Currently going through this with Reddit. Their appeal process is to submit a form which may or may not be processed, and there is zero feedback for the user. Common advice is to submit the form daily.
I have submitted it 200 times over the past year. I know that it probably just goes into a black void, but it is apparently the official review process, and I am 100% sure there were no rule violations (I was flagged for responding to new threads too quickly and reposting the same educational link a few times because I was answering the same sort of question). It's cruel really. Somehow they made something even worse than the Google approach. Presumably tens of thousands of users are wasting time every single day doing this.
Like others have said, most tech companies are like this and it's unacceptable, even if users are the product.
A few months ago I browsed r/all by new and downvoted every crypto scam post to unrelated subreddits I saw. This raised a red flag somewhere inside Reddit (my guess is that I was interfering with some Reddit admin's crypto scams) and my 18 year old account was suspended until I could respond to an email at the address it was registered from that I no longer had access to almost two decades later. An appeal was ignored.
I was furious about losing the account for about two minutes before I realised that nothing of any importance had been lost, shrugged, and created a new account.
Why would you keep trying 200 times to use a site that hates and ignores you? Just find something else to do online.
If HN suddenly banned my account out of nowhere for no discernible reason, I’m not going to E-mail dang 200 times. I’d just find some other site to read. Life is too short to do business with companies that despise you.
Well I have a text file with 5 boiler plate messages. When I boot the screens up every day, I open a new tab and 7 seconds later a new appeal has been submitted.
I do admit that there is a slight prick of annoyance at the start of every day because of this, but I'm well into sunk cost fallacy into the realm of morbid curiosity and flagellation.
Part of the reason is because I manage an account that has a major position in Reddit equity options, so I have to read the name everyday regardless. Indeed I was banned because my option trading advice was too quick and frequent (man, that sub needs some serious basic theory help)... Of course, you can be assured that their horrible customer goodwill may possibly come up in future conversations when I mention the position.
I thought about just emailing IR, but I've actually talked to someone else in a similar position who has contacted IR and they did nothing either.
I was a major contributor to an open source Reddit alternative after the API lockdown, but unfortunately after 2 years I just didn't think that it was going anywhere big and backed out of that, so been there done that to some degree, and that was a good 500 plus hours of investment (although it was net positive - it was fun to grow an old school internet community even though it is never going to compete with Reddit).
The main issue is that they ban all accounts that they can fingerprint to other banned accounts, and I have an account in hibernation that is 15 years old and truly has a huge portion of my life contained in it. It's much like OP and losing a Google account. I think that is the main reason why I grovel to the uncaring corporate shell that encompasses the community that I once help to build when I came over in the great digg migration. I should probably just export the data and vectorize it into an LLM, and just close the book on the few old friends that I'd like to reconnect with someday.
Speaking of Digg, I hear they're rebooting, and things are going well behind the scenes...
Ultimately, if you don’t have group chats on other platforms with the people you’re connected with, you will eventually lose those connections due to platform fragmentation type issues. Online social networks are all too fragile.
> I have an account in hibernation that is 15 years old and truly has a huge portion of my life contained in it. It's much like OP and losing a Google account.
Note that Reddit allows you to log into a banned account and have read access. You can also edit your previously-posted comments. So log in, export everything you want, edit all comments to nonsense as a "fuck you" to Reddit (there are scripts and browser extensions to do this, because a lot of people think Reddit deserves a "fuck you") then forget about it ever again.
> When I boot the screens up every day, I open a new tab and 7 seconds later a new appeal has been submitted.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but at this stage you're messages are insta-filtered and so you're probably not even causing the slight annoyance.
As the other poster mentioned, it's probably best to just move on, or if you're adamant about interacting with people on Reddit of all places, then why not just create another account?
They fingerprint users and ban all associated accounts.
...and believe it or not, it takes months of appeals for some Shadowbanned users to have their appeal lifted. What I'm not sure about is if there is a hidden ban length, and if submitting an appeal automatically lifts the ban if the ban length has passed. I'm guessing that this is the actual case of how it all works.
None of this should really matter. At the end of the day, the company is being hostile to you. Bans, and shadowbans, and appeals, and appeals to appeals... good grief! They're telling you they don't like you and they don't want you around. Why do you care so much about the mechanics of the automation they use to tell you to go away? Life is too short.
I remember I was banned from Fark once. Remember Fark? I was actually a paying member, too! It was the last time I visited or even thought about the site (until writing this comment). It didn't even remotely occur to me to try to understand the banning mechanism or what appeal options I have. I'm not going to grovel and beg some stupid website to let me back in if they don't want me around!
I have submitted it 200 times over the past year. I know that it probably just goes into a black void, but it is apparently the official review process, and I am 100% sure there were no rule violations (I was flagged for responding to new threads too quickly and reposting the same educational link a few times because I was answering the same sort of question). It's cruel really. Somehow they made something even worse than the Google approach. Presumably tens of thousands of users are wasting time every single day doing this.
Like others have said, most tech companies are like this and it's unacceptable, even if users are the product.