They did not provide a reason. There was no further dialog. I just got a system message telling me I was removed.
I was also silmultaniously shadow banned from Reddit and my posts and comments stopped showing up. I had created a post complaining about being removed as the moderator (the only moderator for over a decade) of a sub that I built from the ground up and donated literally thousands of volunteer hour to over the last 14 years. It had zero upvotes or downvotes or comments and was not visable as an anon user.
In the end, I decided to rip the bandaid off and killed my 16.5 year account. I was one of the early supporters of Reddit (user #7758) and had left Digg for good in May of 2007 after the AAC contraversy. They showed their authoritarian side in that moment and I knew Digg had reached their high water mark.
Reddit is at that moment now. They won't be dead tomorrow. They won't be dead next week. However, it will also never be the same, and it's only downhill from here.
Much like Digg. Much like Myspace. I am sure there will be a blurb a few years from now as an addendum in some business journal how Reddit sold to a third party for an undisclosed sum and some Skittles...
The future is the Fediverse and I'm glad I was forced to remove my Reddit crutch and dive in full force.
As a mod myself, I can really understand the pain of dedicating so much effort into building a community, all the fights with the mod queue to make sure it stays good for the users, only for Reddit to absolute discard you. I'm sorry.
Which is why I've been trying to advise other moderators still there to give up on this idea of "half-compromise on the protest" to avoid being removed. Reddit will claim all the communities for themselves, regardless if your users voted in favor of John Oliver. If not today, as soon as the dust calms down a bit. The ideal course of action is migrating as soon as possible, and using the last few days as mods to migrate the users in a more direct way.
We translated Reddit. We created the mod tools, the bots, the documentation, the wikis, we removed the endless spam, the trolls, the dangerous links we had to open while in the bus or the doctor's office. I get it. But don't lose your sleep over Reddit - let they collapse. Consider using your experience to rebuild here, once you rest your mind a bit from all this - at least with Lemmy, you know if your efforts succeed no CEO can steal them later.
Well said