Daniel M.

I started a trial a year ago with Illustrator. I used it 1 time then found it was too full featured for what I needed (Paint was sufficient).

I then went to my account to try to cancel my subscription but I was not able to find the subscription listed.

Their help system is atrociously circular and automated. Clicking on 'help from real people' takes you to a 'virtual assistant'.

I decided to delete my account hoping that deletion would stop the repeated billing but it did not.

To date I have been charged 13 x 39.95 for using illustrator once and I cannot figure out nor find any support or way to stop them from billing me. Their phone support put me on hold forever and disconnects.

I think its quite accurate to describe this as a scam since a subscription should be relatively easy to cancel but this seems purposely designed to prevent subscription cancellation.

I posted a tweet reply to somebody detailing what the US did in My Lai to women, children and babies and about the 50 million litres of agent orange they dropped on the civilian population.

See screenshot for the result.

Medium claims to "provide a platform for everyone to come to share their stories and express their viewpoints." However in my experience this is not true. Medium.com is arguably a great platform for blogging and writing but it is clearly biased in favour of certain protected groups.

While Medium prohibits harassment of users based on gender and race they also reserve the right not to take action at their discretion. After using Medium for a period of time one will observe that there are a number of protected groups who are allowed to engage in targeted hatred against other non-protected groups and any rebuttals, even polite ones, often will result in action by moderators against those people.
I have included in pictures below screenshots in which a Medium user discusses how while it would be unfair to kill all men he would support doing so while allowing women to keep a small stock of men for breeding purposes. In another screenshot you will find an article in which a non-white person discusses how white people are dirty for not using water after going to the toilet and in an additional screenshot you will find a black persons struggle to 'see humanity in white people' alongside an article entitled 'My Dad Taught Me Never to Trust White People'. These are some of thousands upon thousands of Medium articles which have been published which are clear violations of Mediums own hate speech policy prohibiting attacks based on gender and race.

In my 6 months of using Medium I was reported by members of these protected groups 3 times - one of those violations, classified as 'Hate Speech' was when I wrote that 'I don't care or think that gender identity is really that important.". Clearly this is not 'Hate Speech'. The sentence does not attack those who identify as other in gender. It simply says that I hold the opinion that gender identity is not important to me. Ironically I do support naturally gendered people and I support people who re-gender. I simply don't consider it to be particularly important in a world which is frankly falling apart. In the next infraction I was in violation when I was personally attacked by somebody because I didn't anticipate that continuing to politely engage with them would result in a personal attack. Finally today my subscription was cancelled and I was permanently suspended from Medium because I politely replied to an article by a particularly active user who has a very large following and large internet presence. She was not happy that I disagreed with her article and subsequently blocked and reported me. Medium immediately suspended me and their reason was that I had too many infractions and must therefore be an abusive person.

In terms of Mediums customer service, I have responded each time to its warnings, twice several months ago and one today and to date I have never received a response to my enquiries or a reasonable explanation of their actions. This is despite being a paying customer.
In light of what I have written I would say that if you are a certain category of human (gender, race) that you would probably find Medium to be enjoyable, welcoming and perhaps even profitable if you write well but that if you are my gender, race you will certainly not unless you conform to Mediums expectations and narrative and you can tolerate Medium serving you constantly with articles that attack your race and gender in hateful ways.

Reddit is another poorly led unfree speech disaster
Lately I have been looking around for a new social media platform to discuss politics (mainly Israel and Palestine), information technology and other subjects.

After being banned for life from Twitter and banned from Qoura I decided to try Reddit.

Now you might think Im a troublemaker or impolite or rude but this is not the case. My bans were for posting historical documents (Yossef Nachmani's Diary and David Ben-Gurions "Letter to his son" as well as quotes from a Teddy Katz lecture from 2005.

Now to get to Reddit -

I joined a Subreddit called /R/IsraelPalestine.

I began to engage in a conversation in which misinformation was being disseminated and politely countered that with a quote from David Ben-Gurions letter which showed that the information being provided was false.

One of the users then logged into their moderator account and began to flag all my comments with violations even though none of my comments were violations of the subreddits rules.

I was then banned for 5 days.

I complained about the moderator and was then banned for life for "Attacking mods".

24 hours later I was still receiving messages from the "moderators" threatening to get me a sitewide ban even though I had messaged them telling them I no longer had any interest in their subreddit.

And this here is Reddits main flaw and the reason I would not recommend it:

Reddit allows untrained and largely unrestricted moderation with only "guidelines" for moderation.

The moderators can institute any 'rules' they like and interpret those rules in any way they like.

If, as in my case, a moderator acts in an extremely biased way and fabricates violations and you complain about it then they can ban you for "attacking the moderating".

The end result of this system is by banning users with opposing or different views the moderators create a subreddit in which the content is manipulated to be overwhelmingly biased and therefore useless as an aggregated source - it becomes propaganda.

There is an additional system on Reddit that involves banning you for having posted or participated in a completely unrelated subreddit.

For example if you once replied to a post in /R/Tomatoes and you then were to post in another subreddit years later /WeHateVegies the moderators or more usually a bot can Automatically ban you for that transgression irrespective of what you said in /R/Tomatoes.

Its an absurd and largely pointless site where free speech and conversation is restricted and your ability to have an opinion that is your own is curtailed.

Quora is unfortunately not a Q and A site as much as it claims - I am currently banned for 'hate speech' because I posted two screenshots of mainstream articles (Yossef diary was even made into a movie) by Teddy Katz and Yossef Nachmani which describe eye witness accounts of Jewish massecres against Palestinian villagers.

I recently reported a Quora space in which far right racists were posting pictures of serious assaults and injuries inflicted on white people and blaming these attacks on African Americans.

After performing reverse image searches every claimed victim turned out to be victims of neighbours, domestic violence and robbery, none of which occurred in the US and none of which were attributed to African Americans.

This space on Quora is instigating hatred against African Americans based on lies and misinformation and could potentially lead to violence against innocent people but Quora took no apparent action instead preferring to ban me for posting some accepted history.

Make of that what you will. Look elsewhere imo.