Reddit: The Tale of Two Bans

So, my new account SomeOddCodeGuy_v2 just got permanently banned; not a shadowban this time, but a proper ban.

So, a little backstory: My original reddit account, which had most of my benchmarks and whatnot on it, had gotten Shadowbanned after I posted a link to another reddit post, and then edited it, while using VPN. The second I edited the post, I got a security lockout, and then was shadowbanned. They never responded to my appeals.

After months of waiting, I finally got a response to a separate help request I had put in: a placeholder sub I had made, /r/wilmerai, got banned since I was the only moderator. /u/reddit sent me the following response:

This account has been permanently closed. To continue using reddit, please log out and create a new account (the username /u/someoddcodeguy cannot be reused).

"Create a new account"

That, to me, read like permission to return to reddit. You see, whenever you get banned, you actually are banned as a person, not as an account. Creation of new accounts would constitute ban evasion. But lucky for me, /u/reddit gave me permission! So I created /u/SomeOddCodeGuy_v2 while I waiting for my original account to finally finish the appeal process.

I've been using the account for a few months, and it was nice getting to talk to everyone in the LLM community again. I kept waiting for my old account, but it remained banned, with no other response.

Finally, last night, I decided to do 1 more appeal for the old account before the end of the year. Went to help.reddit.com, sent off the appeal, and went to bed. I woke up this morning to _v2 being banned as well. No previous warnings, strikes, no one mad at me, etc. Every post was business casual, absolutely no politics or anything remotely divisive, unless you count disagreements about whether Mistral's Devstral was trained primarily for Mistral Vibe or not =D (Only comment I had removed; labeled as 'misinformation' despite it being right there on the model card =D).

Sigh.

Reddit really does have a problem of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing. One admin sending me approval via /u/reddit to create an account while another admin via /u/reddit banning my new account, likely for ban evasion... tho that's only a guess, since the text is simply "breaking the rules".

Of course, I appealed this as well, but it would seem my days of Reddit are likely over. That's alright; I'm starting a new job and likely don't have a lot of time to spend on Reddit, so it's probably for the best that I was forcefully made to set it down. But I do find the whole situation regrettable, and I'll admit that I feel a slight pang of annoyance when I see people being rude, breaking rules, etc without so much as a strike on their account, while I did everything I could to work within the rules and have now been banned permanently... twice. That's frustrating.