I’ve been using Reddit since 2008, a dozen accounts, only got banned from one subreddit ever for calling out racism (actual, not the deflated, wishy-washy kind). It’s hard to take these stories at face value.
One morning, completely inexplicable sitewide shadowban. Took a while to figure it out, and during that time everything I'd ever written vanished like smoke from the public eye, as well as all replies. Moderators could approve my posts, only for them to become magically de-approved with no logged cause.
I finally figured out what was going on, and submitted an appeal. The appeal was "granted" (no detail)... Yet nothing changed! Then the appeals page stopped working because it falsely claimed my account was in good standing, and other tries at support-tickets went into the void.
OK, so I had an ancient account I'd used for anonymous resume feedback. Dug it up and tried asking others for advice help-related subreddits. *Bam*, same thing happened to it. The algorithm decided I was Archibald Tuttle, and there was no way to fix their typo.
It may be a "first-world problem", but especially after everything-remote COVID, the incomprehensible exile left marks. Heck, even at this exact moment, Youtube's main site won't load, and instead of finding the outage odd or amusing, I'm plagued with anxiety is that some crazed system has branded me with a scarlet-letter.
My 11 year old reddit account was banned a couple of hours into my engagement vacation to bhutan. After putting a local sim in my phone, I was first locked out of my account - I then passed their verification and unlocked it, just to wake up the next morning to an account ban. Their anti abuse systems are clearly very poorly calibrated for anybody who even slightly deviates from normal account access patterns.
The automod interpreted this as a threat of violence. My appeal was ignored.