Comment by KPGv2

> My point is that you don't own your handle. Therefore you aren't your handle.

This is a good point. I wrote a self-deprecating post to Reddit one time that got flagged by AI or someone who isn't a native English speaker as a "threat of violence." This is almost word for word the exchange that triggered it:

Me: [some in-depth discussion of electrical wiring in a house]

Other person: Wow, thank you so much! I would hire you to fix my wiring!

Me: haha oh I'd probably find some other way to burn your house down

The final line was meant to be a humble way of dismissing the compliment by playing down my expertise. But someone with the power to ban accounts parsed this as "I am going to commit arson."

And so I lost the ability to DM any of my friends. My entire reputation was gone. This was a nearly 20yo Reddit account.

And I can't make a new account and tell people "this used to be me" because then Reddit bans your new account because it's against the rules to create a new account if you've been banned.

Yes, I've created other accounts since then. But I can't ever link them to my old one because Reddit will just ban the new ones. (I tried this, and that's exactly what happened.)

I can't even participate on the same subreddits because there's some algo that recognizes if two accounts have similar subscription habits and does some kind of analysis to guess at if it's a person evading a ban.

I was shocked at first (I was in the mid of organizing an event using Reddit in part for communications, and had to rely on an IRL friend who was helping rn it to speak for me), and then angry, and then just sad.

It's one reason I've begun using one moniker everywhere, and I own that domain name as well. It's the closest I can get to fully owning my handle.