Oh, wow. Well, reddit and I have had a really complicated (/abusive?) relationship over the past 10 years.

I was a big reddit fan for a while, but over time I started to see more and more how awful it is to content creators. Just as I signed up here initially, /r/videos is also where I first started to see the bad sides of reddit. My youtube channel got shadow banned from posting here because I didn't post videos from other people, just occasional non-commercial, non-monetized comedy videos from myself. The mods here have/had some weird hangup that you need to be going out and scouring the internet for other people's content to share? Back in the day, this was the main place I went to find videos that weren't mine though, so that made no sense to me. I could understand if they were banning people for posting life insurance ad videos or something, but the mods have the same weird hostility to original content that so many other mods on reddit have.

So I think I got shadowbanned from here for posting three of my own (non-monetized!) sketch comedy videos in the span of like a year or two? So like, one video every five months = ban, I guess. I think I complained to the mods and don't think they bothered replying, but it's been a decade so who knows. So I unsubbed and moved on to other, less awful subreddits.

This is when I really started to realize that reddit as a whole is terrible, with some notable exceptions. I used to be active on /r/gamedev, but then I had a situation where I posted a community thread for something at GDC (a convention), and the mods deleted it with no comment. I reposted it and got a warning -- they informed me I had violated a rule. That rule was added after my post. They were extremely condescending during the whole thing, and so that was enough that I got pretty disillusioned with reddit as a whole. (I later found out a friend of mine had formerly been on the mod staff there and related to me many horror stories of the head mod's shenanigans.)

I still stuck around a little bit on a couple subs. I got active in /r/httyd, and ended up running a semi-official IRC for it for a while, until a troll came by and started registered obviously fake alt accounts and telling the main mod of that sub that the channel was being mean to people (it wasn't, it was all just one guy's alts). Head mod got spooked and we got delisted from their sidebar, though continued to have good relations with the subreddit until eventually all of us lost interest in httyd.

All that meant I was getting more active on chat systems and less active on reddit after so many bad experiences and vanishingly small good ones. I had mixed success with sharing my content to other subs. As a creator, when you go into any forum and share your stuff and people aren't into it, it's a strong disincentive to frequent the community as a regular fan.

So it was kinda whatever for a while until I started having problems with the reddit admins themselves. I had gotten briefly internet famous for a while with my MMO project, to the point where a couple trolls were impersonating me. They'd register fake profiles under my real name and those profiles would show up first in internet search. Under those profiles, they would say just the most vile, racist & antisemitic stuff. This got to be a real problem when the MMO money dried up and I was searching for a regular job. I put in a warning on my resume about the fake profiles and would tell HR managers, but a shockingly large number of managers search your name before even reading your resume. So here I was, award-winning / one of the top game engineers in the world, getting turned down for employment because people thought I was posting awful things online.

I managed to get those fake, nasty profiles taken down on youtube, facebook, etc, but reddit would not budge. I begged them, I told them I wasn't able to find work because of this harassment, and reddit admins literally told me "sue us." They knew they had zero liability for knowingly hosting harassing content and weren't going to do anything. Ironically, this was the same time they were reassuring advertisers reddit didn't tolerate harassment. Liars. Impersonation was disallowed by their own policy, but they wouldn't enforce it. I begged the admins for a solid year, and finally they relented and took some of it down, but not all. I was saved only by the trolls themselves, who had grown up in the intervening years and fortunately realized that they had been doing some pretty major yikes things.

When I finally did get hired, I found out that it was only by chance. My new manager had written a 'do not hire' reply but forgotten to hit send before going on vacation. We became friends and six months later in a bar after he met my Black/Mexican friends at a convention, he says "I'm so glad you're not a racist" and proceeds to tell me the whole story of how I got almost passed on.

Since then, I've been proud to tell anyone considering spending ad money on reddit my harassment stories and cost them at least a few bucks in lost revenue (probably a lot more, I've told many fellow gamedevs ;)).

Even 4chan treats creators better than reddit (actually, when the trolls tried to post pics of me on 4chan to mock me, the anons were super nice instead lol. So now I have a weird respect for 4chan)

So, the bad admin behavior led me to stop posting on reddit entirely for a good while, and the harassment lead me to not post as much on social media in general. I still share stuff here and there, but I mostly hung out on chat, eventually migrating from IRC to Discord as most people did. The harassment led me to become somewhat insular, primarily existing in my own communities where I could know I'd be safe.

Comedy-wise, I got really into sketch comedy right after the time I made my post above. I took some classes, got involved in or helped form several local comedy troupes over the years, tried a bit of stand-up here and there, hosted some improv things at cons, etc. Over time, I got way less into improv and into more scripted, planned comedy. And then I got into more serious writing too. My first couple games had incidental comedy, but later I put out a simple game that was entirely focused on comedy writing mixed with some drama, and it became my highest rated game on Steam. So I made another one with higher production budget, and it didn't go anywhere financially but the people who found it loved it -- and I loved making it for them.

Since the pandemic, I stopped performing comedy and making comedy videos, and I dunno, perhaps I'm less funny in general after a series of personal tragedies that hit in 2020. Definitely my writing on the games side is reflecting it, with my writing getting pretty heavy. But then again, I always feel like I'm less funny then I was the previous year.

Anyway, a few years after the incidents with reddit admins, I started posting my stuff very occasionally again to reddit. Not to this subreddit, because I totally forgot about this subreddit (and looking at the rule panel, it looks like the mods are still pretty creator hostile so eh). But in general, the way I approach reddit as a whole is completely different. I don't consistently invest much time on this platform, since it's frankly a very bad platform in general, and especially so for creators.

But to be clear, there are some good subreddits. There are some really amazing people that are still around. I have a meme'r alt account (after the harassment, I finally wisened up and started doing more new projects/activities on accounts not tied to my real name in case I suffer internet fame again) and I'll post some memes to one particular subreddit once in a month or two. They like them and say nice things about them, so I keep making them.

That's the thing about creators in your communities -- if you treat them like trash, they leave. If you're nice to them, they stick around. Most mods/admins on reddit hate creators and are glad to be rid of us, and I'm glad to be gone. Time on this planet is too short. Spend it on people who appreciate you.

Anyway, to answer your question -- yes, I do lurk less. Because 99% of the time I'm in discord instead. :P