I was banned by one sub for having a different opinion from the hivemind, and having the audacity to try and discuss it. A year later I decided I wanted to start over with Reddit, not because of any bans, but because I wanted to revamp my sub list and it seemed easier to start over. Browsing /r/all, I saw a post and made a comment. It happened to be on the sub I was banned from with the other account (the sub was often on the front page). They took this as me making an account to get around the ban (which wasn’t my motivation) and banned me from the whole site. So one sub can kill all your access. Coming from /r/all, I didn’t even realize I was commenting there until I got the perma-ban. The comment I made wasn’t even provocative, it just matched the IP of the other account.
The thing is, there is no way to know what subs you’re banned from. I would have been more than happy to hide/block all those subs on my new account so I never saw them, but what are they and how can I actually do that? Those features don’t exist. So users get banned because they lack the information and tools needed to follow the rules.
I agree that the small subs are generally more chill. I’d often run out of stuff to look at on subreddits I was subscribed to, so I’d head to /r/all to see what the site as a whole was up to. I had 30-40 subreddits hidden from /r/all to clean it up and get rid of the stuff that would always leave me as a contrarian, but I guess that wasn’t good enough.