I get banned from a subreddit for actually no reason just because a moderator feels like it. And when I then ever accidentally post on the same subreddit with a different account (which is hard when there are multiple to keep track of) your whole access to Reddit gets banned for about 12 months by advanced fingerprinting (so even if you create a new account it gets automatically banned, so you basically cannot post anything on Reddit for a year).

While Lemmy is somewhat better in this regard I think it’s mainly only because it’s so small, is only known by a very small enthusiastic group and therefore needs less moderation. But I realized that even here once a post is slightly controversial it will get removed sooner or later. Frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if this gets removed too. I know that the fediverse theoretically provides protection against censorship by being able to host your own instance but practically that’s very unrealistic to see properely moderated instances being used by enough people.

I think it’s a shame that if you’re looking into providing high quality topics and discussions that are valued by many people and you just want to learn by broadening your intellectual horizons, you can get banned every second because some moderator had a bad day.

And I’m not just talking about posting something maybe somewhat controversial that a moderator might not like. I literally had many situations where I posted completely normal posts that completely aligned with the subreddits rules. I could literally post a normal cat picture on a cat picture subreddit and get banned seconds later without being able to talk to the moderators. In some instances the cat picture post (I’m using that as a metaphor) didn’t even get published and I got banned anyways. Often it’s enough to have a single wrong word that is filtered by Reddit so your whole post won’t publish.

I think the core concept of platforms like Reddit and Lemmy can be very valuable but it’s executed very badly. There should be multiple independent steps of verifying if someone should get banned and in what way. And probably integrate a good test for joining the community so that it’s more likely for people to be rational from the start (that way you don’t even have to look at so many potential flags).

Maybe AI could be better for this by having less human emotion based judgement?

But I’m conflicted because on one hand these platforms can have such a great potential and value but on the other hand it’s maybe better to not use it anyways since it can be quite unhealthy to spend much time on there.

Anyways I think it’s sad we can’t freely express ourselves on social media and can’t have proper discussions. This really feels like being in a 3rd world country with dictatorship and this shouldn’t be the case in 2025. Especially nowadays where it’s extremely important to have open and trusted discussion about topics.

There should be a platform with good/useful censorship and a platform truly without censorship that isn’t owned by a Nazi billionaire. Or even better: have an all-in-one solution that has spaces without and with censorship to varying degrees (preferably a degree that can be decided by the users and not by the corporation).