I Got a Four-Month Timeout

When I learned of Submit in February this year, its founder told me he’d build his leadership structure in such a way as to encourage accountability. If the leader (himself) had to kowtow to the masses, ethics would be woven throughout the entire structure. Essentially, criticism would be encouraged. A council would be elected to assure us of that.

I wrote a mildly critical post about Submit in March. I had brought a great deal of people to the site, so I felt accountable to my audience. That post was due warning, and Submit didn’t like it *at all*.

Apollyon experienced it as an attack, and one that required me to “earn back his trust.” At the time, he informed me that Baku would have issued a perma-ban for it. Is that true? Nope, but more on that later.

I never quite got around to “earning back” Apollyon’s “trust”. I was too busy trying to earn back the trust of my followers for leading them to an unethical space.

The dogpiles that followed went on for months. I was in the middle of the worst depression of my life, but Apollyon did nothing to silence the contempt. Mild criticism of Submit was bad. Vitriolic dogpiles that go on for months were not against the site’s TOU, even if they used your real Fetlife username.

This is, incidentally, against Fet’s TOU. Spotting will get you in trouble on this site, *especially* if you use someone’s username.

When a spate of racist bans took hold on Submit, I signed up to the site again to witness it all with my own eyes. Amidst claims that the site was dying, Apollyon had just posted a claim that he had 80,000 active users. Of course, people tried to confirm that number, so someone began following every account she could find. She found only 3,000. Is this science? Nopedy nope. Is it revealing? Yeppers.

I decided to confirm her results yesterday, so I followed everyone on her list. I was the third account to do this. I then began searching for the thousands-strong silos he swore were there. There weren’t any.

This morning I woke up to a 120-day timeout for “inauthentic” activity. I was one of six accounts to receive these four-month timeouts last night. One had done little more than comment on a Submit-related post on Fetlife. This is against the TOU. Transparency has been thrown by the wayside, and attempts to verify Apollyon’s claims will get you a four-month time out on a first offense.

To be fair, I also left some criticism on Submit yesterday. I was trying to avoid a ban, so I kept it relatively light.

I’ve been a thorn in John Baku’s side ever since I joined Fetlife. I’ve written several extremely critical posts of this site’s policies and actions. It took seven *years* to get a shadow ban for it. Seven *years.*

And in the end, Baku apologized and reinstated my ability to trend.

Over in North Korea—I mean Submit—you get four months for attempting to verify the founder’s claims. If you post a racist image of a shit-flinging gorilla, though, you’ll get a one-day time-out. Unless you’re accusing the site of racism, in which case you’ll get three weeks.