Good: I got support from people when things in my DnD group got weird.

Bad: Once, I asked a technical question that I had asked people irl and researched a lot and not found what I was looking for. On reddit, I had people making assumptions and nitpicking the terminology while avoiding the actual question completely. It was a good example of the CS/math departments friction (which makes a whole lot more sense to me now). I did get a better answer on another site by just posting the equation and using zero jargon but I ended up abandoning that topic bc it was impractical.

I don’t have a specific worst. The best was when I was complaining about my [then] wife for the umpteenth time. I don’t remember which sub it was. Someone responded with, “Are you familiar with Borderline Personality Disorder? If not, you should look it up.”

I did look it up. It explained everything I had seen up to that point. It is as like someone had written a text book about my wife. I was both relieved and terrified.

That was the starting point of getting out of that awful abusive relationship and getting my life back on track.

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.

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.

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

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.