Dear Reddit,

After all these years together and all that we’ve been through, the good times and the bad, the cat pictures and the memes, the endless supply of educational videos an a few thousand porn ones too… you just kick me in the balls and walk out on me.

You don’t even leave a contact number or address, just a bunch of your moderating minions to look down their noses and laugh at my one and only question. Why did you do this to me when I did nothing wrong?

After a sleepless night I’ve come to realise you never loved me like I loved you. The truth is you are a user. It’s all take, take, take and no give with you. Kinda like being in a relationship with a Bangkok bargirl. You are all smiles when I’m uploading all those funny photos to help you reach gazillions of monthly pageviews and every once in a while you put me on the front page just so I keep on coming back with more and more content.

But when I need something from you all I get is the middle finger and a lot of brick walls.

Now my “cheesy blog”, as it was described by one of your moderating minions, may well just be that. That’s okay, I’m thick skinned and can take the criticism, however, being told it was banned on Reddit isn’t something I’m willing to take and I’ll tell you why.

From my 7-year-old Reddit account that is for anything & everything and my 2nd account which is for mainly Thailand related submissions, I have never once submitted a single item from this site as it would be seen as spam. I just followed the rules and used all those little buttons, widgets and sharing icons to encourage the readers of the site to submit anything they thought might be interesting to the subreddits they follow. That’s how it works, right? I know it is cos you supply a bunch of them yourself for website owners to display on their pages to make it easier for you to get all that user generated content that makes your site tick.

Here and there stories or galleries would get subbed and I’d get a tiny, tiny trickle of traffic which was a nice wee bonus. Not much but every little helps as they say.

That was until an email hit my inbox last night from a reader saying they’d tried to sub the rather amusing story of Thailand’s Police Chief stood in the middle of a redlight district addressing reporters with a bar called Suckers in the background as the hunt for the Bangkok bomber was under media scrutiny. The submitter was told by a mod the site was banned.

Banned? Banned for what? I assumed to be banned on Reddit you’d really need to be doing something seriously illegal and that just isn’t the case with Stickboy Bangkok. There had to be some mistake. I knew in the past week or two the trickle of traffic had all but dried up so last night I done what I’ve never done before and subbed the site to a subreddit I’m a moderator of and there I seen it with my own eyes. Straight to spam queue. Well, if a submission by the moderator to a subreddit he oversees is doing that then there is something far wrong.

I turned to my friend Google where I found no answers just a lot of talk about shadow banning. Time to dig into the Reddit FAQ and moderator FAQ to see if I could find an answer but it wasn’t to be. I turned up nothing about website banning.

So that was it. The site was screwed by no fault of my own and there is nothing I can do to reverse that.

That is total bullshit as whatever it takes to cause this penalty, which is as good as a ban, could have been done by a competitor or someone with an axe to grind but as a website owner there is no right of appeal, hee-haw. Suck it up Stickboy and piss off.

Okay, if that’s the house rules then that’s the house rules. My content won’t be missed of that there is no doubt. The inbound Reddit traffic will be replaced easily as the site continues to grow but it would have been nice.

The problem is I’m an asshole. And I thought to myself, well, two can play at this stupid game and I got to thinking, why not get Reddit banned in Thailand?

I would be very easy to do, even without using a backdoor and a stuffed envelope. Reddit has a healthy amount lese majeste content, it’s bloated with porn and there’s tons of gambling related stuff on there too. Plenty to get things moving towards a Green Screen.

Now Reddit aren’t going to miss the traffic from Thailand so no great loss as much like the numbers they sent me, it’s nothing but a tiny, tiny trickle. The members of the various Thai-centric subreddits on the other hand won’t be too amused but not my problem.

I’m 99% certain it will work even if the admins remove or block all that LM content because there’s all that porn which likely makes up at least half of those gazillion monthly pageviews. They can’t delete or block it all, there’s too much of it.

So Reddit, that is my plan, my mission for 2015. To get you banned in Thailand. Yeah, it’s a dick move but hey, isn’t that what you are pulling on me?

Regards,

Stickboy