zlacker

I actually think I would have been pretty bummed by this week’s events if my long-time Reddit account hadn’t been banned last year for literally no reason. (I know everyone always says that - and then it turns out that they’re inevitably extremely enthusiastic posters about, like, early/mid 20th century German highway engineering or something similarly Hitler adjacent. The only not-nice thing I ever wrote on there was in an AMA by a westerner who ran a North Korean travel agency to ask him how it felt to literally be one of Communism’s “useful idiots.” He never answered. But that was also years ago, so presuming that probably wasn’t the cause of my ban.)

I thought, ah, surely this error will be cleared up upon appeal. I submitted my appeal, and nope, ban remains. It was actually kind of upsetting (I guess due to the seeming arbitrariness? certainly no content of any value was lost), but it was good to have that nice, clean break.

Anyway, I mention any of this not because I care about getting that account back, but because it occurred to me that I’d really like to get back on that account and delete all my messages, but with the way their ban seems to work, I don’t think I can do that.

And while I’m sure their 2023 TOS makes it purely my problem if I got myself banned and thus lost any ability to control the content I contributed, I do wonder if their TOS was as robust (it was a pretty, pretty informal place when I started posting, and rights to contributed content can be pretty nuanced based on how the license/TOS is worded), or how their stance interacts with any of the privacy laws passed in the last 10-12 years.

Oh well. This is why my default rule is “never post” (as I elect to override that default at this very moment).

>>nocoin+(OP)
On Reddit, you can say things that would be normal anywhere else, but make a small group of terminally-online individuals very upset. Something as simple as asking 1 question in 1 subreddit. That's how I got my first ban. It's what made me completely apathetic to reddit.

The other bans were my fault (as in, I knew it was likely at that point) but I was apathetic at that point. Still, I appealed because they were silly bans, and my account was reinstated each time.

>>nocoin+(OP)
> how their stance interacts with any of the privacy laws passed in the last 10-12 years.

You’d be surprised how big players work around those.

I asked GitHub to remove an issue from a repo whose owner blocked me. Being both I and the owner EU users, I sent a GDPR removal request. They just said they’re a “controller” and that the request would be forwarded to the owner.

Nothing came of it.

GitHub even has customer support, Reddit does not, so you can imagine how little chances you have in doing so unless you fire up your lawyers.

>>Commit+h2
I believe it. That said, even when trying to adopt that frame of mind, it was still basically impossible for me to identify anything I had said that would have been at all offensive or upsetting even to an extremely sensitive person.

Who knows. I still kinda think it must have just been a mistake, or maybe something I said was taken extremely, extremely out of context (and if I lack the imagination to see how, well, shame on me). I mostly just find it humorous because this is the only ban I can remember getting in almost three decades online.

>>bunga-+v2
Fascinating. Thanks for answering that aspect of my post. So similar excuse if you were to exercise a right to be forgotten? (Would that even apply in this context? Or is that what you’re describing?)

>>nocoin+d4
I think that right only applies to search engines and "directories," the actual content would not be deleted. I suppose I could ask Google to delist that issue, but not GitHub to delete it.

The more recent GDPR on the other hand should allow me to ask the "owner" (I forgot the exact name) to delete all the data related to me. He however declined to follow my request. An option at that point was to pay something like €50 to file a complaint to the governing body (some EU entity), so I gave up.