Asklemmy

My worst experience came just before the API disaster started. Someone posted on the ELI5 subreddit asking what autistic people experience when they are nonverbal. Now, I'm autistic and, while I'm verbal most of the time, I do have moments where I can't speak even though I want to. Typically in moments of high emotion or stress. (It feels like the words are in my brain, but the highway to my mouth has a twenty car pileup blocking all traffic.)

My comment was upvoted many times and many people replied positively to my comment. Then, suddenly, my comment was deleted. The mod said that because this was my personal experience, it was too subjective. Meaning, only an "objective" experience from someone who wasn't autistic would be allowed.

Needless to say, I was upset and needed to vent. I vented in the Autism subreddit about the situation and got people replying in support of me. Now, I did make a mistake where people started asking to see my original comment and I posted a screenshot. That was on me - especially because I forgot to blank out the original poster's name. (In my defense, I had nothing against the OP or their question so nothing lept to mind saying "better blank that out.")

The whole thread was suddenly deleted from the Autism subreddit for "doxing." I deleted the person's username and asked for the thread to be restored. Instead, I was given a 30 day ban. Then, I quickly got notified that I was permanently banned from ELI5 for "sh*t-stirring." My goal was never "raise an army of autistic people to attack the ELI5 mods," but just "blow off steam for something I felt wasn't just."

I decided not to contest either and just stop going to either sub. In fact, I was deciding to reevaluate my Reddit use altogether. And then the API debacle started.

I publicly called out a user whose photo was on the front page of a local publication for racking up over $10,000 in unpaid red light tickets (at about $75 per offense).

He threatened to sue me in response. The cognitive dissonance 😂

Don't really know what the "best" experience was. I can't say there was anything life changing for me. It was nice to have access to so much stuff in a very well designed app (Apollo) that let me share that content super easily with friends and family via Whatsapp or Telegram.

Worst interactions? There were many...the groupthink can be real bad. There are a lot of people who take karma very seriously. There was one sub, dedicated to a podcast, and it was clear there was a person that had six or seven alts because of the language they used and the debate style, and they would get so upset and downvote any disagreeing comment. Other subs had plenty of trolling, transphobia, shitty moderators, etc. Other subs became basically unusable because of how large they got and how many people posted "hey, look at me!" low effort content. You know, "art I did of X character" with 2,600 upvotes for what was a 10th grader type drawing done on a notebook. That kind of kills the visibility of posts with the potential for deeper or more meaningful conversation that don't get as many upvotes.

In the end I think the main issue with Reddit is that it got too big. It attracted too many people on a superficial level, too many trolls, and most subs worth visiting at this point are dedicated to niche subjects and have smallish communities.

Interaction with r/conservatives. I made a comment that I downvote memes that dumb down complex ideas. I was banned for it.

My best experience was help with learning python. The community was great then and a lot of helpful people.

My worst experience was opening up about my sexual abuse that happened to me from the ages of 4 to 14 by my grandfather and brother who is 9 years older than me. Because of the subs rules I had to leave a lot of stuff out. People didn't believe me and started attacking me and calling me a lair when I was just looking for some support after cutting my family off. I had another post but it was on a FB group called tell someone. There I could post all the details. I had to dm all the people attacking me and calling me a liar that FB post. They felt horrible afterwards which wasn't my attention, but thet saw the truth then. It was really discouraging at a time when I didn't have a lot of support from family or friends.

My best experience was hanging around in r/conlangs Small Discussions, helping out the newbies and being helped by more experienced users. I genuinely cared about that place, and I felt that the mods were actually trying to create a good community, not to enlarge their e-peens.

My worst is probably when disagreeing with a certain mod, who decided to distort what I said into the complete opposite, just to ban me. (I was being surprisingly polite so he couldn't ban me out of rudeness.)

I wasn't on Reddit for long, but guys from r/avoidchineseproducts helped me a lot. I offered them to move to Lemmy, but my message wasn't published. Also, there was another sub (I don't remember which exactly), where I couldn't write any message! (I didn't spam or else.)

Best experience: A bunch of strangers getting bored during lockdown and setting up an impromptu hemotology class to amuse each other. This eventually became more of a generalized whatever-today's-instructor-likes class after one user stole the entire show with their brilliant rant about chemistry.

He and I were pretty good friends for a while and though parting ways was inevitable, I'm still sad to have had to. We can't get along, but I do miss him and I wish him well.

Worst experience: every time I posted anything about my mental situation ever. Without fail, İ would come away with multiple of the shallow, dismissive "oHH, if everywhere smells like shit, check your shoes!!" reply. They've never taken the time to think it out, but they know it's snarky enough to win upvotes and shut down the conversation.

I'm forced to assume the people parroting this are themselves abusers irl, because that's sure as shit not a sentiment r/raisedbynarcissists would take well to. Or really any PTSD-centered community/professional. Trying to convince the victim it's their fault is a common tactic, it's what the R in DARVO stands for.

If I needed someone to tell me I deserved to get beat with a table leg, I'd still be talking to my mom.

My best Reddit experiences were where Reddit facilitated meeting people "IRL". I found my first D&D group on Reddit, made 3 great penpal friends, scored a couple dates, ..., and one romantic relationship.

I really don't know my worst... A couple times I let people get under my skin, but I eventually got good at blocking people.

Gated communities on Reddit suck.

A thread hits /r/all, you type out a long comment in reply to someone, hit send.. then get an automod message that your comment was denied. Because you aren't part of that subreddit, or you aren't verified in that subreddit.

Probably the worst example was /r/blackpeopletwitter. They have open threads where you can talk with people. Then at some point they lock down their threads (make it verified black users only) and your next comment in a chain of replies simply gets nuked. Even though you had a civil discussion and just wanted to continue it.

Often those threads aren't even about race, just general things happening. Reddit has shitty support to lock things down where the UI doesn't get greyed out. So you already type a long reply, hit send and only then you get kicked out. I had to block several of those subreddits because I kept running into this issue when browsing /r/all.

College football subreddit on game day was amazing. Gonna miss that

My favourite Reddit moment was when I managed to connect with the dev of a script which I needed for work. He was kind enough to troubleshoot my case with it, and I'll be forever thankful for him for that.
My least favorite thing about Reddit was all the casual downvoting, and especially seeing mine and others' comments being downvoted out of disagreement. Depending on the subreddit of course. To me Reddit was never a community thing, but rather a platform to exchange information and share links. Forums that I frequent provide me that community fix.

Worst, up until the current fiasco, was having told a very deeply personal and unique story, but being torn to shreds because I wrote it pretty. That meant it had to be fake.

It taught me the lesson to never waste effort on reddit.

But the best was kinda the flip side of it. Similar thing, talking about death and dying, which was a large part of professional life, and despite writing it pretty, it resonated with people and I got some really nice conversations commiserating about the way that can change you.